The week before I went to Colombia for the first time, I called my friend Julie and asked for some typically-Colombian phrases that might set me apart from your everyday tourist. “But you are the everyday tourist,” she said.

The first Colombian I ever met was Shakira. I say this acknowledging that I very well may have encountered other Colombians before Shakira and just not known it. She was doing a show in Madrid, where I was studying, and happened to be staying at a hotel across the street from my apartment when I saw her eating breakfast at my favorite café.

I sat down next to her, knowing full well it was Shakira, and asked if anyone happened to know a good laundromat around. It’s not the first thing most people would think to ask a celebrity, but I liked how it came off as sincere, immediately disqualifying me as a stalker or rabid fan. She didn’t know about the laundromat but we chatted for about ten minutes before she said she had to go.

“A sound check?” I asked. “Are you, like, involved in the music industry or something?” Shakira smiled and told me that she was a singer so I acted surprised like a hillbilly who one morning discovers he’s been sitting on an oil reserve. “Well isn’t that something.” I said. “A famous pop star right here at my café in Madrid. How about that.”

Shakira was born and raised in Barranquilla, Colombia where there is erected a giant statue in her honor.

“She was good first Colombian to meet, the Shakira,” I recently told my Colombian friend Christina who’s English is so bad that I’m usually reduced to expressing myself in broken Spanish fragments. “One could think, all Colombians be famous if only for them to meet the Shakira.” In Spanish, it sounded hokey but Christina laughed as she always does when trying to interpret my jokes. Meeting Shakira as my first contact, if you could call her that, in Colombia was not unlike having your first cheese steak in Philadelphia: an ambassador of everything that’s great about the destination as a whole.

To put it bluntly, Colombians are the nicest people I have met in Central or South America. I’ve traveled a lot and spent a number of years getting to know intimately the people of Panama and Costa Rica. In the bigger Colombian cities, people tend to be slightly more fast-paced and hard-nosed while in the interior they’re simply warm and old-fashioned. I don’t know if it’s a conscious effort to rid the country of its stigmas or just a genuine interest in being friendly, but the overall feeling in Colombia is of acceptance and welcome.

Foreigners hear ‘Colombia people’ and they think Pablo Escobar: manifestation of everything dangerous and cruel. But they have not met Shakira. And they have not met the man with the toilet. Skeptics could take it out of context, but I was walking one time in Cartagena and needed desperately to find a bathroom to pee. I asked an old man sitting on the step of what appeared to be a small house. “Excuse me senor, do you know a close place I can urinate?”

He ushered me inside the house and offered up his own personal toilet, which I accepted gratefully. Afterwards, we chatted for several minutes about Shakira’s new album and I said I’d met her one time in Spain. In the United States, tell someone you were ushered into a private home to use a strangers bathroom, and it’d be met with a facial expression that says how irresponsible. “Did you have some sort of death wish?” an American might ask. “Was he an axe murderer? Did you see corpses stacked in the basement?” But in Colombia I don’t think twice about these sorts of things. I don’t go around doing anything stranger’s request, because that’d just be silly.  But in terms of friendliness and authenticity, Colombians, in my opinion, are a rare and misunderstood breed.

“Oh you’re going to Colombia,” a longtime friend suggested. “I actually went to school there back in the 1990’s – gorgeous campus and lots of really smart people.” She was, of course, referring to Columbia the school in New York City: a world away from the country that actually had my sights.

If there’s one thing the architects of Colombia’s investment and tourism plan can’t be blamed for, its being mistaken as Columbia, as in the record label, the Ivy League university, or the brand of rugged outdoor sports gear that looks nice but no one really needs. Imagine your last name Samsong or Mercedes Banz. To many, this is a hard correction to grasp.

When in the United States, I’m always amazed at how bad Americans are at geography. In some cases, we confuse (or don’t know) even our own states and cities. But more often than not, it’s venturing outside the US territories that tends to leave us feeling dizzy and disoriented, as if we were turtles spun around on the half-shell, then set down somewhere atop a bookshelf.

It’s this oblivion that reminds of a time a college professor was quizzing us on the countries in Africa. This introduction alone, when I say it, is usually enough to send a European friend a tizzy. “Americans are still learning African countries in college?” they ridicule. “We learned that stuff in grade school.” I’ll then have no decent excuse and instead choose to make fun of their teeth as if, by choice, at least I could correct my problem with some studies.

The college quiz required us to identify a series of obscure countries in Africa like Laos and Libya and Lesotho and my personal study technique was not to actually learn the continent, but to memorize everything according to mnemonic device I invented, with each letter representing a country. Only problem was, I forgot the mnemonic and, seeing as though African country names aren’t exactly the type of things you can guess at or invent, I instead answered with a list of my favorite assassins. S was for Sirhan Sirhan. Y was for Yigal Amir. And I was for Ignacy Hryniewiecki, the guy who killed Alexander II of Russia. After getting the test back, I pointed out I had even spelled Hryniewiecki correctly to which my teacher suggested “you’ve got problems.”

