Moving to Colombia

A timeline of a mexican girl newly moved to Colombia, sharing experiences and my random rants and thoughts

[travellingbugbitme]

LSD

I had my second strong dose of LSD this weekend. And like every time I do psychedelics there is only the regret I didn’t start this before, I never feel more myself than right after taking a really strong hallucinogen. There’s something about them that gives my brain a reset, I can practically feel some cobwebs clear from my mind, making it easier to keep positive and calm, and not let the bad thoughts overwhelm me. Would I have had more fun in college If I’d donde this sooner? Would I have been a less angry teenager? Only the Goddess knows the answers to those questions, but in the end I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, it only matters that I am here, now.

I focused this time in the textures of my world, the way everything feels. Have you every noticed that on acid even the air feels thick with meaning? Every surface has extra layers of fluff coming off of it, do they always have it and we just can’t tell? Is this why cats are always staring at corners, because they can? 

LSD always makes me feel more connected and more disconnected at the same time. After feeling the rhythm of my city undulating under my feet, how can I help myself from feeling that I am connected to my neighbors around me and feel like I die a little inside with every penniless beggar that comes up to me to ask for extra food for their families or a glass of water to keep them through their day. At the same time... would they push me away if they knew? LSD has opened me to an infinite capacity for love and understanding, but is everyone else around me ready, or will they push me aside and reject me?

[travellingbugbitme]

Stuck in the Rat Race

I have been having some really weird and existential thoughts this week. I woke up this Monday and I was like.... what is the whole point of this weird ass life that we’re all living in? We wake up, work work work (Monday to Friday, 9-5), we go back to sleep, praying for our two days of stressful resting to come soon. All this just to make enough money to survive. Isn’t it odd AF? I feel stuck in the rat race of this thing we call life. 

I’ve never had such a big feeling of just pointlessness, boredom, routine, uselessness. I keep reminding myself this quote I love in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “life’s not a song, life isn’t bliss, life is just this, it’s living” and try to find my little pockets of bliss in my daily life, but there’s days when it doesn’t quite feel like enough. 

I don’t feel a need for earth shattering change, or to be relevant at a large scale, those things don’t interest me. I just want space, time (and perhaps most importantly, RESOURCES) to do things for me. I want a small garden, maybe some goats, is that too much to ask for? Maybe I was born too much of a city girl, I just don’t know where to find the change of pace that I want, that inner peace that I seek. 

Will making cheese help me feel more purposeful?

[travellingbugbitme]

Does it ever get easier?

I’m 27 years old. I feel like I should already have my shit together, I just.... really really don’t feel like I do. 

It makes me feel trapped AF the fact I know I will have to work every M-F, for the rest of my life just to keep paying my rent, eating food. I love my job, but it pays shit, I know it will always pay shit, so is this the only thing life has to offer? Working just to be able to live a little while longer? 

I miss things I have never had. I want to work with my hands, I want to grow things, I want to plant, I want a garden, I want to take care of my cows, my chickens. I know quality of life has “improved” but why do these improvements feel so empty? It feels to me like making a living is a constant ball of anxiety I feel in the bottom of my stomach, that I have to pretend I don’t constantly feel just to keep going with my day.  Will it ever get easier? Will I ever feel like money isn’t a constant worry, nagging like a fucking fly around my ears? Because it sure doesn’t feel like it. Capitalism fucking sucks, we’re all just stuck in this money-making wheel just to survive, everything is so expensive I can’t even breathe. My stupid apartment, the groceries I like, turning on the light, drinking water... everything quantified. Everything expensive.

[travellingbugbitme]

The End of the World

I know it’s not just me. But I really do get the feeling like the world is going to end, soonish. I’m not really afraid of dying, or the end of the world, it will happen when it will happen and there’s not much that I can do about it. What I am scared of is the things I haven’t done yet, the places I haven’t seen before they stop existing, the people I haven’t loved, the friends I never met.

 It somehow makes me feel sad and nostalgic for things that haven’t happened yet and maybe they never will. Will I never get to meet my great grandchildren? What if I never do anything about that one fetish I never told my partner about? What if my non-monogamous status just stays theoretical and I never get to experiment with other women, men and everything in between? 

These what-ifs really haunt me in my dreams, or should I say.. nightmares? My dreams are sometimes so freakishly vivid, I feel I go to a parallel universe when I am in them and when I wake up I feel like maybe the “waking world” is actually fake and my dream world is real. Sometimes I wake up and it takes me more than a second to realize where and when I am.

What is even real anymore?

The only thing I know for certain I did right, is that I’m here. With you. And I think for now that’s enough, even if the world does end. Does anyone else feel this way? I sure hope I’m not crazy...

[travellingbugbitme]

Going to the Hospital in Medellin

I just had the most insane experience yesterday, I feel like I am still half processing it and I can’t go about my day until I write everything down. 

