Ajiaco, soup with chicken breast, guasco, rice, corn, and avocado.
Every place has it’s national dishes. Here in Colombia, if you ask, they’ll probably mention the two most famous soups: sancocho and ajiaco. Or the empanadas and arepas.
I really like ajiaco because it’s got cream on it and you can add your own rice and avocado (like bacon, avocado makes everything better). The distinctive taste and color of ajiaco is a herb called “guasca” which is translated into English to “gallant soldier” but I’ve never heard anyone call it that. It also has medicinal uses. There are many types of corn in the world. The cob in my soup was different than in the corn in the U.S. The corn that most of the world, outside from the birthplace of corn — the central Americas, eats is the small and sweet variety. This corn was starchier and each kernel was much larger (choclo, like what I’ve had in Peruvian restaurants). The way to eat the cob in the soup is to take the handy skewer, turn the cob, and spear the skewer into the end of the corn. Then it’s easy to bite the kernels off the cob. I’ll write more about the restaurant where I had the ajiaco another time.
Freshly deep fried empanada and salsa.
Every country has a dumpling of some sort, sometimes boiled, steamed, or fried. The other day, I had a delicious fried Bogotano empanada. The sauce was surprisingly spicy. Everyone told me that Colombians don’t like spicy food. That may be, but this salsa did not take prisoners. Wowza. Eating these empanadas from a street stall reminded me of the fuchka of Bangladesh.
Inside is rice, beef, and chicken.
As for the arepa. This one was made of white corn, griddled and brushed with butter. Inside was a center of melted cheese. I didn’t actually like this very much as it had a slightly soured yogurt-like tang to it which I didn’t find all that appealing although I love that flavor in dairy products (more about dairy another time). I’ve had arepas before which were spliced and stuffed like sandwiches but this one was more like a pupusa. Will have to try others along the way.
While I can’t understand some of the road signs and the altitude is exhausting, the most shocking thing about moving to Bogota is how tongue-tied I feel. In order not to seem rude, every person has to be addressed in Spanish. While there are places in the U.S. where I only hear Spanish spoken, the big difference is that I’m not expected to respond in Spanish. So far, here in Bogota, the people I’ve talked to have been incredibly nice about my stunted Spanish. But then again, the phrases have been extremely simple:
“Buenas” = “goods” for good morning, good afternoon, good evening.
“Muchisimas gracias” = a million thanks (rough translation)
“Muy amable” – you are so kind/so nice of you
“Que tenga buen dia” = “Have a nice day.”
The other night, I realized that after months and months of Spanish classes, I didn’t know how to say to the waiter, “yes, you may take my plate.”
I won’t go into all the mistakes that I’m making when I manage to actual get a few words out. So far, the funniest part of speaking Spanish was when I was ordering a sandwich and I thought I’d stick to something simple like a ham and cheese… then the sandwich lady asked me, “jamon de pavo o jamon de cerdo?” Turkey ham? Or pork ham? I wasn’t aware that “ham” was generic for “lunch meat.”
So about six bucks?
The other shocking thing is figuring out the currency. At the current exchange rate, it’s about 1,881 Colombian pesos to one U.S. dollar. So far, I’ve been knocking off three zeros, dividing by half and adding a little on top. Is it my new math?
In the frenzied days before my move to Colombia, each evening involves, sometimes twice, a “farewell and hasta luego” dinner. Each evening, the question is the same, “what type of food will you not be able to get in Colombia?” That’s something we’ll find out, but for now, my farewell meals have included: Vietnamese pho, banh mi, Chinese hot pot, Korean barbecue, American hamburgers, Italian pizza, British pub fish and chips, donuts, and coffee cake topped with coffee flavor ice cream.
A pork salad with 11 ingredients. It must be mixed up and made ugly.
