Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner

I'm normally the kind of person who researches a trip semi-obsessively before my departure. By the time I boarded to the plane for my semester of "study" in New Zealand, for example, I had highlighted my Let's Go Travel Guide and already begun planning what food to pack for the hike to Milford Sound. For this Colombia expedition I decided to cultivate a bit more spontaneity, and about the only preparatory action that I took was to watch Dirty Dancing 2: Havanna Nights for salsa tips. The dancing was pretty cool, but the cheesiness was predictably quite high.

Havanna Nights must have had a subliminal effect on me, however, as once I arrived in Medellin, I set to work looking for a dance school. With Luz Helena's help, I found one--El Ultimo Cafe--not too far from my language university, and I was soon signed up for private lessons in any and all forms of latin dance. My teacher promised me 18 hours of class at a ridiculously low price, and I figured that with my gringa background, I needed all of the hours of practice that I could afford.

I began with salsa, which everyone had told me was one of the easiest dances. That may be true for Latin people, born with hips that move in perfect rhythm without either thought or effort, but my WASPy genes did not endow me with such gifts. I could do the basic steps, but the feel of the dance was totally lost on me. I tried not to lose hope, and when my teacher informed me that there would be a milonga Saturday night at my school, I decided to watch in hopes that I might learn grace by osmosis. A milonga, I learned, is a sort of tango salon, a place where couples can dance but where, during breaks in the dancing, professional dancers or singers give brief performances. I sat (happily) in the corner and watched the intricate footwork and graceful movements of the couples. Forget salsa, I thought to myself, I want to tango!

I had my first lesson the following Monday and--much to my surprise--I was actually kind of decent (at least for a total newbie gringa). The steps which had seemed incomprehensible and totally improvised, began to make sense to me. The underlying beat pulsed behind the accordion and piano flourishes and guided me around the dancefloor on tiptoes. I began to recognize the subtle shifts in pressure and footwork that my teacher used to direct me: sometimes holding back and hesitating, sometimes matching our paces to the sweet, tripping notes. I became so enraptured with this dance that I stopped feeling self-conscious, stopped trying to watch my feet or catch my reflection in the mirror. The discovered that the romance of tango can be bold and red: women in tight dresses with a rose between their teeth. Or it can be simple and timeless: the happy feeling of moving in well-paired synchronicity with another person. Unlike Dirty Dancing's Baby, I'm not in love with my teacher, but I am in love with the dance.

Eat, Speak, Love

Allow me a brief linguistic digression, if you will.

In my heretofore monolinguisity, I´ve always felt like a stereotypical American (and in a bad way). True, I´ve done my fair share of traveling, but always with handy phrase " do you speak English?" in the local idiom. Among other things, my Colombian adventure is an attempt to correct this shortcoming and finally achieve something akin to proficiency in a language other than Pig Latin. It has been hard for me to listen, and listen, and still not understand. I find myself frustrated by the inadequacy of my Spanish vocabulary to express my English thoughts. Pero, me encanta español. I like this language so much that I feel like Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love--inclined to read my Spanish-to-English dictionary for the sheer joy of new words.

Medellin is an especially ideal place to learn Spanish, I believe, because of the similar enthusiasm that paisas seem to feel for their slang-laced paisa speak. Not a day goes by without my professor slipping some new morsal of paisa into our lesson, all of which I collect and chronicle and strive to incorporate in my speech. A disproportionately large amount of my paisa seems to have been spawned in Medellin´s shady narcotrafficking past, but I still love the words. "Be careful that you don´t dar papaya (literally, to give a papaya) walking around at night"; in other words, don´t unnecessarily expose yourself to danger. When you go out on the weekends you´ll most likely be found "levantamiento de codo" (raising your elbow--aka taking a drink). And I´ve been informed on more than one occasion that "el mundo es un pañuelo" (the world is a handkerchief) to explain why I keep running into people I know in the must unexpected places. Amusingly, everyone has a different explanation for this phrase.

But studying Spanish has afforded me more than just an opportunity to expand my vocabulary and send excited emails about cognates (whoa! "crepusculo" means twilight, and hey, in English, when you descibe something as "crepuscular" it means you do it in the evening. SOOO COOL!). My studies, brief as they are, have given me a whole new perspective on how we use words to communicate. I´ve noticed how certain words are a sort of key to a conversation, without which all the rest might as well be nonsense. The chasm of difference between signifier (the word) and signified (the thing, tangible or abstract, that the word references) has never been more apparent to me. Words on their own mean nothing; they are as ambiguous as the letters that form them. In many ways, words are social creatures, and as a student of Spanish I am learning their social norms. Ocassionally I´ll stop in mid-sentence and suddenly exclaim "I said that idea correctly without having to think about it!". My listeners are usually kind enough to congratulate me on my small victories.

