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!
Hey Matt! Hope things are good where(ever) you all might be. It was great to meet you all, so great I posted about it on my blog… http://phoenixgoeseagle.com/2011/06/09/artists-welcome/
Keep in touch, and I must say, awesome work you all are doing.