I’m a typical American for my notoriously poor geography. In fact, when creating this website, perhaps the worst embarrassment of all, I registered thecolumbiareport.com, a domain I may use in the future sometime to document the news and current events at a record label, or an ivy league university, or an outdoor clothing brand seeing as though I already have the South American country’s information down somewhat pat.

The first time I decided to visit Colombia, I was at a street fair in New York City. It seems strange and somehow anti-romantic that my Colombian fascination came not from the gleaming photos in Conde Nast or the voluptuous bodies of a Miss World pageant, but rather a little old woman with wrinkly skin selling dollar empanadas on a street corner in Union Square.

It was just after a recent stint in Costa Rica and my Spanish, by my own standards, was on top of its game. This is a feeling, not unlike being a very good hair stylist, that no one is aware of until you incite them. “Don’t ignore those split ends,” you’d have to say to someone on the subway. “The longer you leave them, the further they will climb up the hair shaft.”

The Spanish equivalent is much simpler and less conspicuous. It’s the word hola. The minute you say it, you’re automatically part of the club. Whether it be a gardener, a busboy, gas station attendant or (in this case) a lady preparing street empanadas and super ripe fruit, Hispanics embrace the hola from foreigners the way some former military members do, as if to say come hither my brother, our arms are open wide.

“Hola,” I said to the Colombian lady. “Una empanada y unas frutas por favor.” She took to my Spanish and asked where I had learned it. I told her that besides taking years of it in school, I had just gotten back from five months in Costa Rica. I needed to repeat this several times before she understood. The empanada lady looked similar to a lot of New Yorkers I know: clothing so trendy and cutting-edge that it started to suspiciously resemble rags.

I had seen a show on the Discovery Channel recently beforehand entitled “The Most Desolate Places On Earth,” in which an overly-enthusiastic host traveled the depths of places like Antarctica to find small communities living on whale fat and melted snow. One particular family invited him inside their igloo to see the newly dead seal they were making into a jacket. I imagined my Eskimo family being exposed to New York fashion like that of empanada lady. "Huh?” they would say. “We wouldn’t wear shit like that in a million years.”

I had begun to eat the fruit and meat-filled empanada when we got into a discussion about her home country of Colombia. I asked all the traditional questions, questions I’m sure she’d answered plenty of times. I stopped mid-sentence to rave about the empanadas: literally the most amazing empanadas I’d ever come across in my life: ultra crispy on the outside, soft and pillowy on the inside, stewed beef tucked in the middle and this insanely good fire-roasted salsa seeping from the edges. “You know what this is like?” I asked her. “This is like heaven.”

“Oh yes,” she responded, thinking, from my poor Spanish, that heaven was maybe some neighborhood or special empanada store in the West Village. “Yeah, I never been there,” she said.

I later decided from my morning that Colombia, if nothing else, was worth a visit solely for its empanadas which, if they were anywhere close to those in Union Square, would outweigh all the negative aspects and travel restrictions. I envisioned a newspaper headline above a picture with me, some Colombians, and a few guerilla warriors, all of us pleasantly sharing part of an empanada: “One World Piece,” the article might read.

Colombia sat on the backburner for a few years before I decided a visit was overdue. If not solely to recapture the flavor of a true empanada or some of that amazing fruit, I needed desperately to brush up on my Spanish again.

My first time in Colombia, I tried to hail a taxi but inadvertently summoned a nearby motorcycle taxi who pulled up next to me and handed over the extra helmet suggesting I jump on. To someone not familiar with Colombia, this was a strange position to be in: the land of rebels, kidnapping, and drug cartels, and here’s some stranger on a motorcycle telling me to get on. I rejected the opportunity in favor of waiting for a…more traditional and official form of transportation to come along.

I remember the exact moment I learned the Spanish word for hemorrhoids. I was on a flight to Cartagena sitting next to a Colombian doctor who just finished his residency in Washington DC. He was a young guy, maybe 32 or 33, and when he told me his area of expertise (“rectal disorders”) I thought to mention a product I dreamt up several years back but never quite got around to manufacturing. “It’s a hemorrhoids medication,” I said. “I want to call it…are you ready for this? I want to call it…‘Fire in the Hole.’”

My neighborhood in Cartagena is very old-fashioned and simple: a grid of several main avenues intersected by about ten cross streets. The one of I use to get to my apartment is wide enough for one car with only a few inches to spare and is flanked on both sides by colonial buildings with doorways that are always open and that offer a window into the life of my neighbors.