During my time in Washington, DC, I have enjoyed exploring the eateries, and of the the new restaurants I’ve tried, I’ve most enjoyed the new “it” restaurant, Rose’s Luxury. The last time I went there, the tattooed-swears-like-a-sailor-waitress remembered me from my visit in February… and then she guided us through most of the menu, including drinks. I didn’t think all the dishes were worth it but since they change their menu on a continuous basis, there is usually something you’ll like, but it may not be on the menu the next time. Sometimes the dishes really work and the staff (with *#&&^% added for emphasis) are eager to explain how to eat the dishes to get the full alchemy of the flavors.
Fish? Chicken? Whatever topped with sandfire, a chefy vegetable.
Okay, maybe this posting was just an excuse to post food photos.
The viewing platform on Isla Pirata, off the coast of Colombia.
After months of googling to the nubs of my fingers to read expats blogs in Colombia, I’ve compiled this list of my favorite ones. I’ve tried to concentrate on expats currently living in Bogota. Once in a while, one of the writers, living outside Bogota or living outside Colombia, has such command of the expat life that I will include him or her on my list. I’ve compiled this list based both on content and style.
1. Banana Skin Flip Flops: I think this may be the queen of expat blogs in Bogota. She has written hundreds of blog postings about her four years in Colombia so almost everything an expat might want to know is covered. This blog has a personal bloggy style which surrounds this author’s persona as a young blonde from England (which she is). That said, she is a professional journalist so this “casualness” is professionally done. Kudos to the queen.
2. Richard McColl: I include this journalist because he’s both an expat and a “global nomad” or “Third Culture Kid” (and well, I like to support members of my tribe). Plus, his writing and endeavors are “serious” journalism in the conventional sense. And he is currently living in Colombia.
3. An article from a guy who worked for See Colombia about life in Bogota. While he has moved on, I just like his writings about Bogota.
4. Flavors of Bogota: Written by an expat who’s best buddies with all the cool chefs in Bogota.
5. Bogota Eats and Drinks: I think this is also written by a long time expat. She was part of a Proexport blogger event in 2012 in Bogota. Aside from their own blogs, some of these bloggers are also guest bloggers for See Colombia. Read her article about it here. (Many thanks to the blogger for contacting me and correcting some of the facts about her blog).
6. Mike’s Bogota Blog: This guy is known for his blog about leading bike tours around Bogota, but his Bogota blog is also useful.
And to make it a baker’s dozen: I liked this article is about Colombia and I like the “cost of living index” idea of the site itself.
There are quite a few sites which collect expat blogs in general, including this one, Colombia page, which also happens to list 12 blogs in Colombia. Happy reading!
When I tell people that I’m moving to Colombia, I usually get one of two reactions. Excitement. Or excitement. Excitement about how lovely Colombia and Colombians are. Or, usually, excitement about the possible dangers. Here are the ten most common assumptions I hear about Colombia.
1. Aren’t you worried about getting kidnapped? (I wouldn’t go to Colombia if kidnapping was a guarantee. Duh!)
2. It’s dangerous. You will get mugged. Or worse. (Bogota, with seven million inhabitants, has all the usual dangers of a large city so I think my chances are equal those if I lived in New York or Bangkok)
3. Will you become a drug dealer? Or an emerald smuggler? (Why would you ask me that? Is it a conversation starter?)
4. I hear that plastic surgery is really cheap and of high quality there. Are you going to get plastic surgery? (Thanks for the suggestion?)
5. Colombian women are the hottest in the world. You will get divorced there. (Colombia ranks first in bird bio-diversity…)
6. You will get married there. (If I go to a wedding, I’ll blog about it for sure!)
7. Oh, you’ll be having a lot of romantic assignations (Okay, they put it more crassly.)
8. You will enjoy the steamy hot weather (Not in Bogota. The daily average temperature is 48-68 F, or 9-20 C)
9. Hope you like salsa because there will be lots of it. Any opportunity and Colombians start dancing! (Yup, bring on the vallenato, cumbia, hard salsa, salsa romantica, porro, and so on. More later.)
10. You will never want to leave. (The Colombian public relations slogan says, “the only danger is wanting to stay” so maybe they are right?)
