As of time of writing, I have now spent 46 days in Bogotá, Colombia. I am in the 6th week of university, have already failed multiple tests, moved apartment, climbed Monserrate three times and (almost) mastered the Colombian national sport Tejo.
So far, I would describe my time in Colombia as amazing, but challenging at the same time. I have struggled a lot with the amount of work I have to do for university, to the point at which I considered going home because it was too stressful. Thankfully, my home university in England offered a lot of support and now we have found a solution that allowed me to lower my workload for this semester, which makes it a lot easier for me to keep up with all the work. Now everything is more relaxed!
Speaking of university, my current courses consist of: Colombian History in the 20th century, Globalisation, Contemporary Colombia and Spanish. I chose a lot of history courses because my naive self thought that those were going to be super interesting and a lot of fun. While they certainly are interesting, I am not entirely sure about the “fun” part. History courses include a lot of weekly readings (~80 pages per course per week, all in Spanish of course) and I am a slow reader. However, I love learning about the history of Colombia, mostly because I absolutely know nothing about it (did you know that Panama used to be part of Colombia? I didn’t). While they are challenging, I like my courses and I know that they help me a lot with understanding the country’s culture of today, which I greatly appreciate.
Generally speaking is the Universidad de Los Andes a very demanding university. Compared to my home institution, they are much stricter with marking and require way more work than Essex ever did. Part of me wants to travel and see Colombia, but I also don’t really mind doing a lot for my studies. After all, it is an academic year abroad, and the professors provide a very high-quality education, so I try to appreciate the academic side of my year as well. That doesn’t mean I don’t ever get annoyed at the high workload though; that happens a lot. However, I am absolutely in love with the campus! It is huge and stunningly beautiful, with very good facilities and nice places to relax.
Other than my workload struggle, I am having the most amazing time. I am lucky to have met a ton of great people and we try to get the most of the city and its surroundings. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a lot of time to travel, but I will try my best to change this. I am very excited to go on a trip to the pacific coast in three weeks, which is supposed to be an incredible area of Colombia.
One thing we do weekly is play tejo. I am not sure if I can capture the beautiful insanity of tejo, but I will try: there are two teams and the goal is to throw a piece of metal (= a tejo) against a small wall of clay in a way to make it stick into the clay. There are also small triangles filled with black powder on that wall. If your tejo lands (and stays) within the circle of the triangles, you get more points. If your tejo hits one of the triangles, and it explodes, you gain even more points. The highest score is granted if you explode one of the triangles and your tejo stays within the small circle of black powder triangles. The difficulty is that you have to throw the tejo standing quite far from the clay wall, so hitting it in the first place takes some practice.
The beauty about tejo is its rule about payment: you don’t pay according to time played or how many tejos you have thrown. Both teams pay for a case of beer and as long as you have beer, you play. This results in all players’ intoxication levels rising over the course of the game. In short, tejo is essentially a drinking game. We play tejo pretty much on a weekly basis and while we’re still really bad at it, we have the best time playing it.
I have also established a joure fixe with a friend to climb Monserrate once a week. So far, we’ve done it twice after my near-death experience a few weeks ago, and we’ve improved! Our last record was 1h 6 min, next time we are aiming for under an hour. It feels good to finally get used to the altitude more and not nearly dying every time you try to climb a flight of stairs.
All in all, I am slighly stressed out about university, but in love with Bogotá and the people I have met so far. I definitely feel like I have made the right choice coming here and excited to see what the next months bring.
Colombia Chronicles 