This past Saturday, I left Cartagena after a week on the boat with Dad, Gordon and Lanny. WHAT an awesome experience! I officially have the bug for sailing and can't wait to get a sailboat of my own one day and travel the world as a sailor. Cartagena was beautiful however it was hot as fuckkkkkkkkkk!!!! We mostly hung out on the boat called Emily Morgan, named after Emily West (a.k.a. Emily Morgan) who was a heroine from the Texas Revolution. The song, "The Yellow Rose of Texas" is about her. If you have some time, she has an incredible story and is someone who isn't as celebrated or even well known for her role in history. But Omg I am IN LOVE with this boat! She is certainly a piece of art compared to all the other boats in the Club Nautico Harbor. It's pretty dang amazing. Today (Saturday) Gordon and Lanny set sail for Aruba so it was perfectly timed for me to start my first leg of my trip alone.
Cartagena is a very old city dating back to at least the 1400s. A ton of churches and monasteries are held within the "old city" as they call it and is an old fort from like the 1400's. It's surrounded by this huge 11 mile around wall thats about 6 feet thick. It's really nice and there is so much history there that you would need to spend several days doing tours to even hear half of it. I would totally come back again. Unfortunately, in June, It's way too hot and humid to go out during the day before about 4pm unless you want a raging case of skin cancer, so we just mostly hung out on the boat during the day, learning about the boat and listening to Lanny tell his old war stories over and over again (LOL) and then we've toured Cartagena a little bit. The colombians are super nice people, the city is super clean and really safe. Police officers don't even use sirens. They just ride their motorcycles everywhere and hang out with everyone. There's a lot of them all over but they're all super helpful. Nothing like in America.
I'm sad to say we didn't do as much sightseeing as I would have liked, but again the weather was just horrible during the day. I will come back to Cartagena one day but it will definitely be in the winter time so we can actually go out during the day. We did eat at several local restaurants that were awesome. Watched a lot of futbol as Colombia was playing Brazil in the playoffs. This week, I believe, USA is playing Colombia so it should be a super fun week here in Colombia.
Technologically this was a hard week lol. My phone decided it wanted to be a fish on day 4 and took a dive in the ocean. Luckily, my new friend Dina's son was close by and dove down in the nasty harbor water and saved it! Yay! However now the home button doesnt work and the entire left side of the touch screen doesnt work either so I'll have to somehow figure out how to get a new phone to me. My camera also decided to give me problems by filling up my memory cards in 7 or 15 pictures! Then once I bought a 4GB version, I couldnt get it to read the card at all. Luckily dad was able to figure out the problem yesterday (6/19) and I now will be able to take more pictures going forward :)
This week has been difficult though. I left a lot of people I cared about back in Phoenix and Texas and as someone who has never been good at letting go, I've definitely had some moments of sadness and homesickness. I realize that now I'm more alone than I've ever been. I'm in a foreign country where I don't know anyone. I have no idea where I'm going, what I'm doing, and am really nervous yet excited for what lies ahead.
This week I'm in Medellin for a few days and then probably headed to Colombia's capitol, Bogota, after that. Stay tuned :)