Colombians and Colombia have been through violent times, but according to recent articles, times are changing in Colombia. Medellin, previously infamous, is cited as a model success story of urbanization; Cartagena is a popular tourist destination; most of the world’s cut flowers are grown in Colombia; and the culinary scene is growing. Even with all of this, people still equate Colombia with cocaine, kidnapping, and coffee.
Speaking of coffee, apparently most Colombians drink instant coffee, like Nescafe. With Starbucks’s launch, this week, of their first cafe in Colombia, it will be interesting to see how they change the cafe culture. Will Juan Valdez match the mighty marketing machine that is Starbucks? I will try them both in between my forays into new fruits.
The mangosteen, succulent luminescent segments inside the padded exterior.
In preparation for my goal in Colombia to try 100 kinds of fruit that I’ve never tasted before, I was thinking back to the best and worst fruit I’ve had so far. Surprisingly, it is not durian.
So far, the best fruit I’ve tried is the mangosteen. The mangosteen, which is commonly found in Southeast Asia, has an aubergine brownish color and carapace-like leaves on the top. Inside, the pulpy exterior is red and bleeds like the blood of berries. The edible parts are the white segments inside. A few of these segments have a large soft pit inside. The other segments have no pit so they glide down like manna. Having looked coast to coast for this fruit in the U.S., I had just about given up eating it here. But, then I went to a local “Little Vietnam” or Eden Center, in Falls Church, Virginia, and there, sitting on the sidewalk, was a lady selling mangosteens. At $16, the price for a bag for these well-traveled, dessicated, and bruised fruit was exorbitant.
The worst I’ve tried so far is the wood apple. The wood apple, which I tried in Sri Lanka, is brown, pulpy, and fibrous with the flavor of tree stump.
When I told one of my friend about my new challenge, it turned out that he had actually written a book on fruit. With the weary look of a man who has chewed his way through hundreds of bushels of fruit, he said to me, “Get a juicer. You will get tired of all that chewing.”
In Colombia, they have 150 official commercial types of fruit so my goal of 100 shouldn’t be too hard. Some of the names of the fruit I may find dance like sugar plum fairies in my head: curubas, badeas, caimones, chontaduros, guamas, mamuncillos, mairoños, grocellas, piñuelos, zapotes, and nísperos…
The thing I like most about blogging is that it’s such an easy way to write. To tell a story. I can only think of a few people whom I’ve met who didn’t want to tell me their stories, and even then, they certainly had a story to tell. The skill of storytelling is a form of art. I support everyone’s right (ha! write!) to tell their story.
M’s Adventures in Bangladesh, the book.
After I published my photo book, M’s Adventures in Bangladesh, I got many, almost desperate (so great is this desire to share a story and to be published), questions about where to publish for yourself. In the past, this form of publishing was sometimes called “vanity press” but I like CreateSpace’s term better: independently publish. The printing process keeps getting more and more democratic. Most online sites have free options and publishing costs keep getting lower and lower. They even offer e-book publishing for those who want to publish in that format.
Blurb.com: on all the bloggers’ lips, apparently, it’s easy peasy and they will take your entire blog and convert it to a book for you.
Lulu.com: less known, but I chose it because supposedly it would be easy to get my book on Amazon… but it’s not as easy as one might think. You can get an ISBN for your book if you want to sell your book in a brick and mortar book store.
CreateSpace: Amazon (yup, the magic word) owns this publishing house.
Also, there are many online printing companies to choose from (Snapfish, Vistaprint, etc.). My first attempt was going directly through my iPhoto program, but there were too many aggravating glitches in the program for it to be worth my while, plus they did not offer bulk discounts. I found Lulu easy. Perhaps for my next book, perhaps on Colombia or on food, I will try one of the other options. In many parts of the world, printing on the local economy is a very viable option, but for an ever-moving expat, online is the way to go.
Of course, you don’t have to sell your book. So, all you writers, bloggers, storytellers, raconteurs, tell your story. Even if, you end up doing a limited print run, of one.
