Back in Paris

Back in Paris, back on the other side of the Atlantic, back to a language barrier forcing me to play cherades for something as simple as extra ketchup and mayonnaise for my fries. I got in mid-Friday morning and a massive case of jetlag had me dozing off a little bit at the office and now wide awake at 2am early Saturday morning live streaming NCAA Tournament games. I’m about as alive as Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense in my brackets.

There are several significant factors to this trip. First, well, as is obvious, my time in Colombia is done. Get to that in a bit. Second, it was about this time last year when I came to Paris for my job interview with Focus Reports thus beginning this whole journey that I’m currently on. And last, but certainly not least important, I just had my first gyro in over two months and am back adding to my lead over Eric Day in our 20 year gyro eating contest. It wasn’t a gyro actually, it was a doner kebab. But the true followers of this blog know from previous posts that the rules of the contest equate kebabs, with schwarmas, with gyros. I’m not gonna beat around the bush. The doners in France suck. The doners in Germany blow the Parisian ones out of the water. And I don’t understand why. Both countries have doner stores run by first generation Turkish immigrants. So the authenticity and know-how factors are there. But while the German doners are so delicately wrapped together with care and precision, decorated with lettuce and tomatoes, and then flavored with the perfect ratio of sauce to meat, Parisian doners are carelessly slopped together with ketchup and mayo squirted onto bread and a random discretion of meat just haphazardly thrown in. The presentation is careless and the taste is disproportionate since the sauces are concentrated at the bottom of the bread. I’m not being sarcastic. The disparity in presentation and quality is really striking. I’ve always believed that making a good sandwich (and we’re throwing the ballgame wide open here in terms of what constitutes a sandwich….meat in bread let’s say) is an art. It must be done with attention and care. When you go to Potbelly’s, for example, they put effort into making your sandwich. You can tell that they care about your sandwich experience and the preparation enhances the consumption. Germany is the Potbelly’s of doners. And that’s all I have to say about that.

I flew Air France here and again I loved it. I sat near crying babies and again I hated it. 4,500 miles later which I collected for my Sky Miles account I am back in Paris. Adios, Colombia. It was a good run that went by in the blink of an eye. My last day there was pretty memorable being that I ate Capybara - those cute, chubby, furry animals that I saw all over the Pantanal in Brazil. They’re called Chiguiro in Spanish and Capybaras in Portuguese. They were awesome! It was a barbeque house that my friends and I went to on our way to the airport. Honestly, it looked and tasted exactly like grilled pork chops, possibly even better in taste. The only odd-factor was the huge painting on the wall of Alvin, Simon, Theodore and their friends reminding you that you were eating the world’s largest rodent! It was part of my despedida (going away) festivities with Camilo, David, Natalia, other friends, and my co-worker Jessica who is off to scuba dive in San Andres for a week before I see her in Paris in 10 days. My last night in Colombia we rocked out at one of my favorite bars in Zona T that serves the best and strongest martinis south of Havana. And the weekend before, as previously blogged, we had a party at my place again as part of a farewell tour but also because of the ban on alcohol at bars and restaurants for the national elections.

I had door-to-door service from Camilo in Colombia. He met me at the airport upon arrival and was part of the crew that dropped me off for departure. In between he showed me the ropes around Colombia, brought me into his social circle, took me to some soccer games, and was always there to share a good laugh with. Big ups Camilo!!!

Another good friend of mine, Mr. Justin Jusher Kreamer, once shared the thought stimulating revelation that “music is the soundtrack of life.” By that he was referring to songs that you hear in passing that subconsciously cue a whirlwind of memories to the time and place that you first heard it. For example, while writing in my journal flying somewhere over the Caribbean Sea my iPod shuffled to “Shut Up” by the Black Eyed Peas. Immediately I began reminiscing about my first job out of college as a “research,” but more so administrative, assistant for a small think tank in DC rotting away at my desk while listening to the new Black Eyed Peas song on iTunes on my desktop computer. On those hot, muggy DC summer days I would listen to music while doing boring work, waiting for Sunday to roll around so I could play softball with my friends, and flip through the Page-a-Day calendar of 1,000 places to see before you die wondering when, if ever, I would get out of the dead-end entry level job that I was in and embark on a job that go me out into the world. One song, yet an endless stream of memories.

I am satisfied with my time in Colombia but can’t help but feel that my trip there was incomplete in many ways. I only really got to experience Bogota. Fun city but like any new country you want to explore the diversity of its offerings. Unfortunately I had to pick and choose my battles and as was often the case, money-saving and the need to prepare for important Monday meetings usually won out. No beach time while I was in Colombia and no late night salsa dancing in the cobblestoned colonial streets of Cartagena de Indias or Barranquilla. For sure it will be on the agenda for next time. My Spanish came and went, then came again, then disappeared, then came back. The learning curve and fluctuations of a language are really bizarre. There would be mornings when I couldn’t form two coherent sentences in Spanish and not be able to ask the grocery store clerk for something, but then later that afternoon I would go and interview a CEO about his cost-competitiveness strategies or corporate social responsibility achievements. Whether rappelling down a 250 foot waterfall mountain or sitting in a corporate executive’s office asking him questions in Spanish about an industry I am just getting my feet wet in, I think the biggest thing that came out of Colombia was my ability to adapt to new challenging circumstances when my feet were held to the fire, allowing me to grow personally and professionally.