Yesterday at around 6 pm, I tried to walk out onto the balcony of my apartment, with the door still closed. I walked straight into it with my knee and broke it into huge ass chunks, it took me and my partner a couple of seconds to even realize I had broken the glass. After what it felt like forever in slow-mo, I realized I had a huge gash on my shin and it was quickly spilling out blood, lots of blood. It’s weird how calm I felt, I should have been a nurse or a doctor in another life. My partner was not particularly calm, I could tell he was freaking out, but i’ve had first aid training before and I knew exactly what to do: put pressure on the wound, elevate it above your heart and cover yourself with something warm to avoid going into shock.  Thank Godess my father in law is still in Colombia, we called him, he came to our apartment in less than two minutes and got me to the hospital in less than ten. And.... that’s where my story stops being fast-paced. The hospital is just INSANELY slow. I mean, I guess it makes sense with the sheer amount of people they have now because of COVID, and they probably have more security measures, but damn, that was slow.  It took them at least an hour and a half to actually admit me into the emergency room, my leg just pulsing away precious blood as I waited outside the consulting rooms with the other non-priority patients like me. Then I went in and they put some pain killers and hydration in me through a catheter, waiting for at least another hour and a half. Then came the doctors, with their terrible sense of human sensitivity, coming to tell me I might have broken my leg and an x-ray was needed. This is when my calm demeanor broke down.  I just felt so stupid, like something so ridiculous as not noticing where I was walking was just going to be so horribly expensive and maybe now even I’d broken a leg??? I was just worried sick about how much this stupid thing was going to cost me.  So.... my leg wasn’t actually broken. Huzzah! But I did get my first x-ray, which was exciting. I got a what felt like a shit ton of stitches, and seven hours later I got to simply walk out the door.  it. was. insane. 

Thankfully this all happened in Colombia, where everything is just insanely cheap. My entire trip to the hospital cost me a mere 90 USD (which is basically insane in and of itself).

Lesson for today, always check to see if the glass door is actually open before you walk out of it. 

[travellingbugbitme]

Tortillas in Colombia suck

I’ve always heard people that move to other countries miss their home foods so much, I thought they had been exaggerating. But man, do I miss good tortillas. I tried making flautas today with the tortillas that they have here in Colombia and it was.... kind of a disaster. For some reason tortillas in Colombia just don’t roll into cylinders? and on a continuing rant note, I really hate colombian curfews. And COVID can suck it.

[travellingbugbitme]

Quarantine in Medellín

These Colombians are so intense... Or maybe I’m used to Mexico treating COVID like it doesn’t really exist? 

Here in Medellin a curfew has been set, from today at 8 o’clock until MONDAY morning. Yep, that’s right, no one is allowed outside, at all, the entire weekend. I must admit when I first read about it on the news, I felt a tight knot form in my stomach.... 

Goddess I feel caged, I don’t really know how to handle all the emotions, there’s so many I’m not really sure what I’m feeling. 

On the other hand, at least I am locked up with my favorite person in the world. I really wanted to visit that cat café I’ve been eyeing on Instagram all week though. Guess it will be a calm weekend of tarot, reading and lots of writing.

[travellingbugbitme]

Jardín Botánico (or Botanical Garden) de Medellín

As I mentioned in my previous post, I love the greenery and the biodiversity in Medellín; I have found that the embodiment of these two loves to be the Jardín Botánico de Medellín. Wow, what a place! 😱 And the best thing about this place is that, not only is it wonderful, but it's also free! (except days they have special events, but it's usually free). So it's common to see families going in to have a picnic on any given day or just people hanging around enjoying the beauty this botanical garden has to offer. As a recommendation bring with you your ID, like everywhere in Colombia they ask for your cédula at the entrance (like they do for everything, what's up with that?) and if you're a foreigner you'll need some kind of ID to get in.

It's hard really to describe exactly how much I loved this place, but I will try to boil it down to the two things I loved the most. The first thing that made me fall in love with the place is the amount of animals you can see, particularly the iguanas. Not just any iguanas either, these are small dinosaurs roaming around the entire garden and clearly not afraid of humans anymore. Rather than me just telling you, see a little bit of their majesty in action yourself. As you can probably tell from the video, I was a little bit excited, these reptilians were fearless! And pretty awesome. So yes, they were definitely my favorite part of the garden.

My other favorite part was, of course, botanical side of the garden. There's different collections of plants from different climates in Colombia, the ones I remember most vividly are the desert and the tropical forest sections.  The garden is huge and there's plants galore to see and lounge around.The one thing I might add or change would be for there to be more labels as to the names of the plants you see in the garden, I would love to have been able to see the labels of local plants in the garden and then be able to take that knowledge and apply it outside. But maybe that's just me, I've been on a recent spree of learning plant and animal names and being able to identify them in real life.

