Santa Marta, Colombia
Wanted to comment briefly on the street vendors in Cartagena. There are a lot of street vendors in Cartagena selling practically everything - fruit, coconuts, cooked food, snacks, gum, cigarettes, umbrellas, cellphone minutes, jewelry, crafts, paintings (particularly copies of Fernando Botero), chips, orange juice, clothing. There are even guys who go around with thermoses & little plastic take-out catsup/salsa containers selling shots of coffee. They also have motorscooter taxis (they call'em "telemotos") - where a guy (saw no women driving them) on a small motorcycle provides the customer with a helmet and a reflective vest and provides taxi service i suppose for a fee less than the car taxis. There is also a lot of street hustling. A guy asking me for spare change all of sudden became a guia (guide) upon discovering i was not particularly fluent in Spanish. However, the best example of spontaneous improvisational entrepreneurship i saw was after about a 10 minute downpour. As i mentioned in a previous post, the streets in central Cartagena are narrow, the same streets used back in the horse & carriage days going back to the 16th centuryThe draining is not very efficient. As a result, some streets became flooded enough to make it impossible to walk across some intersections without dipping ones shoes or sandals in the water. I look up the street and see a guy with 2 yellow hard plastic milk cartons (similar to our old style recycle bins), placing one in front of the other in the street, creating a moving platform for women to use to cross the street!
Another thing i noticed is that everytime (and i'm not exagerating), everytime someone "befriended" me on the street, the encounter eventually turned into some sort of hustle. Have i mentioned yet all the prostitutes? So eventually i got the impression that money is tight here for a lot of people, and there must be some poor folk. From the window seat of the bus from Cartagena to Barranquilla, i got to see where some of the poorer folk reside . Just about 15 minutes out of downtown Cartagena, i saw shacks built on the river where people lived with their small boats and fishing nets. Young boys cycling bicycle taxis. Men using horse drawn carriages as trucks. Kids transporting stuff on donkeys. Shantytowns. And i realized that downtown Cartagena was at the top of the wealth pyramid. Home to the descendants of the conquerors, and their entourage and support staff.
Bought a ticket today for a bus leaving tomorrow morning at 11am for Caracas Venezuela. Received a very snooty, entirely unfriendly attitude from all the ticket agents for the Brailia Venezuelan bus company both here & in Baranquilla. Don´t know if it was because I spoke no Spanish or what. It reminded me of something i read on the Lonely Planet website where a guy said after being in Venezuela for a while, he thought they didn´t like Americans. Guess i'll have to wait 'til tomorrow to find out what´s in store for me from my Venezuelan hermanos & hermanas. Adios for now!
Wanted to comment briefly on the street vendors in Cartagena. There are a lot of street vendors in Cartagena selling practically everything - fruit, coconuts, cooked food, snacks, gum, cigarettes, umbrellas, cellphone minutes, jewelry, crafts, paintings (particularly copies of Fernando Botero), chips, orange juice, clothing. There are even guys who go around with thermoses & little plastic take-out catsup/salsa containers selling shots of coffee. They also have motorscooter taxis (they call'em "telemotos") - where a guy (saw no women driving them) on a small motorcycle provides the customer with a helmet and a reflective vest and provides taxi service i suppose for a fee less than the car taxis. There is also a lot of street hustling. A guy asking me for spare change all of sudden became a guia (guide) upon discovering i was not particularly fluent in Spanish. However, the best example of spontaneous improvisational entrepreneurship i saw was after about a 10 minute downpour. As i mentioned in a previous post, the streets in central Cartagena are narrow, the same streets used back in the horse & carriage days going back to the 16th centuryThe draining is not very efficient. As a result, some streets became flooded enough to make it impossible to walk across some intersections without dipping ones shoes or sandals in the water. I look up the street and see a guy with 2 yellow hard plastic milk cartons (similar to our old style recycle bins), placing one in front of the other in the street, creating a moving platform for women to use to cross the street!
Another thing i noticed is that everytime (and i'm not exagerating), everytime someone "befriended" me on the street, the encounter eventually turned into some sort of hustle. Have i mentioned yet all the prostitutes? So eventually i got the impression that money is tight here for a lot of people, and there must be some poor folk. From the window seat of the bus from Cartagena to Barranquilla, i got to see where some of the poorer folk reside . Just about 15 minutes out of downtown Cartagena, i saw shacks built on the river where people lived with their small boats and fishing nets. Young boys cycling bicycle taxis. Men using horse drawn carriages as trucks. Kids transporting stuff on donkeys. Shantytowns. And i realized that downtown Cartagena was at the top of the wealth pyramid. Home to the descendants of the conquerors, and their entourage and support staff.
Bought a ticket today for a bus leaving tomorrow morning at 11am for Caracas Venezuela. Received a very snooty, entirely unfriendly attitude from all the ticket agents for the Brailia Venezuelan bus company both here & in Baranquilla. Don´t know if it was because I spoke no Spanish or what. It reminded me of something i read on the Lonely Planet website where a guy said after being in Venezuela for a while, he thought they didn´t like Americans. Guess i'll have to wait 'til tomorrow to find out what´s in store for me from my Venezuelan hermanos & hermanas. Adios for now!
