Medillin

Medillin – oh Medillin! In the 5 days in Colombia’s second city, in some ways quite disgracefully, I did not see much of the city centre. The basic set up of the backpacker scene in Medillin is currently centred around the Black Sheep hostel and full of a nearly entirely male backpacker contingent, a large percentage of whom are getting lost into various beautiful Colombian Chicas.

Besides that, there is a lot of fun to be had with a some great blokes and really awesome places to go out to. In particular, there were three big nights all of which adhering to the common theme of ending sitting outside the hostel as the sun came up with the very occasional sound of gun fire in the hills to add some edge to the place.

We had a great night in a live salsa bar with again much dancing on tables and even conga dancing for some reason. Sunday night was perhaps the pinnacle of nights out in Colombia at The Pub, a place that played everything from Salsa to Rancid and had such a fantastically fun atmosphere - perfecto. This country really puts some dancing vibes in your system.

Beyond the great nights we had time to catch Medillin beat Perreira (thanks Gloria for taking us) – more great atmosphere despite being soaked through to the bone with a pointed headache – and spend a lot of time in Exito. I will not go on about how much I enjoyed that daily trip to the supermarket as it might make you think I am a bit odd – but it was excellent!!

I think I also reached the pinnacle of my Spanish by somehow managing to teach Sandra and Christina to play Risk nearly entirely in their native tongue. I find that after about 2-3 hours of conversing in my poor Spanish my head feels like it wants to roll off and the only cure is English and beer.

The combination of the likes of Sebastian, Dave, Mill, Kye, Mark, Paul and others was a bit of a messy one. Good thing then that Mark (another person who has more than a little loco in him – I do not think Colombia is a good place for his long term health), Dave, Sebastian and myself woke up after a 12 hour bus ride to what seemed like a totally different country – the place was Arbolites and one heck of a strange 2 weeks on the Caribbean coast began!!