First Week- Acabo de llegar

August 12,2009

I have decided to blog about my adventures here in Barranquilla, Colombia. For the next 2 years, I will be teaching 5th grade Language Arts and Social Studies in a bilingual international school. Should you continue to read my blogs, you will know all about it!

I’ve been here for just over a week, and I am amazed by all of the things that have happened in such a short time! My mom came down with me to check everything out and so far we have cleaned and organized my apartment, met my new coworkers, set foot in the Caribbean, gone traveling to Cartagena, seen my new school and classroom and gone through new teacher orienation. Not to mention bathing in a volcano (see Dave's blog) and witnessing our first arroyo peligroso.

Being in a new country for the first time, there are just so many things to figure out! The best example of this was on the first day. After traveling for over 24 hours (including to and from airports) we went my new apartment. Then my new principal gave me some Colombian money and drove us to the store imediately to buy groceries. My mom and I were left to our own devices, and we thought we could handle it. Never in my life has grocery shopping been so difficult! First of all, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted (sleep!), and second, I couldn’t find what I did want. Things are packaged differently. It took us forever to find the sugar and salt. They both came in clear plastic bags. Where was the sugar sack that stands up with sugar written in large type? Where was the Morton-style container of salt? Not to be found. And milk- also in a bag. Who knew? (my Canadian coworker tells me that they do the same thing in Canada; strange, eh?) Finally, we had to decide which product to buy. When you don’t know any of the brand names and the exchange rate is about 2100 Colombian pesos to 1USD this is much more difficult than it sounds. Basic routines are so much harder to accomplish when you don’t know what you’re doing!

As you can imagine there have been many of those moments in this first week. There’s simply a lot to figure out. We’ve used the phrase acabo de llegar often this week. We just got here, we don’t know anything! Luckily, everyone we’ve encountered has been very nice and very helpful.