It’s getting harder and harder to get home any time after about 5pm.

Yesterday, the taxi driver asked me where I was going and reluctantly let me get in and only then realized that he had mixed my hill with another less congested one but by that time I was in the taxi and i wasn’t going anywhere.

“Look at that,” he grumbled, as we passed the gridlocked traffic on the way down the hill.

“How about you let me off at the filling station and you can keep going up rather than getting stuck coming down?” I (most magnanimously) offered. “I don’t live very far up the hill, it’s quite easy for me to walk.”

“OK, then,” he agreed.

But then I realized he was turning up my hill.

“So you are taking me home,” I said.

“Oh, the princess has to get home,” he said.

Tonight, the metro was closed when I go to my station, there were no taxis when I got off the metro (once it opened), the bus got stuck at the bottom of my hill because of an accident and when I got home, the power was out.

It’s December in Medellín.

Yesterday, the traffic up the hill was so terrible that my taxi driver started taking selfies to pass the time.

Then he was driven to a massive rant by a traffic police waving cars through a green traffic light.

“If there is one thing that is – excuse my language – more like a puppet, it’s a traffic policeman waving traffic through a green traffic light. I mean, everybody in the world KNOWS that you can go through a green traffic light. If she was waving us through a red traffic light, that might be of some us, but through a green light…that’s no use at all.”

The taxi driver who took me from the airport to the transport terminal in Monteria on the way to the wedding, called me the following four things during our half hour trip:

Mi amor = my love

Mi reina = literally my queen but more like sweetheart

Jefa = boss

Patrona = also boss, but it always sounds a bit feudal to me.

It’s as if he couldn’t quite decide on the right tone to strike with me.

Another taxi driver made my evening today. He bought some chewing gum from a young woman who was carrying her sleeping toddler over her shoulder and that prompted him to say:

I really admire these women. See these women, making a living on the street, selling their chewing gum, not prostituting themselves. She doesn’t have to pay child care, she’s got her child there, where he grows up, he can help her sell. if it were marihuana that would be different. But chewing gum… Because it’s hard you know. I have a friend who sells minutes [for mobile phones] in the centre. And she’s not pretty. And men come up to her and say “How much do you make in an hour?” and she says “$15,000″ (=£4 approx.)” and he says, “Look, I’ll pay you that, and I’ll buy you a nice lunch and then we’ll go to a hotel, and I’ll give you $30,000,” and she’s good, she knows how to handle the situation, and she’s starving but she says, “No thank you, I bring my lunch box.” No, there are some women the street doesn’t devour, and that’s admirable.

TD: You’re foreign, aren’t you? North American?

Me: No, I’m Scottish.

TD: And how long have you been in Medellín?

Me: Almost 5 years.

TD: Husband?

Me: No.

TD: Well, I’ll tell you what the problem is.

It’s that us men just don’t want to commit.

We’re afraid, you see, there are so many women out there,

so many, that we are afraid of being unfaithful.

So my advice to you is to have affairs and not to fall in love.

Me: No, no. I’m waiting  a man who is prepared to commit

and if he doesn’t come along, I’ll stay single.

TD: Why?

Me: Because I want to please God.

TD: Well, that’s wonderful. What a sweet thing.

Well, I hope that man comes along for you.

I’ve noticed I have tendency to commentate my taxi journeys.

Very busy time of day, I say.

Or: This might take a while, as we crawl along.

Or: I think there must be an accident ahead because it’s not usually like this at this time.

Why the need to state the obvious?

I don’t think it has anything to do with what’s going on outside,

I just have a compulsive need to communicate.