Ok so before this blog goes any farther, I need to give a brief overview of the five guys who I am living with here in Medellin, so my stories that follow won't seem quite so strange:
First we've got Jimmy, who is in his mid 20s, stays in his room all day (he currently has sequestered his younger sister who is visiting for a...week? and I've seen her for all of five minutes when she makes brief trips to the kitchen to help her brother cook), and after I left in December had been pestering me via MSN messenger with requests of bringing another gringa with me when I came back to Medellin. Sorry Jimmy. Since he never really leaves his room, he's become pretty good at maintaining relationships with women via the telephone. He currently is unemployed and lives off the little money his mother supplies him with and the 200,000 pesos he charges 2 other roommates a month to be their personal chef.
That leads me to the other 2 foreigners living here, a Dutch guy named Adrian illegally residing here for over a year who I have never seen go without a cigarette for more than 20 minutes, and Patrick, an English guy in his 40s who was living in Spain but wanted a change in scenery so picked Medellin, Colombia as his destination with no knowledge of any other place in Latin America. Not bad if you ask me, but if that doesn't seem a bit strange well how about these other clues: fluttering about the room when we play any kind of music, demonstrating his ballet poses that just weren't good enough for a real ballet company as he sadly found out as a teenager after years of classes; apart from the one meal a day Jimmy cooks him, only eats arepas (these tortilla-like Colombian staple) that he heats up on the stove and then forgets about, so he only ever gets to eat half of the pack after burning the other half; never leaves the apartment, working from his laptop in his room for the Spanish company and when he does leave, it is only go to pick up his ahem, 18 year-old Colombian girlfriend (!!) who got whisked away to Bogota by her mother, but who Patrick tries to whisk right back to Medellin every weekend, until she gets her passport so they can whisk off together to the Canary Islands.
The other two Colombians are pretty normal compared to these other characters. Giovanni is in his late 20s, has a 6 year old (the norm here) and works with Adrian on Colombia Reports, an English language Colombia news web site for expats living in or out of Colombia. And then there's Checho, who wears a different pair of tinted prescription lenses every day, goes to his job at a bank in a corduroy blazer and t-shirt underneath, and is very tranquilo with lots of "amiguitas" instead of having any one serious relationship after getting his heart broken by his wife when they went to the US on vacation to repair their relationship and she ended up staying there, marrying an American, and moving to Norwalk, CT.
Three Colombians, a Dutch guy, an English guy, add a loca gringa to the mix, yep, sounds about right.
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