Friday!

It’s Saturday! I was too exhausted to do an update last night and I’m just getting around to posting Bill’s update this morning. He did a really good job, so I’m just going to add a couple things to his post.

After our dance class, I suggested to Bill that we could potentially be great at salsa with some practice. His response was “we might be great at chips and salsa!” I suggested that we go to either a salsa dance club or an Afro-Caribbean dance club tonight and he wanted to know what I’ve been smoking. I think I have him talked into going to take a look at the dance club! It was a really good week and we are looking forward to a fun weekend too.

Okay, the rest is Bill’s post! I’ll add pictures below.

I should probably clarify my statement about translating what Karen says. She speaks to me mostly in Spanish unless I admit I have no clue what she was saying to me. It seems you can answer with “si” a lot and she is okay that. I really don’t know what she said because she moves on. But sometimes she says things that she knows I don’t understand and repeats herself slower and I will hear a word that I know and I will translate it. Other times she will write a word I know and I will automatically blurt out the translation. When I do that she will tell me in Spanish not to translate, I’m learning “no traduciendo” very well!! It’s probably good I’m not in a class with other students. 

This morning I looked through our posts and seen that I should be reading my posts before I send them to Emily to be posted. A few missed letters and words. 

Every morning down on the beach there is a guy that sets up little tents. They are just four posts and some tent stakes that we believe people rent for shade. 
There is also a guy that must sell fresh fish he caught. He sets up a thing on the wall that separates the beach from the sidewalk and cleans them tossing the guts to the birds. He usually has several lined up by the bus stop. 

It’s Friday so that means we’ve made it a full week! It seems like it has gone by fast and that we’ve not done a lot besides school. But we have walked around the old city and seen some of the local culture. We’ve been getting in some swimming which has been nice. Even with three hours of class in the afternoon we have been making good use of our free time. It feels like a vacation and not school. Even my time in class is fun. I’m not good, but I am getting better. 

Today we decided to go into the old city early and go to a couple museums, turns out the two we were planning on today is actually one museum. Palacio de la Inquisition/ History Museum. It was interesting, they had a window that people used as a drive up for carriages, narc on your neighbor drop off. The carriage would pull up and a note would get tossed in the window. 

Before the museum, we stopped off at Juan Valdez coffee shop, I don’t normally drink coffee, I am in Colombia though and felt I could give it a go. If there is a place to drink coffee it would be here where it feels like 100 degrees most the time! I had a cafe tinto, which here it’s just tinto. It tastes like coffee in the US. 
After we walked up on the wall for the view and bought a selfie stick. They are dorky but we won’t have to take close up of us, we can get some background in our shots of us!! 

After the museum we did a little shopping in the old city for souvenirs. We both were able to find some things. 

We had lunch at a nice place. We used the method “look she has restaurant picture menus” and followed the woman with the picture menus. It was nice place, the food was good, I had a rabbit based concoction that tasted familiar, kind of a comfort food. Emily’s shark meal was good as well, a bit more exciting to taste. 
We met a couple from New York, she was born in Russia and he was from Nicaragua by birth. They were very friendly and we got to try some Spanish, Emily more so than me with the man. 

Class today was more numbers for me. I did a little better with not trying to translate. Karen only had to say not to a couple times. It’s nice to be done with numbers. 

After class we came back to the apartment and swam for a spell in the pool. There was a mother and two kids leaving as we got there and there was a man sitting by the pool drinking Budweiser beer listening to music, a mix of Spanish, 80s and 90s American. He must’ve lived either on the same floor as the pool or one floor up or down. He would get a few beers at a time and bring them out to where he was sitting, he did not take the elevator as he was not gone that long. We have three elevators serving 18 floors, the first two maybe three are parking, the lobby and store fronts. There are 8 apartments for the rest. The elevators are slooow!! 

For dinner tonight we opted to go back to the restaurant we went to last night. I got a photo. I had fried chicken that was very good. 

Emily booked us a snorkeling trip on Sunday that should be fantastic!! We also got the number for our taxi driver from this morning who was very friendly and is willing to be our driver / guide Tomorrow morning for a while and show us some hot spots and must see things about his city. He was very enthusiastic about Cartagena.