Anywho, in our barrio, we have a neighborhood security guard who does not have a machine gun. At least not that I can see. Each house that chooses to...pays him 30,000 pesos (that's about $15) per month to walk up and down and around the block all night long watching out for us. There are bad guys here.
When we first moved to Barranquilla, we put a window unit air conditioner in the downstairs bedroom and blew up our air mattress and slept in the cool (until we got our first electric bill). But that's another story.
Every now and then I'd wake up to the sound of an exotic bird outside and finally said something to Jerry about it. He, of course, hadn't heard a thing with the AC running non-stop and didn't know what I was talking about...until we got that electric bill and a new bed the next week and moved upstairs to our UN air conditioned bedroom. Then, with the open windows, he could hear the bird too.
You don't know how many times that week I heard, "I'm gonna shoot that &$#%^& bird if I ever get the chance".
One night I heard it right outside our window and jumped out of bed to see if I could see it - but the only thing I saw was a man in a blue uniform walking up the street. He came to the crossroads, walked down 2-3 houses, turned around and came back. When he turned around I was sure he had heard the bird too because it had just whistled and I figured he was looking for it just like I was.
Then to my amazement, I saw him put a whistle in his mouth and realized HE was the bird.
After I had a good laugh, I woke Jerry up to tell him I'd found the bird and he should load his shotgun. :)
So anywho, last night when I was finishing up my blog post, I mentioned that it was time for bed because I'd heard the Whistler which meant it was getting late. He starts making the rounds at about 11pm and I'll try to get a picture of him to show you.
Speaking of pictures...As I mentioned in my last post, Bogota, the capital city of Colombia, is only 428 miles south of us but because it's in the mountains (the altitude is higher than that of Denver) it's always rather cool - if not downright cold. The temperature rarely goes above 70 or below 40 and it's the same year round. If I'm wrong about this please leave a comment.
Yep - those are the mountains straight ahead.
Because of the weather (it drizzles a lot), there are flowers everywhere. Beautiful. lush, colorful, abundant flowers. The grass and trees are green and it's a truly gorgeous city.
Also because of the weather, people have energy and you can feel it in the air. After getting over the shock of being cold, I loved, l-o-v-e-d having and feeling that energy.
This next picture is of the inclined plane we rode up on to the top of the mountain to see Monserrate, a beautiful church in a heavenly setting.
Here's a pix of Monserrate from the base of the hill.
And here's a view of the city from the church looking down. (Yes of course we went up to see it).
Sophia took it all in stride and was right at home there.
We all loved Bogota and I can't wait to go back BUT...on our second night there, Jerry and I looked at each other and said at the same time, "It'll be sooo good to go home".
Barranquilla, with all of it's heat, humidity and mosquitos is becoming home to us and it's really wonderful to be able to share it with you. But I miss the USA like you wouldn't believe.
OK - so after getting back home I did those alligator quilties that I wrote about here a couple weeks ago. This is what my studio looked like back then...
I've fine-tuned it a little since then, but it's crowded and messy looking, even though it's a huge room. I don't know how I had all of this stuff in the house we lived in in Tampa!
That yellow chair is the one Sophia sits in when she works on a project. The table under the quilts is glass so we can make any kind of mess on it and not worry too much about cleaning it up.
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Yuckola. More than half of my email has been from anonymous, so.....