Sunday, March 15, 2015

Moving to Sites

November 16 - November 22

OK, so starting from now, I’m going to try to make these entries a lot shorter by cutting out the day-by-day section and just making the beginning section longer. You’ve now read everything that everyone does during PST, so from this point on, my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer will be a lot more my own experience and much less the same thing everyone else is doing, so a detailed account may not be quite as useful as it was during PST. Hopefully, this will make reading these entries less tedious, so we’ll see how this goes.
This week was our first at our new sites. Another volunteer came to my apartment in Barranquilla to help me get my stuff down the stairs and out the door and our little dog, Sony, followed me the whole way. I love my Barranquilla family and I love that little dog! At the office, we picked up our water filters before sleeping on each other’s shoulders on the way to Santa Marta. Once we got there, we had a host family meeting and I met my new host mom. Later, we had dinner at another volunteer’s house – I’m very excited to get to know the CII-5 volunteers, who all seem like wonderful people.
We spent the week exploring in and around Santa Marta. A group of us walked around the Centro and saw both the Museo del Oro and one volunteer’s Soy Wiwa exposition at the Museo Etnográfico. A volunteer helped me with buses and finding my church and I really appreciated her accompanying me everywhere until I can get the hang of my new city. We celebrated a volunteer’s birthday in Minca on Friday and hiked up to La Victoria, a coffee farm about 2 hours up the mountain. We toured the farm and drank tinto before heading back down.


- If you don’t have a Pinterest account, I highly recommend getting one. It’s especially good for teaching ideas…and ideas for whatever else you like.
- The Bendito Café, which is in the same plaza as the Catedral, has a nice atmosphere and is a good place to meet with people in the Centro.
- Colombian coffee is amazing. I don’t drink coffee, but I’ve had it here several times because, well, I’m in Colombia. Even if you don’t drink coffee, try it – like in the United States, drinking coffee is a social event here and the coffee’s almost universally good (and the organic or single-origin coffee’s even better), so why not?

No comments:

Post a Comment