Things I’ve seen

A woman riding pillion on a motorbike holding a cloth over the head of the man in front to protect him from the blazing sun.

A man on a motorbike talking on a mobile phone that was jammed between his ear and his helmet.

A girl walking towards me, limping. I looked down at her feet and she was wearing a flip-flop on one foot because it had some sort of wound, and her regulation school shoe on the other. I don’t know why she wasn’t allowed to wear flip-flops on both feet!

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Election Sunday

Yesterday the city was quiet.

The bars round my church were closed. There was no ciclovía, when pedestrians and cyclists are allowed to use half of the main roads in the city, as is usual every Sunday, so the traffic flowed.

Elections for governors and mayors and members of other local councils were taking place. All sale of alcohol was banned. The metro was free so people could get to their polling stations.

The sun was shining. It seemed as if Medellín was a renewed, calmer, saner version of herself.

The defence minister said it had been the quietest elections ever, but even so, a soldier died protecting the elections in a rural part of Antioquia, there region where I live.

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At the T-shirt printing shop

Today I went to get a T-shirt printed as a goodbye present for a friend. The shop was a hive of paisa industry with orders being taken, stencils being cut out and the T-shirts being stamped.

As I explained my design to a helpful young woman, another member of staff was looking for images of Pablo Escobar. “I need the one that says Pablo,” he said, impatiently.

“You’ll have to get that off the Internet,” someone suggested.

And indeed, around the shop were several designs of Medellín’s most notorious narco-criminal.

In stark contrast, was the lady getting a pile of T-shirts printed with a variety of different Bible verses.

The one that I was able to read upside down and back to front was: “She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak,” from Luke 8:44, which was an intriguing choice to be printed on a T-shirt, I felt.

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On the way to work

The bus crawled up the hill on my way to work. I spotted a cluster of motorbikes and the traffic coming down the hill had stopped. Which could only mean there had been an accident. And so it was.

The girl lay flat on the ground, her side covered in dirt. Three men stood guard around her and one crouched at her side and held her hand.

Then I heard sirens and thought, Oh great, an ambulance.

A policeman marched down the hill and took control of the traffic. But he was making way for the huge blue and grey buses of INPEC, Colombia’s Prison Service, taking prisoners down to the court in the centre of Medellín.

The last I saw was the girl being helped to her feet by the men.

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Park life

One of the points William Ospina makes in his book is that Colombia’s cities lack parks and other public spaces. For him, this fact is further evidence of the contempt her leaders have felt for centuries for the common people.

And it’s true. Apart from the lovely Botanic Gardens, there aren’t many open green spaces in Medellín and often what are called parks are tiny and are mostly concrete. But now, a stretch of land along Medellín’s River is being turned into a park, part of the city’s ongoing drive for self-improvement.

The only problem is, the work on the parks is making the traffic unbearable.

We are Bogotizing ourselves, a taxi driver said to me glumly, referring to Bogotá´s terrible traffic problems. What do we need parks for? The way I see it, if I have a plot of land 50 metres square, I can’t build a house with 10 bedrooms and six bathrooms. People say to me, you’re not from here, criticizing the city like that, but I am from here and I’m just telling the truth.

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“The most delicious cup of coffee I may have ever drunk”

Where did BBC Reporter Peter Day drink “the most delicious cup of coffee” he may ever have drunk? In Medellín, Colombia, of course!

You can hear his coffee-infused musings on the BBC programme, From Our Own Correspondent, from 4th April. His contribution comes at the end, from minute 22:38 onwards.

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A couple of follow-ups

I am liking the honest beggar more and more. The other day I saw him hand over part of his breakfast to someone poorer than he is.

And when I mentioned the 9 motorbike accidents the last taxi driver had seen to another taxi driver, he said: I’ve seen 7 today.

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30th Street to 33rd Street: not as close as you might think

A couple of weeks ago I went to a church on 33rd street

(remember Medellín is helpfully laid out on a grid)

but I got on the wrong bus and ended up on 30th.

No problem, I thought, I’ll just walk the three blocks along.

Not so!

First came 32rd street, then 31f, 31e, 31d, 31c, 30b,

and then, just when I thought I had to be arriving,

the city planners snuck in 30a AND 30aa.

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