Date Archives April 2011

My Medellin Wrap-Up

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It’s funny, every time I come back from a trip, it always feels like the whole thing could’ve been one crazy ass dream. My latest trip – 5 weeks in Medellin, Colombia – was no different. Hell, if it weren’t for my pictures, I could probably convince myself it never happened.

I’ve been back in California for a week now and it’s been throwing me off – everyone speaks English, it’s not raining every other day, I haven’t heard any reggaeton or salsa, and everything is just a little too clean and organized. It feels weird.

So before the dream completely fades away, I want to share with y’all a small taste of what made Medellin special for me:

Teach Me How to Salsa

Before I left for Colombia, I told everyone that I planned to return as a master salsa dancer. I was only half-kidding.

As soon as I got settled in, I signed up for private dance lessons 5 times a week for 3 weeks and made sure I went out salsa dancing at least twice a week. So did I reach master status? Hell no. But I had one helluva good time trying.

I quickly realized a few things: 1) 5 hours of practice a week sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing. To get good at this, you need to devote way more time than that. 2) Learning a fancy move is easy. Learning how to lead a partner through that fancy move is damn hard.

3) Every once in a while there’ll be that (rare) moment where the music lines up, you stop over-thinking, and everything just clicks. And for those few seconds, you get why people love this so much and you feel like an actual dancer.

At the end of my 3 weeks, my maestra Jazmin tested me and you can see how I did in this video. I got decent and learned a few moves, but my form is still off (stop bouncing, this ain’t hip hop!) and my leading skills need a ton of work.

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How to Get By When You Can’t Speak the Language

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I’ve always sucked at foreign languages. Don’t believe me? I grew up with two Korean parents (yes, from Korea) and somehow I managed to NOT learn Korean. In middle school, Pig Latin and Gibberish (and the girls who spoke them) constantly eluded me. In high school, I took 3 years of Spanish and all I got from it was “Donde esta la biblioteca?”

In spite of all this, I somehow thought my Spanish would be up to snuff for my latest trip: living for 5 weeks in Medellin, Colombia. Um, no. This is gonna sound stupid, but when I landed I was actually surprised by how difficult it was to communicate. I guess in my previous travels, I was either surrounded by a ton of other English-speaking travelers (Thailand) or lived in a city where English was a common second-language (Berlin, Germany). Not this time.

Colombia was full on Spanish, all the time. And wow, it was such a different experience trying to live in a country where you can barely speak the language. It was challenging, exciting, frustrating, rewarding, and most definitely a time I’ll never forget. Here are a few things I learned from my experience:

Everything becomes an adventure. Getting groceries. Figuring out the metro. Asking your landlady for toilet paper. When you don’t speak the language, the most mundane things can become epic, monumental tasks.

People will think you’re mentally challenged. I wish I could say it’s all fun, but it can be hard at times too. Some people will literally treat you as if you’re an idiot. They’ll get annoyed that you can’t get your point across and will think you’re dumb because of it. Brush ’em off – for every one of them, there’s 99 other friendly people who will want to genuinely help you and get to know you, regardless of your language barriers.

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