Colombia - Amor y Granadillas - Medellin

Yesterday was 'Amor y Amistad', it's like Valentine's Day but it means love and friendship so everyone gets special treatment, and not just couples; one of the women who works in the hostel came round with sweets for everyone to celebrate.  To mark the occasion there was a really nice designer market on a street near us, cool clothes, jewellery and food stalls, and all the young beautiful and rich paisas (what people from Medellin are called) were out and about. Brian bought a shirt from this guy who only makes one in each size and stitches the edition number onto the shirt.  He had great stuff and kindly invited us out for a drink with his friends, but unfortunately we were too wrecked after having gone out the night before with John, another friend from home who's here.

Found out from John's Colombian girlfriend that it's really difficult for Colombians to travel outside of the country, well I think she said it's ok around South America, but if you wanted to go further, like to the States or Ireland you need to have $10,000 in your bank account.  Our Spanish  teacher was also telling us that she doesn't think there is any free speech in Colombia and there are no left leaning newspapers at all.

The police do random searches of people at any time.  Once we were in a taxi that was stopped by the police and Brian was taken out and searched.  Wasn't that thorough though, seems like its just for show in a way, like the other day I was standing on the street looking around as Brian was searching for something in his bag, and when a policeman saw me looking at him, he immediately stopped and searched the next guy who walked past.

This week has been mainly spent studying Spanish.  We really enjoyed our classes and learned loads. After 8 hours of lessons we were successful in writing a three page essay about our Colombian trip.  Our teacher was lovely and used to treat us to unusual South American fruit everyday. Here's a picture of her and Brian in our class with one of her paintings in the background.

Our favourite new fruit - the granadilla.  It's like a passionfruit except bigger and really sweet.