Becoming a local attraction

We had a first meeting with our supervisor, we met some local students who showed us around and explored the different locations where we will be stationed in the coming weeks. To recover from all these new impressions we decided to have a nice weekend trip.

Life starts a bit earlier in Cartagena, the first classes start at 07.00 AM. Luckily we were allowed to have a good night’s sleep since we didn’t have a workspace yet and our meeting with Dalia (our supervisor) was scheduled at 09.30 AM. The university building in Centro Historico is a beautiful square building, three stories high with a large courtyard in the center. This is where we had our first meeting with Dalia. One of the first things she taught us is that we should change our clothing. In these weather conditions you don’t want to dress too warm but unfortunately it turned out to be obligatory to wear shoes and long pants.

For one day it was okay to wear our slippers, so we continued to the conference room to discuss our plans for the coming days. After agreeing on the basic steps for the first week we decided to start doing some research. Our department is called Instituto de Hydraulica y Saneamiento Ambiental. Here we all have our own desk and computer. We figured that they are not used very often since we found a lot of documents of previous students. Nonetheless they suffice and after some initial problems the internet is working perfectly as well.

The next day we went to see our second workspace: the main building of Universidad de Cartagena. We had a warm welcome by professors Edgar and Javier and they introduced us to Leydy, Melissa and Jésus. These three students are helping us to get familiar with the university and the city. Since we did not really train our Spanish language skills, the communication is a bit rusty but with their help we are making progress. And we are helping them to improve their English at the same time. Next weekend we will go dancing together!

In the remaining days we had some more time to concentrate on our project. We now have a clear formulation of the problem and a substantiated planning to go with it. This week we try to finalize our more technical analysis so that we can start brainstorming about possible solutions next week.

To complete our first week we decided to spend our weekend at Isla Grande. This island has only a few small hotels along the coast and there is no real road for car traffic. It was the perfect serene environment to process the impressions of the past week. After dinner we heard some distant music and decided to walk there, on one of the trails behind the hotel. After about ten minutes we walked right into a local Colombian party. At first we were not sure whether it would be safe but then we met Juan Carlo. He reassured us that it was okay for us to be there and offered to get us some beers (if we would have bought them ourselves they would coast $5000 instead of the regular $2000). It was amazing to be in the middle of a Colombian street party drinking a beer with locals.

On Domingo (Sunday) we returned to Cartagena with a small stop at Playa Blanca. A group of about 15 Colombian women, swimming in the sea, started laughing and screaming really loud when we walked by. We didn’t understand why, so Karel decided to dive into the water which only increased their excitement. Once the ice was broken, we quickly found out that European people usually don’t go there. Before we knew what was happening we turned into some kind of attraction surrounded by Colombians who wanted to take a picture with us.

Next week we will tell you more about the problem in Cartagena. Hopefully we will have some nice dancing pictures as well!