Crazy Week

Ok, so it's been a little while since my last post, but with good reason.  The last couple weeks have been jam packed with all sorts of goodies.  

First off, there was a big party called Vibra mi Tierra a few weeks ago that was held in the Orchidrama at the Botanical Gardens.  It was a combination of good music, overpriced but delicious food, and beer tasting.  We really went for the beer tasting, but the rest was a welcome bonus.  

Turns out there are quite a few aspiring brewers in Colombia, and they all had the chance to come out and strutt their stuff on this particular evening.  For the cost of about $5 you got a glass and 9 tastings from various booths.  Each booth was manned by the brewer themselves and most had pictures and explainations of their processes.  All of them were eager to tell you about their particular brew.  

Unfortunately, there's not much of a tradition of beer making in this part of the world, and the typical offerings are on the very light, corona end of things.  So, despite some very good efforts to dive into the realm of real beer, and a welcome respite from the typical, none of the beers on offer really lived up to the styles they were attempting to achieve.  The best by far was called a porter, had a dark color and more flavor than most, but definitely still fell short of the full bodied texture evidenced in other parts of the world.  Nonetheless, it was a wonderfully entertaining experience, and you really can't beat the Orchidrama as a setting for a party. 

The week following the festival was jam packed with lots of work as we prepared for a weekend conference and tried to push through a few other projects at the same time.  Luckily, one of those projects requried that I accompany our guest from a very well known US University to see 2 of the major Urban Integrated Projects the city has done or is in the process of doing.   

The first day took us out to see the Metrocable, the Biblioteca España and all the parks, bridges, housing and urban reconstruction they've done in the area.  We also took a beautiful ride out the Metrocable extension that drifts over a nature preserve named Park Arvi.  Quite unfortunately, I forgot my camera that day, so I'm afraid I can't share the visuals with you at the moment. However, I promise to go back at some point during my stay and will update accordingly.  In the meantime, please accept this substitute image found online.

http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/4449/5061180g.jpg

After our adventures in the city, we all came back to the office and started discussing the possibility of creating a joint project between EAFIT and our guest's university.  As this has not been finalized, nor publicized, I can't say much more, but I can assure you, if it goes through, this partnership will create some really amazing opportunities and hopefully a fascinating body of work. 

The second day involved a tour of the Centro Oriental, or Central-East district of the city, an area I had yet to come even close to visiting.  Apparently one of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods at the moment, this area is slated for another Metrocable extension in the coming years, and is the site of a series of government sponsored community partnerships.  

Our tour took us through a park that was once the site of many ramshackle homes, but had been cleared when a fire destroyed nearly all the buildings in the area.  The surrounding community had petitioned the government to develop a park rather than allow resettlement due to the extremely steep slope and precarious conditions evident in this area.  The government obliged and for the past 10 years, this area has been a welcome green space within a densely packed residential area. 

As we walked through the neighborhood, we came across various recent projects including playgrounds, community gardens, roadway improvements and numerous walking paths, stairways and plazas designed to make the pedestrian experience that much more comfortable.  

The final site we visited will soon be a memorial park and was situated on a portion of the hillside that had once tumbled over numerous residences and trapped 500 people beneath it's unstable ground.  Most of the bodies were never found, so the site was designated as a cemetary and the community built a monument to the tragedy.

Today, community members are being put to work by a government sponsored project to build a memorial park on the site.  This particular project is one of many small interventions being planned along the border of the city in an attempt to build pride and ownership within the community.  The concept is part of an attempt to dissuade further informal (and often dangerous) development through a combination of community action, government attention and economic development. 

Once we had seen our fill of this particular project, we caught a taxi down the impossibly steep streets and found our way back to the University.  The afternoon held further discussions of how a joint research/design project could aid in the current development initiatives and what new perspectives might be brought to bear on the incredibly complicated issue of informal settlements.  Fascinating stuff if you ask me!  Hopefully I'll get a chance to share some more of the details as soon as they are confirmed, but for the moment, let's suffice to say I'm really hoping to get a change to work on this as it develops. 

That evening, starting at 5pm and ending at 10pm, we held a conference, with several prominent invited guests, to discuss the possible formation of a new school here at EAFIT which would focus on urban issues through design.  Being the only native English speaker other than our guest, who didn't speak a lick of Spanish, I had the incredibly challenging task of attempting to be a simultaneous translator.  If you've read my previous posts, you'll already know how much respect I have for people who do this particular task as a profession.  In my opinion, they are nothing less than miraculous.  Our conference continued through all of Saturday, so I got plenty of time in which to come to an even greater level of respect for simultaneous translators as a frantically attempted to keep up with all that was being said.  Fortunately, our guest was very understanding, and my Spanish is now good enough to at least get the gist of everything, if not every single word, so we made it though.  

When the conference was over, several of us went out for a well deserved celebration that included beer, leftover catered food and salsa dancing.  Not a bad way to wrap up the week!