It’s Friday and for sure many of you are making plans for the weekend, especially since it’s a bank holiday weekend (er..again!? Yea, we only just had one last weekend!! #ThisIsColombia. Remember Colombia is one of the countries in the world with the highest number of public holidays!?)

While some of you are heading out for the night, many of you may have been stood up. As a foreigner I’ve now come to terms with this sort of phenomenon. Have you confirmed three times the date/meeting/appointment/event? Well, then it’s technically not on..

Wait, 3 times?! Yes, you have to confirm 3 times (at least). Once I invited someone to have brunch on Thursday. Come Saturday morning I asked him whether it was ok to make it 1 hour early. He said ok. Then Saturday night he asked me, ‘is tomorrow’s brunch still on?’ Imagine all the time that goes into confirming everyone’s attendence in a meeting. Imagine all the lost productivity!

Even an Austrian friend has learnt the ropes after living here for two years and was doing it to me!

So what does this mean? It means if you don’t confirm a meeting three times, it’s not really going to happen. That’s right! It’s happened to me before. A friend asked me to meet up and I agreed one week beforehand. Then the day before, I asked where we were going to meet. To which the reply was ‘oh, I thought we weren’t meeting coz you never said a thing!’ WHAT?!

As a foreigner, you may think, ‘that’s just lame. why can’t you give me a better excuse?’ But actually it’s not really an excuse. it’s true. Since Colombians are so nonchalant about saying ‘see you soon!’, ‘let’s go get a coffee soon!’, ‘let’s grab lunch some time soon!’ and ‘let’s meet soon’, and suggesting going somehwere to do something together can be so casual, if you don’t make a fuss about the meeting, it would just be seen as blah blah blah. ‘Yeah we should go to xyz!’ ‘Yea let’s go dancing at Club X next week!’ ‘Yea let’s go to try the new place Y!’ Good luck!