Medellin, Colombia - Excuse Me, We´re Looking For The Butt?

We still needed a guidebook. We found no stores with English sections in Cartagena or Medellin, and there was nothing in the one sad book exchange we found in Cartagena. Michael's Colombian friend Jorge's brother suggested we try El Tesoro mall. He said there is a bookstore there, Nacional, that has an English-language section.

Plan B was a guy named Kelvin who runs the Black Sheep Hostel in Medellin and had responded to Michael's post on the Thorn Tree looking to trade our Central America guidebook. Kelvin said he'd recently bought a brand new Lonely Planet South America On A Shoestring from Amazon and would be willing to sell it to us for $30 USD.

But we wanted to try the mall first before we made this guy have to start all over again with his reference library. We'd also heard there is a Mac store at the mall, and we need some software because our laptop is sick. So this morning we were off to the mall. This meant we got to try out Medellin's metro system, the only one in Colombia.

We hoped something like a mall would be on the subway map, but it wasn't, so we had to gather ourselves up to ask for help from the ticket guy. Michael was having trouble remembering the name of the mall, and I had only glanced at the e-mail, so I didn't know it for sure either. Tresoro? Tesaro? "Whatever you do," I said to him, don't say 'trasera' because that means "butt.'" (I learned that from watching American TV with Spanish subtitles.)

I should have kept that to myself and not planted the idea in Michael's head, because of course as soon as we got to the ticket window, Michael said, "Disculpe, sabe usted... el mall... trasora? trasera?" The guy behind the glass started giggling and then said, in English, "Do you speak English?" So Michael switched to English and said we were looking for a mall, and the guy told us what stop to get off at.

Asking for the Butt Mall is not as bad as the time Michael ordered "pinche pollo" instead of "pinchos de pollo," but much funnier, in my opinion. At least the ticket guy got a good laugh out of it. But in all seriousness, Michael is much braver than I am about taking chances and trying to make himself understood, so I have to give him a lot of credit for that. And he has improved so much since we started traveling, it's amazing. He's really doing well. Good job, Mikey!

So the Metro was very nice. Clean, fast, and orderly. Unfortunately, the mall at the stop we'd been directed to was not El Tesoro, but another one. It was really hot today and I was bitterly disappointed to find that it wasn't air-conditioned. We checked it out anyway, since we were there, but found no bookstores. What we did find was that the entire top floor was computer stores. Store after store selling computer gear, dozens of them. But it was all for PCs. No one had anything for a Mac, even the one store that sold i-Pods.

The mall did not have a food court per se, but just outside it was a whole row of dirt cheap food stalls. We stopped at one and had a quick almuerzo which was very tasty. Grilled pork, beans, rice, fries, an egg and juice. Plus an arepa. Not like the big, buttery arepas that we got in Cartagena, but small yo-yo sized ones, cold and dried. We've been getting them with every meal and no matter how fresh and hot the food is, the arepas are always cold and hard. We don't know if they're supposed to be that way or not, but we're just not eating them.

After lunch we hopped in a cab to El Tesoro, this time saying it correctly. Ooh, it is a fancy, fancy, shining star of a mall. Probably the nicest mall I have ever seen, though that's not saying much because I don't really go to many malls. But it was lovely and bright and clean and cleverly arranged. There was a children's amusement park, a movie theater and store after glittering store with all kinds of wonderful new clothes in the window. I'm sick of my old clothes.

The bookstore however, let us down. They did have an English section - about fifteen paperback novels of the Zane and Danielle Steele variety. No guidebooks. And the Mac store was not actually a Mac store. Though they did have the logo and some Mac things, they did not have what we needed. But Michael bought a new black shirt to replace the one he's been wearing, and we went to a movie.

We bought tickets for Memoirs of a Geisha at the fancy, fancy mall movie theater. We had to choose our seats on a little computer at the ticket window. It takes me forever to choose seats under the best of circumstances, so you can imagine how look it took to try to decide based on looking at a little screen full of tiny virtual seats and then having to direct the girl to click on the seats I wanted.

Michael gave me no help, of course. He thinks I take too long to decide stuff like that, so he throws up his hands and says, "Whatever you want, baby," when I'm just trying to make sure he's happy too. You know? Luckily there was no one in line behind us.

The movie theater lobby offered a panoramic view of the hills surrounding Medellin and free Internet access on a row of five gleaming new computers. We used that free Internet until the last possible minute, entering the "sala" after the commercials had already started. The theater was mostly empty, but we sat in our assigned seats anyway. It took me fifteen minutes to choose them, after all.

After the movie we took a cab to the Black Sheep and met up with Kelvin to buy his book. The hostel looked nice. We prefer being smack in the middle of the centro, but if you're looking for a more relaxed, homey, neighborhood type place with all those hostel amenities, the Black Sheep might be it.

It's a short walk (Kelvin says eight minutes) from the Metro, which took us back downtown in just a few minutes, happily clutching our brand new guidebook, finally. It has "Black Sheep Hostel" and "Kelvin's" written across the page-edges in black marker, but that's ok. Thanks, Kelvin.