I got my next project assignment…..drum roooooooooooooooll………Australia! I’m going down under for about 4 months and will be based more or less in Perth but with frequent cross country trips to New South Wales. More to come on my thoughts on Australia…..

I ate you.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

At the risk of displeasing some of my constituents, i.e. Justin, with boring stories and lackluster writing skills, I give you another blog post in the life of Naki Mendoza.

You ever realize that after Monday and Tuesday the next three days on the calendar are WTF? Of course someone is gonna holler back that Thursday’s abbreviation is actually “R,” but it’s a clever enough observation that someone pointed out so let’s just leave it at that. This morning I found myself bemoaning the fact that it is only Tuesday. Usually the weeks go by very quickly being action packed with meetings, interviews, and such. But oddly enough things have been crawling by in the 36 hours of the week thus far. I had a pretty solid weekend that just ended that was sprinkled with the typical dosage of culture and fun times. Women have their pampering days when they treat themselves to manicures, pedicures; kids have their outings to Toys ‘R Us; and for the first time in a while I pampered myself to an equivalent self-indulging outing – I went suit shopping. In need of a touch up on my corporate threads I took a nice leisurely stroll through the mall trying on and decorating myself with different suits before finally settling on an Egyptian cotton navy blue pinstripe suit which came out to less than US$100 after the 20% store discount. Quite a deal I might say. Of course, me being far from a baller, the last time I splurged on suits was nearly four years ago in Thailand. The fact that the last time was so long ago and coincidentally also in a developing country speaks to either the quality of the local textiles or to my status as a non-baller. I’ll let you decide.

Suit shopping Saturday was followed by culture day Sunday. My co-worker Jessica and I went to a small town a little more than an hour outside of Bogotá called Guatavita. While it was in Guatavita where I enjoyed a very hearty menu del dia of broiled chicken for only US$3, the town is more famously known for being the present day actual site of the mythical El Dorado legend that the Spanish conquistadors were endlessly in search of. El Dorado, according to Spanish legend, was a city of gold. It was what Jay Goossen would consider West Virginia to be in comparison to western Massachusetts in other words. Well, in actuality the legend stemmed from Guatavita’s lake. Nestled in a mountain is a crater-sized lake that years ago had a gold-ish complexion to it prompting the local indigenous population to conjure up stories that a god, decorated in gold, descended down into the lake. As such, the locals paid homage by throwing gold offerings into the lake and bathing themselves while decorated in gold paint as part of certain rites of passages. Rumors and embellished stories reached the Spaniards who went on an endless pursuit of such a city of gold. Today, what remains is a very picturesque lake, but nothing more really. If it weren’t for the mystique, the legend, and the significance that the stories had in shaping Latin American history anyone hiking through the mountain would merely stop for a few pictures and comment, “wow, nice lake.”

Guatavita panorama

Despite being an extremely popular tourist destination it is not the easiest place in the world to get to. The bus that you take to Guatavita itself drops you off on a highway at the bottom of a mountain from which point you must proceed 7km uphill either by foot or in the back of a pick-up truck that you hitchhike on. The latter was how Jessica and I got up the mountain. Going down was much more pleasant as we befriended some people that were driving all the way back into Bogotá and were nice enough to offer us a ride in their car. Two of them were sociologists with specializations in transnational prostitution so we got an hour lecture on the global sex trade and the vulnerability of uneducated young Colombian women to the viciousness of this industry….in Spanish.

This weekend are Colombia’s legislative elections. Senate and lower chamber congressional seats are up for grabs. Then in May is the big presidential election. President Álvaro Uribe, in office since 2002 and lauded by many Colombians for bringing the country back to prosperity through his crackdown on guerrillas, insurgents, and paramilitaries, was just denied the chance to run for a third term by the Supreme Court. The Constitution only allows two consecutive terms but because of the country’s progress under Uribe he was interested in an exception to that small and tiny constitutional rule. Access denied. So in a few months Colombia will have a totally new government. Logistically, this weekend being an election weekend prohibits all restaurants and bars from serving alcohol. IDK, no hungover or drunk voters at the polls is the rationale right? It is also my last weekend in Colombia because we will soon be wrapping up the report that we are working on and on March 18 I am hopping on a jet plane to Paris. I’ll be there for a little over a week before shipping off to my next project, the location of which is still TBD. Or maybe it is determined, but I just haven’t been told of it. I am thinking of going to Cartagena (beach town on the northern Caribbean coast) this weekend or if anything staying in Bogotá and burning the city down to the ground one last time if flights are too expensive. But either way, the election and the conservative nightlife they usher in will make it a relatively tame last weekend in Colombia.

Little friend I made along the way

There she is. The famous El Dorado.