Links

I'll be helping out as a high school theater assistant to Catalina Botero. Not only is she the director, but a working actress. In fact she was in a 2007 movie with Hector Elizando (Pretty Woman) and Leiv Schriber (Wolverine), entitled "Love in the Time of Cholera."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0484740

Yesterday the PTA treated the staff to lunch and dancing at Andres Carne de Res, a Colombian steakhouse.
http://www.andrescarnederes.com/index2.html#/VisitasVirtuales
Here are sites for local grocery chains. This may not be that interesting, but this is as good a place as any for me to have them for future reference.
http://www.carulla.com/inicio.jsp

http://exito.com.co
http://www.surtifruverdelasabana.com
Thank you to the Onion, which for the record originated in Madison, for the following story. This has nothing to do with Colombia. It is just too funny not to post. Warning: Contains Adult Language.
http://www.theonion.com/video/in-the-know-are-tests-biased-against-students-who,17966/

Finally, last week Guillo and I moved a bookcase from Calle 65 to Calle 61 for Jessica. We're expecting to go to El Corral Gourmet for hamburgers on her.

La Semana de Cumpleanos

Thank you for the 70 Facebook posts I just received all at once for my 33rd Birthday. That feels great! That's even more wishes than the average degrees Fahrenheit for my classroom (62).

Tonight is a party at second-grade teacher Susanne's apartment. It's HER birthday, too! This caps a week that was tiring due to the first week back (i.e. waking up at 5:30 a.m.) yet wonderfully social, too. On Tuesday we surprised Carlee for HER birthday. We ate dinner at Rausch, but all you really need to know is their hot chocolate is fantastic! On Wednesday four of us had a southern BBQ style dinner with Tim (high school math). On Friday, Kaleroy (middle school theater) had HER birthday party at home. While meeting new people there I got some leads on finding jazz in September and football broadcasts for the fall.


Below are some pictures of my apartment and a trip to La Calera.

CNN and the New York Times picked this up

The welcome here for 9 straight days was nothing short of superb. You don't know job satisfaction until you teach somewhere that raises teachers up and honors them with all their might, instead of kicking them down from time to time... but now let's go to the feature story.

Tuesday morning there was construction on my street 3:30-5:30 AM. Whoa. Tuesday night they continued at 9 PM. This is my way of saying that I was pretty tired Wednesday morning, and the Benadryl worked nicely as I awoke to my 6:30 AM alarm.

Later I discovered that at 5:30 AM a car bomb had exploded one block west and six blocks north. The blast radius was under two blocks. It was a 50 kilo bomb, not the biggest ever, set off precisely at a time when the street would not yet be crowded. The target was a radio station edifice. Coincidentally timed was the school's emergency reaction plan meeting the same morning. Fortunately I got through the day nicely distracted, and was at happy hour by 2:30 PM!

I'll post video footage to my blog from school, since my Internet is at least a week away. On the bright side, my boxes arrived surprisingly early from Miami, and I'm enjoying hard guava with Campesino cheese every day!

Bailamos!

Carlee (from Deerfield), Jessica (who I met in June here at CNG), and Guillo (Carlee's boyfriend) surprised me on Sunday night with a visit and some hot cocoa! From down the hall I heard Jessica yelling, "Aaron! Aaron!" before the bell rang. It's so great to have friends in this building and next door.

Below is a video from Villa de Leyva this past weekend. We stayed at a convention center for orientation sessions and enjoyed trips into down for shopping, food, and fun! 

One more random note: last night someone decided it would be a good idea for a crew to be repairing the road outside my bedroom window from 3:30 - 5:30 a.m. Good times!