| First Hearing of Colombia |
 |
 |
 |
| Written by Matt Landau |
| Saturday, 22 May 2010 19:10 |
|
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. |
