Time Slid Out Of Focus

Time slipped out of focus when the red-eye flight of Ecuatoriana de Aviación, proceeding from Miami. having left at 00:30  with a stop at Panama in the dead of the night touched the runway at Palmaseca Airport in Palmira, Colombia, in 20th of August, 1970. Time and Place too, as a matter of fact. We walked down the steps emerging into a hazy dawn of the Valle del Cauca Province,. I was groggy from lack of sleep and the strain and stress of the tumultuous last weeks and a last minute decision to follow my brother down to Colombia instead of returning to Finland or trying to stay in USA and getting my situation there sorted out, perhaps by marriage or getting a student visa.

"

Yes. my brother had gotten himself a job at Centro Colombo Americano and while still back in Florida and preparing for his trip he asked me if I was going back to Finland or follow him to Colombia and I said not Finland. He offered to pay my ticket whichever way and I said yes, sure; Colombia here I come. I barely knew where Colombia was located on the map but I knew they spoke Spanish there and learning a new language sounded like a fun thing to do. "I'm going to teach English". he said, what could you possibly do there? "If you can teach English certainly so can I"
"My future students are all professional adults, doctors, lawyers, engineers...you're just a little wisp of a girl, a college drop-out, almost a child still". "Yes, but I can speak English, these people can't". Naturally, it was an overstatement as my English as a Second Language was piping fresh from the oven. But at 20 you think you are invincible." (from a post in MangoBiche, my social network site I had a few years ago)

Cali, the seductress of the Valle, La Sultana, was just waking up to a new day, the sun had barely risen and the Lady of the Valle was streching and yawning still, not quite ready get cooking. The nightly mists were hanging over the cordillera (the western finger of the Andes) and the hazy morning air was inmpermeated by the heady aromas of sticky, sweet molasses from the sugar mills and smoke from the cane fires. The alienness of it all struck me and I remember thinking that I was walking into somebody else's dream, not my own. No, not my own.

There were dark, small people all over the place. After we cleared the immigration we took a taxi to downtown. My brother was the only one who spoke Spanish. So who were "we"? We were four people, my brother and me and a friend of my brothers and his girlfriend; they were the original group who had been planning this trip  for a long time, I was a last minute addition to the group. Both men had been recently divorced from their Florida wives and wanted a fresh start, Why Colombia? I still don't know, perhaps because it was so close, a short flight straight down, going south.

We rented a room, just one room with four beds at Casa del Viajero, a hostel right in the middle of everything, on Avenida Sexta and Puente Ortiz, a short walk to downtown banking and shopping, to English Institutes concentrated on barrio Granada between the Cali River (Puente Ortiz) and a few blocks north (Avenida 22 North). The place was a dump, but they cleaned and changed sheets and towels every morning and there was a shower (a cold one) in the room; the toilets were down the hall. Next to our hotel there was a streetside cafeteria where we ate breakfast (scrambled eggs with tomato and onion) before going back in to sleep out our travel weariness.

 Snoopy's on Avenida Sexta, Norte. Puente Ortiz and the very first pictures of me and latest flame, taken by a street photographer ;)

The next few days (eventually weeks) we spent in getting our bearings. We walked the downtown area with stately old buildings (The Alferez Real, Plaza de Cayzedo, Hotel Aristi, Edificio Botero, ate in small restaurants (my deep mistrust for mondongo and other dishes prepared from bovine offal dates back to these first days in Cali) but I had a hard time adjusting to local cuisine. I ate hotdogs at Snoopy's, a little hole-in- the wall fast food joint run by two Americans, Cliff and Nick. They played cool music and the place was crammed with young expats, mostly Americans, the majority of them English teachers employed by The Centro Colombo Americano, Meyer's (used to be located in a beautiful Republican house that was later demolished to build that god-awful Palacio Rosa.