While many people visit New York City for the shopping, the sites, the entertainment, I like New York for its villages. It seems like every few streets, New York changes nationality, from Chinatown, Little Italy, Jamaica, and all the other little villages that make up the great world of New York City. Every neighborhood is distinct and many New Yorkers never leave their neighborhoods.
Seafood dumpling soup in Chinatown, NYC.
Usually, when I take a taxi, I chat with the taxi drivers. Taxi drivers are often immigrants and many have interesting stories to tell. On this trip, my first taxi driver shared with me where to get the best Pakistani food in New York and in Washington, DC. But then suddenly, he asked about my marital status. I was a little taken aback because I had forgotten, after a few months in politically correct DC, that this is considered a polite question in some cultures.
A few days later, my second taxi driver, an Ecuadorian, patiently let me practice my Spanish with him (gracias, and I appreciated your philosophical stance on bilingual education). My third cabbie was a Miami Cuban taxi driver. I considered trying to practice Spanish on him but his delightfully colloquial rapid fire English and his story about his epiphany about happiness, on 9/11, made me keep quiet.
Lighthouse Tofu’s seafood stew, with half a mini seafood pancake in the background.
“Hey, do you have a recommendation for a Korean restaurant?” Do I ever! In the service of social media=democracy=sharing information… here’s my list of Korean restaurants I like to go to when in Northern Virginia. I also mentioned Korean food in my list of iconic American eats in the Washington, DC area. All these restaurants are located in Annandale in Fairfax county about ten miles from the Lincoln Memorial. There are buses out to this area but that experience would probably ruin your experience.
Lighthouse Tofu (Vit Goel Tofu) – 4121 Chatelain Rd #100, Annandale, VA 22003: More than tofu, this place specializes in volcanically hot earthenware bowls of stew/soup. This place actually has seafood stew which I love. Plus, they have created a mini seafood pancake which is more like an American appetizer. Most places serve a huge seafood pancake (haemul pajeon) which can be harder to deal with.
Honey Pig – 7220 Columbia Pike, Annandale, VA 22003: Very loud music, steel decor and smoky, this place will make you feel like you are in Korea.
To Sok Jip – 7211 Columbia Pike, Annandale, VA 22003: Across the street from Honey Pig, easy to overlook, this place with the purple awning, is worth finding. It’s got three “rice” options – white, barley, or purple which is a mix of brown rice and beans. This is one of the few hole-in-the-wall places left in this area. The bok choy kimchi is fantastic. They also have a mega-pot “wartime soup” which is a hodgepodge of hot dogs, tofu, pork, kimchi, noodles, etc. thrown into a cauldron. Must not eat alone. Plus, the ladies’ has a fancy Japanese toilet.
Gom Ba Woo – 7133 Columbia Pike, Annandale, VA 22003: This place is next to Giant. I mention it because I’ve had some really delicious home made mandu (dumplings, potstickers) here, and I’ve had wonderful language barrier issues here too, one of which resulted in us receiving a cold bowl of noodles in a lard soup. The lady looked at us approvingly because clearly this was the dish to order in hot weather, but we were not so thrilled.
Nak Won – 7317 Little River Turnpike, Annandale, VA 22003: This place is where I’d take newbies to Korean food. It’s got a nice authentic feel and it’s quiet. The decor reminds me of the decor of the 80’s with wood tables and memorabilia on the walls.
Oegadgib – 7331 Little River Turnpike, Annandale, VA 22003: This place should be called “Mr. Lee’s” but instead I think it is “Gram’s place” or something like that. There is a full menu but the two things that stand out are the all-you-can-eat shabu-shabu (where you cook meat and vegetables in a broth – like hotpot) and the barbecue which includes three kinds of meat. The prices are under $20 per person so a great place to go with big eaters. This place is hard to find and hard to pronounce so look for the Jerry’s Sub sign, make absolutely sure that you do not park in Jerry’s lot, and then go behind the building on Little River Turnpike and you will often find Mr. Lee waving his light saber around to help you find parking in his lot.
