This weekend was super fun and I can honestly say I have experienced something that you cannot see in the United States (well, you could, but it would be short-lived with several police on the scene). Saturday morning my housemates and I went to Parque Arví, a national reserve
site high up on one of the mountains surrounding Medellín. It was nice to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city and breath clean air! We left at 9 am and took the metro out of the city, to the metrocable just over 1,615 miles above sea level. We were probably there for 3 or 4 hours and were able to see the best views of Medellín, as well as beautiful flora and fauna.
For several portions of the hike we were walking through butterflies; unfortunately, that’s difficult to get a picture of, but I did get several other butterfly shots! Darlene, Eric and I had a great time…mostly making fun of Eric who was deathly afraid of coming across a snake (they don’t have snakes in Norway). He was also really nervous about all the bugs and unleashed dogs, which meant he was jumpy even when walking around the butterflies. He was pretty gracious about our teasing him though.
Later in the evening Susi and Lizzy (the host family sisters) invited us all out to watch the fútbal championship game in Parque Lleras; Medellín (Nacional) played Bogotá (Equidad). Mind you, we were warned that this would be chaos, but I don’t think we could comprehend what that actually meant until it happened. For the majority of the game, the area was energetic; people were routing for their team, screaming at the TV, you know, the normal stuff you see in the US. It was cool because the Medellín team had it’s own salsa song that played after every goal, and everyone sang along. People were anxious, but happy. The game went into overtime and then penalty shots—this even made me nervous. Although, I think I was more nervous about what would happen if Nacional lost! The last goal (which I have on video) sparked excitement in the bar and across the entire park. People were hugging, kissing, dancing, and screaming and within 20 minutes, people were leaving the bars and rushing into the streets to celebrate. Parque Lleras is a “park” only by name, it’s really just a 6x6 block area full of restaurants, bars, and clubs, and all the people in them flooded the streets.
At first there were just people marching around and dancing in circles—hugging each other. But then people came out selling bags of flour and cans of foam and within two hours, everyone in the Park was throwing flour on each other and spraying foam. If you managed to get flour off of you, someone would walk by you and say “Esta chica está demasiada limpia” and you’d be instantly covered in foam and flour. It was also perfectly okay to throw flour at strangers… so of course we bought our own bag of flour and our own can of foam and harassed each other (as well as 
Later in the evening Susi and Lizzy (the host family sisters) invited us all out to watch the fútbal championship game in Parque Lleras; Medellín (Nacional) played Bogotá (Equidad). Mind you, we were warned that this would be chaos, but I don’t think we could comprehend what that actually meant until it happened. For the majority of the game, the area was energetic; people were routing for their team, screaming at the TV, you know, the normal stuff you see in the US. It was cool because the Medellín team had it’s own salsa song that played after every goal, and everyone sang along. People were anxious, but happy. The game went into overtime and then penalty shots—this even made me nervous. Although, I think I was more nervous about what would happen if Nacional lost! The last goal (which I have on video) sparked excitement in the bar and across the entire park. People were hugging, kissing, dancing, and screaming and within 20 minutes, people were leaving the bars and rushing into the streets to celebrate. Parque Lleras is a “park” only by name, it’s really just a 6x6 block area full of restaurants, bars, and clubs, and all the people in them flooded the streets.At first there were just people marching around and dancing in circles—hugging each other. But then people came out selling bags of flour and cans of foam and within two hours, everyone in the Park was throwing flour on each other and spraying foam. If you managed to get flour off of you, someone would walk by you and say “Esta chica está demasiada limpia” and you’d be instantly covered in foam and flour. It was also perfectly okay to throw flour at strangers… so of course we bought our own bag of flour and our own can of foam and harassed each other (as well as strangers) for two hours. I don’t think I’ve laughed or screamed this much in a long time. We did a lot of people watching between our flour fights and tried to stay out of the huge crowds because although it was extremely fun, people were getting drunker as the night went on. They were selling boxes of aguardiente with plastic shot glasses to people (this would be like buying boxed rum), so everyone was pretty trashed. I took one shot to say I did the Paisa-thing, but was hesitant to lose my wits in that kind of environment.
We were home by midnight. It took a while to get the flour out of my hair—it’s still in everything I was wearing—and I woke up this morning with flour boogers in my eyes…
Today was pretty chill. Eric and I went for a run on the ciclopia (of course, we weren’t so good today since we’d been hiking and drinking the day before) and then we picked up Darlene and did some grocery shopping. We decided that we would all cook something for dinner together; it was nice to have a meal that consisted of more vegetables than meat! At dinner we just chatted over our veggie stir-fry and a glass of wine. Gloria had brought some hand-picked fruit from her sisters finca home for us to try; one of the fruits had a seed that also contained a nut (the size of an almond, but shaped like a cheerio) that tasted like coconut—it was pretty awesome. Anyway, Darlene loves coconut and said something about raiding the fruit cabinet to eat these nuts, then made this squirrel imitation that set me off. I don’t know what it was, but this story in combination with something I ate, the glass of wine, or one of the two new fruits, gave me such a case of the giggles that I could barely talk. Of course it spread to Darlene so that as we told each other stories and talked about things, we couldn’t stop giggling. Needless to say the stories got funnier and funnier…poor Eric was a little confused (and perhaps worried), but we managed to make him laugh with us too.
We eventually had to separate ourselves and leave the dinner table before we laughed ourselves to death…but it was a nice way to end a wonderful weekend.
We eventually had to separate ourselves and leave the dinner table before we laughed ourselves to death…but it was a nice way to end a wonderful weekend.
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