Semi-Halloween Party

Since I didn't get my act together in time, our Halloween celebration ended up being an intimiate affair. This was mostly due in part to it being a dry weekend in Medellin (elections for mayor, governor, and local senate are today) and so any hope of putting on a costume and dancing a stifling hot club was dashed.

Instead, we opted for a minimalist evening, luckily my American friend Ariel is a big Halloween fan. She made her own tutu! She also made dairy-free candied apples that tasted of dream-like fudge, and Giovanni got to carve his very first pumpkin!

Feria de las Flores in October

Medellin's typical Flower Festival is held every year for 2 weeks between July and August. The weather is usually perfect, if not a tad too hot, and tourists can personally testify to Medellin's nickname as the "city of eternal spring."

So when my friend Ashley who was visiting from the US decided to come in October, well we got lucky and we were able to show her the typical flower festival. Except it was in a small but growing town about 1.5 hours outside of Medellin called La Ceja (the Eyebrow, if you want the literal translation. Who knows why). So instead of the usual sunny skies and thousands of sweating tourists waiting for hours to see some flowers, we stood in the rain along with maybe a few hundred other people for not nearly as long as we would in Medellin watching as some impressive "silletas" (the flower arrangements and they way they're presented as they're called in the region) nonetheless passed by.

Chicharron Party

I've been meaning to post these photos for a while now. They're back from the last day in September when we had a "pork cracklin" get together. And as you can see from the pics, though this greasy Colombia favorite was the focus of the party, us girls provided some healthier animal-friendly options for the attendees.

It's all about the journey...

...and boy it was. Giovanni and I can be spontaneous, sometimes. And this weekend we wanted to get out of the city, so we chose Manizales, a small city about 5 hours drive from Medellin, as the destination of our choice. We set off in the early afternoon on Saturday, realizing how spontaneous our decision was when it took us 2 hours just to get outside of Medellin due to a bicycle race going on and the roads being closed off. Since there are really only 2 ways out of Medellin (to the north and to the south) there wasn't much we could do besides wait with the rest of the travelers who had been at a dead stop since 10 a.m. that morning. When we saw abandoned cars sitting in the middle of the 2-lane road and people having block party-style meet ups every few hundred meters, we realized there wasn't much we could do and stuck it out. By the time we got rearing to go we were already hungry, so we stopped at a famous fish soup place on the side of the highway. We managed to get to Manizales by nightfall, which was lucky since once the sun set we were getting chilly up in the mountains.

The next day we went around the city, saw the famous bits, and head off back for Medellin. Our total time in Manizales was less than 24 hours. But we stopped numerous times along the way both there and back, resting our bums, eating, putting on our rain jackets, again to wait out an aggressive thunderstorm, and getting pulled over by the police (only once!). As we arrived soaking wet to Medellin on Sunday evening Giovanni kept kindly reminding me that it was all about the journey!

Did I mention the entire 10+ hour trip in 2 days was on a motorbike??

Giovanni getting directions for a lovely old man on a deserted Sunday