ESL Folk

Well its been a long long time since we revisited this blog. Turns out that playing music, running around with children, and traveling to and from several cities is kind of exhausting. Anyway, we’ve got some time now and we want to tell you all about the rest of our fun trip! We’ll pick up where we left off in Pereira, Colombia.
Pereira is one of three cities in the “Coffee Triangle,” the mountainous area of Colombia where most of the country’s coffee is grown. The city and its surroundings are covered with banana trees, coffee plants, and various other goodies. One of our hosts, David, took us on a beautiful drive all around the town where we saw endless green mountains covered in plants.

Our classes with the students and teachers went really well. Brendan and Gillian broke the language barrier ice by reading some spanish aloud for them in their best gringo accents. This has proven to be an excellent way to demonstrate for the students that we understand the difficulty of speaking a foreign language, and that it’s okay to make mistakes. We also taught our first square dance here, which was a huge success. I figured it would have been very difficult to get a room full of high school students to dance, but as it turns out it is very typical for young people in Colombia to love dancing!

After our workshop for teachers our host David at the Binational Center surprised us with a concert from a Colombian Folk music quartet. They consisted of two bandolas (similar to a mandolin but with 10 strings ), a tiple (another traditional stringed instrument), and a guitar. They were amazing musicians and their original arrangements of traditional Colombian tunes blew us away. Afterwards we all had a chance to talk and play each others instruments. I want to learn the tiple!

The surprises continued when, as we entered the auditorium for our concert, we discovered the stage covered in hay bales. It looked, smelled and tasted like hay, and we later learned it was the work of David Fay, our wizard behind the big screen who has helped us put this whole trip together. Our concert went well and afterwards a bunch of people came on stage to try out our instruments and chat with us.

After the show is the after party, and so we were taken to a very local spot for dinner, essentially a barbeque on the sidewalk. We had a slew of empanadas, arepas, and plantains and left feeling very full. Gillian and Matt went to sleep, while our host David took Brendan and myself to a very local bar that has been around since he was a child known as “The Turkey.” We had barely sat down when not 1 but 2 people who had been at our concert congratulated us on our show! What a warm welcome. If that weren’t awesome enough, the bar was visited by a blind musician who belted out three beautiful mariachi-esque songs and drowned out the sounds of the whole bar.

The following day we visited the house of an English teacher from the Binational Center. Located in Mundo Nuevo (New World), a small collection of houses on an extremely steep mountain 15 minutes from downtown Periera, we were treated to agua panela and hot chocolate. We were lucky to step inside right as it started raining really heavily, enjoying our view of a bamboo forest from the kitchen.

Pereira treated us very well. Next stop, Manizales!

I’m sitting in our hotel in Manizales, finishing some delicious café con leche, & savoring the last few moments of our time in Colombia. What a whirlwind the beginning of this tour this has been! Since we left San Francisco a week ago, the Ramblers have taken six flights & are about to catch our seventh & eigth this afternoon to Bogota & Quito! Using planes so much for travel has been nice in that it allows us to visit many more cities & schools than we’d otherwise be able to, but it’s been harder for Brendan, who couples an astonishing amount of obscure technical & trivia knowledge about plane models with a mild fear of flying.

Ramblers being silly

Before we take off for Ecuador, I wanted to give you all some highlights of our amazing week in Colombia.

BUCARAMANGA

We began our journey in Bucaramanga, where we were met by our effervescent cultural co-ordinater from Bi-National Center, Juliana. We hit the ground running with a workshop at the Escuela Normal Superior with two big classes of enthusiastic (and energetic!) students. We worked off some of that energy by having them jump, walk, run, swim, drive, & ride around the verbs of motion in Old Joe Clark, & then learned some interesting noises for animals in both Colombia & the United States during Old MacDonald. I especially liked learning about the Chiguiro! Also, I’m always excited for the opportunity to showcase my super-realistic chicken sound, cultivated over many afternoons of serious practice as a child. In between the classes, we were offered a refreshing carbonated beverage called Malta that looked for all the world like cola, but tasted like a dead ringer for the milk in your bowl post-Lucky Charms. Brendan, Matt, Jordan, I were reminded of our time in Russia at the end of the class when all the kids rushed us for autographs & facebook contact info.

