Arriving in Cali

Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2017--Pereira to Cali

Moving days are always stressful.  I awoke this morning at 5:30 and could not get back to sleep.  I knew my apartment would be available at 13:00 and my guidebook had said that it was a 4-4 1/2 hour trip from Pereira to Cali.  I also knew that a bus would be leaving every hour on the half-hour and that it was supposed to take about 30 minutes to walk to the apartment from the bus station in Cali.  The timings added up to indicate I might as well get out of bed, bathe, shave, eat breakfast, pack, and try to make the 7:30 bus.  That would get me to the apartment just about 13:00 if I checked out the bus schedules for my next move before leaving the station.

Well, the timings were off.  As usual, the bus didn't leave on time.  We finally left about 7:45.  And the route we took was a surprise compared to all my other trips.  Somehow we found a long, narrow valley between two mountain ranges and had a 4-lane highway (What a luxury!) with no twisting and turning (Unbelievable!). 

I was reading and finished my most recent novel just before the bus stopped at a restaurant.  (See below for details.)  So, I had not used our phone to check our progress.  I pulled it out and opened the map app to check our position using GPS.  It was 9:15 and we were already half-way to Cali!

The stop was brief.  No one got food.  Many bought a coffee and maybe a pastry to have with it.  I just stretched my legs and started wondering if maybe the 4-lane road was going to stop and that would cause the second have to stretch the time to 4 to 4 1/2 hours.

Back on the road, we continued at the same fast pace.  By 10:30 we were in Cali and by 10:40 we were getting close to the bus station.  But we hit heavy traffic where we had to turn and merge into another road (just a quarter or a half a mile from the terminal), and that ate up some time.  But at 10:55 I was off the bus wondering what to do to pass the time until 13:00, since I had all my luggage with me.

I decided to go ahead and walk toward the apartment thinking maybe I would come across a park or a plaza.  I found a tunnel that took me under the expressway and followed the street numbers toward where I needed to be.  Within 10 minutes (not 30!), I was 2 blocks from the apartment.  But it was a nice area of shops.  And what a surprise, there was a bench in front of one of the shops.  I headed for it knowing I just needed to do something there to pass the time.

Last night, because I knew I would be finishing te book  was reading, I downloaded another.  Normally, I don't like to start a new book on the same day that I finish one.  I prefer to continue to think about the previous one.  Also, that makes a disconnect that keeps me from getting confused as to whether something happened in the new book or the old book.  But two hours was a long time to wait, and I knew that reading would be the fastest way to pass that time.  I sat and read.  An old man passed and saw me reading from my Kindle and asked, "Amazon?"  He was impressed that I had an electronic reader.  Another man sat on the bench briefly and tried to have a conversation, but left when he realized my Spanish was limited.  Anyway. at 12:55, I had finished 10% of the new novel and was putting the Kindle away to walk the final two blocks to the apartment.

The apartment here in Cali has huge rooms--a big living/dining/kitchen and a big bedroom.  It's nice.  Also, it has a/c which is needed now that I am back in the warm coastal area.  The bedroom TV even has a Roku box, so I may see if I can watch my upcoming episodes of Narco on the TV instead of the computer.

I went out to explore the neighborhood not long after arriving.  I walked maybe 10-12 blocks toward town, then I went back two blocks and returned.  That took me through the city's Zona Rosa (dining and entertainment district that also has lots of specialty shops) district known as Granada.  It's mainly for the tourists who want to party and pick up women and for the locals who have money and want to party as if they are not in Colombia.  (It has a Hooters and a KFC, for instance.)  It's not my type of place.  I'll find my hole-in-the-wall restaurants tomorrow when I head further into town, and I passed a few between the bus station and here, too.  But before returning home, I stopped at a supermarket a block away and bought some coffee, a cola, some pasta, and some pasta sauce.  I had missed the time to eat lunch while I had my luggage and was reading, and because it took a while to settle in and go out to explore, the restaurants were closing or clearing their boards of their menu for the day because of running out of items.  So it was pasta for me to night rather than an early-afternoon meal at a restaurant.

The book I finished reading earlier on the bus was The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner.  It took me longer to read it than other books have, because there kept being sections that bored me.  It deals with artists in New York--their social lives, their sex lives, their dinner parties, their conversations, etc. They can expound forever on the most uninteresting topics!  There is more to the book than that, and the two story lines at different points in history were interesting.  Readers' reviews on Amazon show an almost even distribution of ratings with 16% giving the book only 1 star and 23% giving it 5 stars with the overall average being 3.2 stars.  I give it 3 1/2 stars, and that is a bit generous because of the quality of the writing being so good; the story itself wouldn't rate that high.