Medellin with the Locals
“Hey Laura, I’m finally going to be in Medellin this weekend, can’t wait to see you!”
“Ah Joey, that’s so great! I’ll show you around. Do you have anything you want to do here in particular?”
“Nahh, I’m up for following you around, just experiencing the life of a Medellin local, yknow!”
“Ok, sounds great! We’ll just chill and you can see how I live my life.”
Four days later, as I was readying myself to literally run off the side of a cliff strapped to just a sixteen year old boy and a giant set of green wings, I wondered quite how Laura had misunderstood what I had said.
Medellin is a huge, sprawling city with a layout unlike any other place I have been. Anyone who knows me will be aware of my inadvertent obsession of comparing things to other things, but with Medellin I really struggled (it even became an advertant obsession…NEED…TO…COMPARE…). In a nutshell, the city is in the middle of a circle of valleys, with the valleys themselves comprising the slums and lower class areas and the bottom comprising everything else. They have pioneered an amazing social initiative where they link the main part of the city with the slums via cable car, therefore providing a more wholesome feel to the city and allowing those in worse off situations to get involved in the day to day life of the main part of the city.
The next important thing to know is that all the women have massive fake tits and asses and lips so it’s constantly entertaining just wandering around playing Fake or Real, a game I played in my head that Laura was unaware of until she reads this (Laura is a close university friend of mine, Colombian and living in Medellin and my exceptional hostess for the 5 days I was there).
It was the bank holiday weekend so we went out. A lot. It was sunny, it was calm, it didn’t feel dangerous despite Laura’s inability to accept that I could follow directions to the nearest shop without getting abducted and used as a drugs mule. There were men screaming AVOCADOS on every street, and they really did have something to shout about because they were the size of most of the boobs I saw watermelons. We ate well, we spend part of a warm, balmy evening in a crowded, sociable park pre-drinking (except you know how in England you have to go seek out your pre-drink booze and worry the shop might stop selling alcohol? Well in Medellin you just sit in the park and little old Colombian men come round to you selling ice cold beer as if it were a bar…although it remains a mystery as to how they keep the beer cold and I feel like it is something I would rather not know). We we went to a big club which I loved because they handed out long thin multicoloured balloons to literally everyone in there, and then once the novelty of those ran out, they handed out bowls of popcorn, raisins and mixed nuts because who doesn’t love snacking on the dancefloor, right?!
And then on Monday we went paragliding, a strange and liberating experience just floating around in the sky over this huge mountainous metropolis, something I enjoyed more than I thought I would and something Laura enjoyed far less than she hoped she would (I think the most common thing her tandem said to her was “please try and have a good time” although the pictures she took of herself show her to be in a jovial state, despite also looking like a potato with a helmet on). I couldn’t believe how simple it was. You just get a bus up a mountain for an hour where you find a mass of people sitting having picnics and watching people casually hurl themselves off the side of a cliff. You find your “guy”, put on a safety harness, literally get stuck to the front of your tandem person (mine was a boy who probably would have been at school had it not been bank holiday and which didn’t initially inspire a great deal of security in me) and then get told to run really fast off the side, which should be harder seeing as it goes against every survival instinct humans have ever developed. It is hard to describe the split second where you leave the side like some kind of speedy cartoon character who has overrun the chase and is treading thin air, as you suddenly lose your breath, but it is a feeling nearly unrivalled. And then you just fly around for a while! Before landing down in a park full of people, where you unharness from your tandem and your wings and use all your self control to fight the urge to go running around whooping with the adrenaline of flight, instead just sauntering through the crowd of gawping onlookers with a look on your face that simply says “yeahhhh I just flew into town, how’d you get here?”
Medellin really does have it all. Beautiful, sociable people, incredible landscapes, an enormous variety of activities and you can go flying in the sky for 20 quid. I was genuinely reluctant to leave and got on my flight to Cartagena feeling mildly bitter that I had to go there (a feeling that would prove extraordinarily and hilariously unwarranted, as a future post will describe). It is a place I could see myself staying for much longer and one I would like to return to, although I repeatedly dreamt I was flying through the air on a pair of giant fake tits attached to a pair of giant fake lips which kept screaming AVOCADOS at me.