Swimming

The family have advised me to spend as little time as possible on the streets of Soledad and when I am on the streets not to speak Engish. This is a place of abject poverty where a thirty-eight is often the only tool for making the rent or getting food into your kids. To wander into this place looking like a gringo tourist would be akin to a sheep stumbling into a mint sauce convention. All the same it's vibrant and,if you're not giving up the ghost on the pavement then full of life, especially in the evenings. Apparently there is more conspicuous policing at night and the majority of robberies occur in broad daylight. I haven't actually witnessed any incidents myself, the odd gathered crowd with ambulances, but nothing you wouldn't see in Coventry on a friday night.
Everywhere the preparations for Christmas are in full swing, many of them slightly incongruos; reindeer are not exactly indigenous to Colombia and the only snow they see is the crusty sort that well, drifts down from the Andes then drifts right up your nose. It would be great to see Santa Claus getting his arse dragged over the Andes by flying llamas but we'll have to settle for what we've got. It's strange in the extreme to see grown men constrained to dress up as snowmen, Santa Claus (or Papa Noel as they call him here.)in thirty-two degrees of heat. With the humidity up around 80% at this time of year. They must be sweating the old snow balls off inside those suits. It probably takes the remaining eleven months of the year to rehydrate themselves. As you'll see below Mama Noel is probably not helping with the overheating problem  They all seem suitably jolly though. as they prance around the artificial trees and under bowers of plastic holly. I asked the family if they had ever actually seen a holly bush, they assured me that they had and that the cherries were delicious. I think,in fact, we're talking about a different bush here. That or my phrase book is letting me down.
The Vivero supermarket is buzzing and every day there seems to be more decoration. It seems to me that the Colombians are generous givers. They make donations at the cash tills and get little cut-out candles that they hang in the fake trees. These donations often seem to take preference to completing the shopping list. Unlike their shopping counterparts in Europe they don't seem to tote up the contents of the shopping trolley before hand. They throw in what they want, prioritise it on the way around the store and then watch the total as it is checked out. When they reach the amount of cash they have with them then that's it. The rest stays in the trolley, taken back to the shelves for the next, perhaps more affluent shopper.
They seem to be a remarkabley stoic folk The family were robbed at gun-point in their own home last month, all their cash was taken and all their cellular phones. I asked them what they thought about it. Of course; "it was terrible but then these robbers were young people with children and no food..." Giving really does start at home. I get the drift. I will listen to the family and keep my mouth shut on the streets, resist the impulse to take too many photos, ensure that both the door AND the 'ornamental' steel-bar gates are locked behind me and generally think and act a little Colombian.
I don't need mint sauce or stuffing.