Yechon – 4121 Hummer Rd, Annandale, VA 22003: This is a 24-hour standby. It’s big and they do everything well. It’s located a bit away from the other restaurants and many don’t like how generic it feels, but that’s one thing that’s good about it — you can always go there and find acceptable Korean food.
There are two other places to mention – one bakery and one chicken place:
Shilla Bakery – 7039 Little River Turnpike, Annandale, VA 22003: Forget all the weird ideas about not liking Asian desserts… you will like these! They have everything from French bread, puffy pastries, colorful cakes, bingsoo (frozen ice dessert with flavorings, fruit, etc.), Illy coffee, and yes, some of those weird Asian desserts made with beans. This place is always pumping with Korean American youth hanging out and families. The bakery is very generous with its samples so you can try four or five different breads, cookies, pastries, before buying one or none.
Bon Chon Chicken – multiple locations: Really, very few things make me NOT want to share. I have a friend who is a true foodie friend because when we shared a plate of Bon Chon’s wings, he ate the winglets (part that looks like a drumstick) so that I could enjoy the flats (the part with two bones). Sigh, now that’s true understanding. These wings are sweet, crunchy, and lightly coated.
Korean barbecue at Oegabgib.
Maybe once I get to Colombia, I’ll compile a list of the seven best Korean restaurants in Bogota.
Here’s another doodle about learning Spanish. The previous one was not as much fun to draw as this one with the octopus.
A glass of juice with octopus, por favor.
It makes me laugh to think how delighted I would be if I used this phrase incorrectly and someone actually brought me a glass of juice with an octopus in it (that would be a lesson I would never forget!). Considering my “100 challenge” to match my 100 in Dhaka, I imagine that I have many glasses of juice in my future. I don’t think any new list I compile will match the popularity of my list of 100 restaurants in Dhaka… but, who can predict what the google bots will pick up?
Washington, DC’s Ethiopian restaurants are well-known. Yet, I tried Ethiopian food for the first time in Ethiopia. The food was new to me. It was perhaps not so different from the bhorta of Bangladesh, but it was a world away from the sancocho of Colombia, and the burgers of America. When I was in Ethiopia, my friend took me to a restaurant serving traditional Ethiopian food. First, we sat at low tables about the size of chair. The food was served on a large platter (about a yard/meter wide) on which the waitress placed our different dishes along with the national bread, injera, a spongy flat bread. The waitress brought a silver pot and poured water over my hands so that I could wash them, although I only ever dream of using my right hand! We had a boiled egg, stewed greens, a curry, etc. I found the food to be on the sour side and immediately thought of certain friends who love sour foods — like lemons.
As we were at a tourist friendly, the other guests appeared to be a mix of expat Ethiopians, families, and the national football (soccer) coach. For dessert, we had coffee. After all, coffee comes from “Kaffa” in Ethiopia. It was strong in the “Turkish” style. I enjoyed it.
A male dancer at the beginning of the evening.Traditional dancing.
During the meal, traditional dances of Ethiopia were sung and performed for us. I’m sure that the stories being told in the dances were those of battle, courtship, and harvest, and they involved a style of dance which required high impact step aerobics and what is fondly called the “chicken” dance. As the evening progressed, the men changed into costumes that seemed to allow them more air during their feverish dances while the women continued to put on more and more clothing like sweaters and headscarves. I don’t know if any of the restaurants in DC have dance performances like the one I saw in Addis but I found the dance and the music uplifting and I’d watch it again.
Anticipation is the sweetest nectar. Here are some photos from my last visit to Colombia. Who wouldn’t look forward to more of this?
Night in the old city of Cartagena with touristy horse and carriage ride.
I also remember dancing at every turn, the Jack Daniels at the weddings, the fruit juices squeezed fresh, the soups topped with avocado, the fried cheese bread balls served in bags, the burger topped with shredded chicken, donuts bought at the airport like a duty free item, jeans worn tight as second skin, the fort in Cartagena hugging the town of dreams… will the Colombia of the future outdo what I can see in my memories?