At the same time, I am engaged in a process of meta-learning--thinking about thinking, learning about how I learn. This morning, I met with my conversation partner, Andrea, and we read to one another from children´s books to practice our accents. Towards the end of my story (about a frog with too-tight pants and a fondness for beer), I suddenly realized that the whole thing was written in rhyming verse. In my halting Spanish I had understood the story but missed the sense. Andrea turned back to the beginning and read a few verses for me so that I could hear the rhythm of the words. That´s what I´m looking for, really. Rhythms of speach, patterns in my mistakes as well as in verb conjugations. Details are important when learning a new language, absolutely. But just as salsa is more than just a series of steps, Spanish is an integrated amalgam of rhythm and patterns. I think I´m starting to feel the beat.

I´ll Have What She´s Having

I can pinpoint the moment when I relinquished any residual vestiges of picky eater-ness. I was in Turkey, traveling with four other girls, and we were dining at the home of family friends. I can´t remember most of the details of that feast (other than the fact that it was all indescribably delicious), but I do distinctly recall that one course featured whole artichoke hearts. I had spent the previous 18 years declining all things artichoke for no better reason than that they looked weird, but my desire to be a good guest overrode the force of my habit. I took one bite and I swooned from gastronomic delight. And I thought to myself, “My god! What other glories of the table have I been neglecting out of ignorance or fear?”

Ever since, I have made a point of trying any and all local delights, no matter how unusual. In Chinatown, I slurped my way through chicken foot soup, in London I tried jellied eels (actually not one of my most successful gastronomic adventures, but a good story nevertheless). Now that I’m in Colombia and happily ensconced with a host mother, I’m wolfing down Colombia´s “comida tipica” with daily delight.

I knew that I would love Luz Elena, my host mom, when her first order of business upon my arrival was to take me grocery shopping. We filled a grocery cart with fruits, vegetables, and the trappings of the illusive Saturday “Bandeja Paisa” (the Colombian version of Sunday dinner), and as we left the store she bought me a cup of freshly squeezed sugarcane juice. The sugarcane juice sealed the deal; I would go to war for this woman.

Ever since my arrival in Colombia, people have been bringing up bandeja paisa repeatedly and asking me if I have yet experienced the magic. It really doesn´t take much to get my hyped up at the thought of food, so by the time Saturday rolled around my anticipation had reached a fever pitch. After attending mass, Luz Elena and I made our way to the home of her 93-year-old mother, where I expected to eat prodigious quantities in the relatively calm company of a few close family members. Instead, upon my arrival, I discovered that I had stumbled into an unofficial, unexpected extended family reunion for Luz Elena´s cousins, nieces, nephews, children, and friends. Everything before had been merely an introduction, THIS was a Spanish immersion experience. I did my best to answer questions about my journey and my hometown, and what I liked best about Medellin. I received unreasonably generous compliments about my Spanish (the fact that I frequently had to ask for them to be repeated, but slower, ought to give an idea of my hosts´over-kindness). Eventually, we migrated to the tables, and the feast began.

We began with a simple bean soup, sopa de frijoles, which I laced with avocadoes. We followed the soup with rice, salsa, carnida molida (cooked beef that has been finely shredded), chorizo sausage, fried plantains (both the sweet, mature ones that cook down like bananas foster and the immature green ones that fry up like potato chips), chichorones (heavenly bits of fried pork skin that melt in your mouth with a entirely misleading suggestion of airy lightness), and of course the ever present arepa, Colombian corn cakes. All the while Spanish was flying thick and fast—jokes cracked, stories related, congratulations and condolences offered all around. I was content to be a quiet member of this gathering, the adopted gringa for the afternoon whom everyone silently welcomed even as they talked past her at 500 words per second. After dinner someone brought out a tub of ariquipe, a caramel dessert made according to the family recipe. I found myself eating the ariquipe with the same helpless craving with which I attack peanut butter. Eventually you give in and start eating it by the spoonful rather than the serving. Colombians, I have learned, generally eat the largest meal of the day for lunch, and after Saturday I could see why. I needed the better part of the day (spent wandering the grounds at a gorgeous country house, to be chronicled shortly) simply to digest my meal.

Now, I have not yet made any of this myself. But I purchased a bag of arepa flour tonight and I am working up the courage to reenter the kitchen after the disastrous experience of my wild yeast bread. So, “good Lord willing and the creek don´t rise” (as we say in Georgia), I will soon be bringing the secrets of Bandeja Paisa to any other good eaters out there who also travel with minds and mouths open.