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.