Jordan strikes a teacherly pose...

We were delighted to discover that the venue for our first public concert was the stunning Casa del Libro Total Museum & were well-received by the audience there. Our program ranged from rousing songs about Union scabbers (“Casey Jones”), to ballads about the hardships of growing up in poverty in the Appalachian Mountains (Ola Bella Reed’s “I’ve Endured” & Gillian Welch’s “Red Clay Halo”), to songs about the railroad (“John Henry”) and the range (“Home on the Range”) and heartache (“East Virginia”), to silly children’s songs (“The Fox”), and examples of “contemporary American folk music” when Brendan, Jordan, & I each take a turn playing original compositions. I also like to throw in a traditional Irish song called “The Blackbird,” which provides a good opportunity to introduce the idea of The United States as a nation of immigrants & talk about the relationship between some of the traditional music in America & that of the British Isles.

sound check at the museum

One of the main ideas behind this project is that, in addition to being a fun way for ESL students to learn through music, we feel that traditional American folk music is a terrific way to share another side of American culture that is perhaps not very well represented by our most pervasive cultural exports (Hollywood films, pop music, MTV, etc). The United States is a vast & complex nation filled with many different people with rich & varied heritage. The stories told in Folk songs are stories about real people, ordinary people, about hardship & joy & suffering & history, & we are as excited about sharing these narratives of American culture with other parts of the world as we are about learning more about the lives & history of our hosts & the students & teachers we encounter.

Matt & Gillian ramble through the streets of Bucaramanga

One of the ways that we like to explore new cultures is through food! Brendan in particular has made it his mission to taste every local specialty cuisine he encounters, which is how we came to sit around a small plastic table, contemplating a bag of fried ants. The ants were much larger than any I’d ever seen – each abdomen section about the size of a small pea – and (I can personally report) are crunchy, salty, & not altogether unpleasant save for the disturbingly tangible legs, which got stuck between my teeth.

After two wonderful, busy days that ended too soon, we packed our bags once again & caught a flight back to Bogota & then to Pereira (interesting fact: we will pass through the Bogota airport three times on this trip without ever actually seeing the capital city itself! Guess that means we’ll have to come back soon for a proper visit). Next update: Pereira!

revisiting a favorite Russian card game

Greetings Everyone!

The Ramblers are proud to announce our 2011 music tour in South America!

For the last 10 months we’ve hibernated and worked on our various projects and day jobs. But alas! In 3 weeks we are flying to Bogota for our month long reunion tour in South America!!!

With the help of David Fay at the U.S. Embassy in Peru, as well as countless teachers and organizers in South America, we have put together our tour through Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru!

Our itinerary is as follows:

May 15th-17th: Bucaramanga, Colombia
May 18th-19th: Pereira, Colombia
May 20th-21st: Manizales, Colombia
May 22-24th: Quito, Ecuador
May 25th-27th: Cuenca, Ecuador
May 27th-29th: Guayaquil, Ecuador
May 30th-31st: Mancora, Peru
June 1st -2nd: Chiclayo, Peru
June 3rd-4th: Trujillo, Peru
June 4th-8th: Cuzco, Peru

In each of these towns we will be stopping to teach language classes and perform our songs, much like we did in Russia. This time around we’re a little better prepared and have created more developed lesson plans, pictures, and lyric books to pass out to our students. We’ll put those up on here soon.

Also, before we leave the States, Brendan and Gillian will come to San Francisco to stay with Jordan and Matt at their Beach Mansion! We’ll probably play a show for all our friends before we leave–look for video!

Keep your eyes peeled for updates as we go on our wild adventure!

Love,
!!The Ramblers!!