A Solidly Chill Time

Location: Cartagena, Colombia

This is more of an update than a story, so if you're pressed on time, feel free to skip a few paragraphs.

Despite the fact that we're in a city, there's a surprisingly nice amount of marine life here. Giant shoals of baby fish swim around the boats in the marina and in the mornings there are flocks of gulls alongside frigate birds, pelicans, and snowy egrets. Jem likes the latter because they are very pretty, despite their surprisingly ugly squawk. He doesn't think very highly of frigate birds, which stink, and of pelicans, which stink and sometimes poop on the bowsprit.

I've recently finished More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. It's a hilariously strange book about the intertwined lives of various people living in an apartment building in San Francisco. I would recommend it to queer friends (in both senses of the term, preferably simultaneously). I would not recommend it to grandparents, unless they were hippies. It's a trip.

We've done a bit of cleaning up on the boat. Both engines have been serviced as well as the dinghy engine. We've scrubbed the boat of dirt and salt (accidentally spraying water into Anna's face in the process). We've put out the cushions and line-hung the salt-ridden pillows to dry. We've gotten rid of as many thousands of ants as we could. We've even killed the cockroaches. They always come back, though. Always.

Getting data took awhile. First, the sim cards allowed us to send text messages, but nothing else. Then, the company wanted us to register our phones, but the website didn't actually work. Then, we went to a local mall to go to the phone company's store to fix the issue, but we were told that this store didn't do customer support and the store that did was on the other side of the city. We ended up buying new sim cards. They're slow, but they work. To do internet-intensive projects (e.g. posting this), I tend to stick to the supermarket wifi. The supermarket is called Carulla, by the way. They sell excellent vanilla cappuccinos.

We've had a wide, mostly good, variety of food this week. On the boat, we've had lasagna, pita bread, hummus made with a potato masher due to lack of blender, potato-and-onion scrambled eggs with slightly raw potatoes and too much onion, and cookies that had way too much sugar and butter in them, causing them to look like they were frying in the oven and having the nice side effect of creating caramelized sugar. On land, we discovered that there is a small unmarked, green-roofed shack in the corner of the marina that sells huge portions of delicious food for a total of 3.45 CAD. The next day we went to eat there, but there was a large man shouting and angrily smashing all of the kitchen appliances and displays on the ground, so we decided to eat at the mall instead. Sometimes, all you really need is a big plate of greasy, Americanized Chinese food.

Also on the topic of the mall: we got there via a tiny, seat belt-less taxi (with a door handle replace by a single screw) driven by a man who was way too big for his car. The mall has three stories and is almost entirely comprised of clothing stores. Anna and I walked everywhere trying to find a raincoat. We found a down jacket in a store that looked like it belonged in the Adirondacks and a windbreaker from a high-end men's store, but no raincoat. Guess I'll die.

After the mall, we explored the old city, which is surrounded by pretty walls. Old Cartagena resembles old Panama city, with its beautifully-coloured walls, elegant balconies, and cobblestone streets. The only differences are that in Cartagena, the cobblestone is being ripped up and replaced with concrete and at every street corner there are half a dozen people very aggressively trying to sell you things ranging from restaurant deals to jewerly. I'm not sure which part of my Costco-athleisure-with-flip-flops outfit screamed "I buy emeralds in my spare time," but there you go.

Underneath one of the colonnades in the old city there was an enormous number of sweets stands. How they all stayed in business, I have no idea. I was in a bad mood because of all the emerald sellers so I wasn't necessarily excited to see more people who wanted to sell me things, but Jem bought a few sweets. This turned out to be a very good decision. I am now in love with Colombian sweets.

Due to covid, most of the streets and squares were empty in old Cartagena. However, at a small, vine-covered bar, we met an impossibly tall Danish traveler called Thomas. Thomas has owned a furniture store in Berlin for the past ten years, but he's been traveling around Colombia for the past six months. He speaks in a German-Spanish accent. A few days later, we had him over for dinner, because he was curious about the boat. There, we learned that despite his many sí's and gracias's, he doesn't actually speak Spanish. Also, he learned most of his English so as to have a common language with a girl from Uzbekistan. Thomas is leaving for Bogotá on Saturday, and, following that, Miami.

My Canadian ensign (nautical term for flag) has become quite tattered over the past months. Today I decided to re-stitch the edges. Unfortunately, my small sewing kit didn't have enough thread of one colour to do all of the border, so the colours of Canada are now red, white, black, slate blue, and baby pink.

Today is our last massive grocery haul before leaving for Sint Maarten. According to Jem's wind prediction app, the trip should only take eight days. Of course, after our last passage, I don't completely trust Jem's wind prediction app. Also, today there was a bad-weather flag flying in the marina, and we're supposed to leave tomorrow. Oh well, it'll either be a good time or a good story. See ya