I have only been there once, so this is not a definitive guide by no means, the botanical garden is of considerable size and will need several visits for me to even visit everywhere at least once, so this is just an overview of what I loved the first time around. I will be visiting, hopefully often and shall continue adding on to my report. I have lately found a new love for plants and animals and, Colombia being so rich in both, is a great opportunity for me to dive in deeper and learn.

[travellingbugbitme]

Cerro Nutibara, El Pueblito Paisa, or the strange town frozen in time.

El Pueblito Paisa Image by César Gómez found at this link

In my last blog post I put up a picture of the view of Medellin from El Cerro Nutibara (Nutibara Hill), this place is a viewing site next to a town called El Pueblito Paisa. This place.... gives me weird feelings, let me try to explain.

In this Pueblito Paisa there's four basic sections: the museum, the tourist lookout, the small town and the rest of the hill. The museum is quite small, a museum with reproductions of photographs of how Medellin looked like in the 20th century. What is really interesting about this is how all of these buildings and the look of Medellin the way it used to be is completely gone. Maybe it's because I come from Mexico, (where historical conservation is really important) but it just shocked me to realize just how much Medellin has changed from the 1930s to the present time, it's like nothing of the old Medellin remains, except for a couple of buildings here and there. (I am by no means an expert on the subject, I have only recently begun learning about the city, if you want to learn and read more about it consider reading this article).

So, after giving a look around the museum and comparing to how Medellin looks like now and how it used to look like, walking out onto the preserved town feels... odd. A little bit like stepping out into a trivialized blast from the past, if that makes any sense. Here we have one of the last remaining buildings that show us how Medellin used to look like and yet there's people everywhere selling bandeja paisas, sodas and a mix of artisanal looking and plastic machine-made souvenirs from everywhere in this town. This place feels like Colombia's attempt to honor their past and at the same time apply modern concepts of making a quick buck from tourists and local visitors alike. All in all, such a small place felt surprisingly overwhelming.

One thing I absolutely loved about this place was the hill surrounding it, now that place, is damn near magical. The entire area around the Pueblito Paisa is forresty goodness, an oasis in the middle of the city where the air feels fresh, pure and you are surrounded by a variety of bird calls (much like in the rest of the city). There's different trails around the forest and not many people straying away to explore, in my experience most people stuck to the Pueblito Paisa and there were few people out in the surrounding areas. What I loved most about this wooded area is how you can feel how this is an older forest, it wasn't completely cut down and then reforested when they realized they fucked up, there's old trees here and they truly give this place a peaceful feel.

All in all, it felt like an odd place, half in between the past and modernity, a good metaphor for what I have seen so far of Colombia. And yet, like the rest of Colombia, its redeeming quality is the vast amount of untamed greenery and diversity of its birds.

[xcamxlax]

Medellín 🖤

[travellingbugbitme]

Medellín is so beautiful at night

[travellingbugbitme]

I've always had this itch to write. Now I will.

I feel like such a cliché, yet another person writing a blog when she moves to another country. But frankly, I just don't give a damn.

Ever since I was a little girl I've had an intense fascination for the written word, I was an only child surrounded by adults, the written word was a was for me to completely go away to a different world, in a way that most adults applauded and wouldn't nag me about. I could literally sit down in a comfy chair and read for hours, without looking up or paying attention to anything around me; my favorite type of world to get myself into was fantasy books. I even wrote a short story about me getting lost in a gummy bear world when I was around ten (shockingly, it was not great).

When I was in high school I wrote one or two short stories that other people considered good and I even had more than one person ask me if I was planning on studying Literature or becoming a writer after graduation. Honestly, to this day, I don't know why I never even seriously considered it. I guess I felt I would never be good enough and my writing was just not going to cut it out in the "real world", so I didn't even want to try for fear of failure. I still struggle with this fear of failure, but I've decided I am done being afraid: I fucking love the written word, I love writing, I love reading, so who gives a shit if I suck and no one will read my blog? I want to do this for me, for the me in the present who is trying to work her shit out and the me in the past, whom I wish now I could give a fierce hug and tell her that it's OK to try things, even if you don't excel at them.

So this blog I want to dedicate to my new experiences I have had lately (and will keep having), the latest and biggest is that I recently moved to Medellin, Colombia  (during a global pandemic) with my life partner whom I've been living with for the last two years. Maybe it's something about the beautiful mountains of Medellin, the greenery all around me or something in the water, but I feel the most myself i've felt in my life and I have this urge, this itch, this need to pour some of myself somewhere. Mostly, I just want a space that is just my own, where I can write about things that happen to my in my daily life. If what I write entertains you and you want to read me? Awesome. If you don't, that's awesome too, because I am doing this for me.