Back to school!

Well, then I started school! I haven't gone to school for quite some time now but I liked it a lot. It was a nice class and good teachers with good social skills. When I thought about taking Spanish classes in South America I had expected them to be somewhat cheaper than they were.. But I must say, the week that I took classes, I did get value for my money. Not only did the classes feel like they improved my Spanish a lot, but there were also activities offered after school pretty much every day.. For example, I did a cooking class and a dance class. That one dance class is not enough to make my Scandinavian hips adopt Latino rhythms come as no surprise. I was at a Latino disco two days ago and at one point a young girl came up to me and told me, not using words but body language: No! That is not how you dance! Look at me! And then she started showing me how to dance and whenever I did something wrong she said: NO! On average it took two seconds from the point that I started dancing until she firmly said NO! I really appreciated the gesture and that was one of the nicest things that happened that evening. It is important to help people in need..

On the last day of school the class went to a local market for an exercise. I decided to buy something to drink. Here in Colombia they have a lot of super tasty fresh juices of all kinds of familiar and unfamiliar fruits, so usually buying juice is a safe option. In this case, I asked to buy "jugo borojo"... The woman at the stand asked me if I wanted everything in it and of course I said yes since I like to try new things.. Then slowly I realized that those live crabs in front of me were supposed to go into the juice!! Will the crabs be cooked before they go into the juice, I asked. No, mixed, she answered. That is even for me a little too hard-core.. So I asked her only to put fruits in the juice.. She didn't quite understand me so she only left out the live crabs but did include the oysters.. Apart from fruit and oysters there were also three kinds of alcoholic beverages in the juice.. It turns out the jugo borojo is a Colombian "energy drink", some love it some hate it.. I loved it! It tasted awesome and was definitely packed with calories! :)

Another trip I did with the class was to the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá. In fact it was a humongous salt mine in which some of the older parts there had been rebuilt into several different chapels and a big "cathedral" and other things. The size of it all was very impressive and so was the way the mountain has been used for architectural purposes.

Going back from the salt mine we ended up in a traffic jam. One of the teachers of the school, Carlos, was driving and guessed that people were protesting against the inadequate service of the Transmilenio, which are the express-busses here in Bogota. It would turn out that he was kind of right.. We were only about 100 meters from the blockade. In Europe this would mean.. We are stuck on the highway. In Colombia, Carlos turned around and went a short distance in the wrong direction on the highway to the previous exit.. He was not alone doing that though and indeed we did get home. Now, the reason that people were protesting would be on the news the following day. A woman who had been waiting for heart surgery for one year collapsed and died on the Transmilenio platform. After that, it took the authorities more than 6 hours to come and pick up the body!! That was what people were protesting against!