“Living high” can mean many things in Medellin. Given my limited life experience, I’m sure I only know a small fraction of the possible meanings. Here are a few I know :
1. High on altitude. I haven’t actually had breathing issues in the downtown city or the leafy suburb where my hostel is located, but these parts of the city are in the bottom of a long narrow valley. All around the valley are mountainside “barrios” where most of Medellin’s 3.9 million people live.
And to get up to many of the barrios you can take cable cars, which are part of the city’s very cool transit system that moves these 3.9 million people around. So yesterday I took the metro to the north end of the valley, transferred to a cable car system and took a gondola up the mountain, making stops in three barrios along the way.
In the last town, I left the transit system and walked next door to a station which took me to another cable car that carried me over the over the summit and over a second hilltop and then dropped me off in a beautiful cloud forest park called Parque Arvi. The park is a very popular escape from the smog and the bustle of the city. For this reason, I went early in the day and it was quite empty. I took a couple of hikes through green cloud forest and took pictures of birds and flowers.
And on these hikes I was feeling very winded any time I walked uphill. It must have been the altitude, because I had a pulmonary function test just before Christmas and was told that my respiration was very good for an old man like me.
What an amazing thing to have a wild cloud forest where you can go and walk in solitude on a 2 hour hike, just a 45 minute metro and cable car ride from the centre of a city of millions.
2. Living high on the hog
Today I spent some time in the centre of the city in a place called Parque Berrio, which is a concrete square beside a metro station where people congregate for free entertainment. Today there were two large groups. One was a “snake oil” sales show where a man was singing the glories of a certain type of leaf that he uses in an infusion, and I wasn’t able to understand what the benefits of the infusion were, and I wandered over to the other group where several musicians were setting up. They started to play and immediately people began to dance. I asked if I could take a photo and they looked at each other and shrugged, not looking to keen about it. Then one pointed to the hat on the ground and said, if you contribute, ok. I took the picture, gave the a 10,000 peso note (about $4.50) and the musicians all shook my hand. I felt like a “big shot” in spite of myself.
So then I walked just beyond the music, where the shoeshine men set up. I went to a man whose offer I had rebuffed a short time before, and told him I changed my mind. He was pleased and got right to work. He washed my shoes, added colour where it was scraped off, the waxed and buffed them, and I told him this was more than a simple shine, I was impressed with his meticulous work (actually I said it much more simply, I don’t know the Spanish word for meticulous). I only understood a fraction of our conversation, but he said he enjoyed his work, had been doing it for 25 years, and had been working in Parque Berrio for 9 of those years. I asked him f he always worked Sundays and he said he always told people he worked Monday to Monday. I said it must be a hard to have to work all the time and he said no, he liked it and his life was good. When he was finished, I told him the shoes looked better than new and he was pleased. I asked him how much he wanted and he took out a sheet of paper that had the Parque Berrio shoe shine prices listed. He pointed to the “reconstruction” price, which was 24,000 pesos, or about 10 dollars Canadian. I was a little surprised, it seemed a high price for Colombia, more like a Canadian price (though I’ve never had my shoes shined here), but he’d done a good job and I would have tipped him that much anyway. Then he really surprised me and said that that was the cost per shoe, and I owed him 48,000 pesos. I was shocked and told him that seemed high. My limited Spanish didn’t allow me to say much more, I couldn’t present a logical argument. And, after all, I had just complimented him on his workmanship and commiserated with him about having to work a 7 day week. I didn’t want to accuse him of trying to cheat me and didn’t know how to say that anyway, so I paid him the 48,000 and skipped the tip.
Then I took the metro home, looking down every so often to enjoy the gleam of my newly shined shoes.
So much for being a “big shot”.
I was wondering why it is that I need to be the one to decide when to be generous and when to be withholding, and why, when someone else “makes” me be generous, against my will perhaps, I feel cheated? In the end, I got what I deserved, and he, more or less (mostly more) did too.
