Another Day in Pasto

Anywho, he came with me to Pasto, where I have some friends (Melisa and her boyfriend) that I met cause Mom works with their relatives in the Calgary library. So we showed up at 5am after a god awful bus ride. I bargained to get the bus tickets for $12.50 instead of $16.50. I thought it was a sweet deal, but the my seat wouldn't stick in any position and there wasn't very much space for my legs. So there I was, sitting upright cause the lady behind me had a kid on her lap and kept pushing my seat up. Of coarse the lady infront of me also had a kid on her lap, so her seat all the way back. No inch of room to play with! Thank god it was only 9 hours - anymore woulda killed me. I couldn't have slept more than 30 minutes during the overnight trip, so Mat and I checked into a hotel and slept a solid 7 hours before getting up to meet Melisa.

Meli, her boyfriend Santo, Mat and I went for a scavenger hunt around town looking for a Santo's tent. His friend had the tent, but we first had to locate his friend's girlfriend to track him down. We tried several houses and talked with several old folk just chilling on the sidewalk, but to no avail. We even went into the Urgency Room - not to be mistaken with the Emergency Room. No, if your problem is an emergency you must procede down the road to the hospital. An urgent problem though, hell come right on in!

We never actually found the tent. Hopefully it'll show up before the weekend when we go camping. Eventually we gave up and went to the university, where we bumped into a punk rocker friend of Santo. The five of us chilled on the pasto (grass in English) in Pasto where all the uni kids enjoy the pasto experience.

All over town, and especially at the uni, was graffiti saying something roughly like "Gringos get out of Colombia" and "No Yankee bases in Colombia". Colombia's capitalist president Uribe (and corrupt as fuck with his hands in the coke mafias and paramilitaries) wants to set up some US military bases in Colombia. Beats me why. Funny though, being a foreigner with a North American accent walking by slogan after slogan telling sepos to get out.

Later we found ourselves waiting outside the house of another one of Santo's friends - Fabio. We waited on the stoop with a big bag of contraband norteño - cheap brandy from Ecuador - for several hours before Fabio finally showed up. He arrived just after La Negra. She says her name is too hard to pronounce, so everyone calls her Negra. Man, she's one of the craziest girls I've ever met! ADHD is the easiest way to describe her. It puts in all the right stereotypes you ought to imagine. And she's never serious either - even when she's telling you about her problems two minutes after meeting her.

Later on Santo passed out, so naturally Fabio wrote on his face with everyone's help. After waking up from camera flashes he and Meli went home. La Negra was buzzing mad like normal, but Mat and I needed to crash, so we took off to the hotel.

written by  ryanmyers on September 30, 2009 from Pasto, Colombia
from the travel blog: Ryan's First Sabbatical
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