Category Culture
Colombian euphemism
6 years ago, Johnson, the column on language from The Economist published an article on how the Dutch understand the British, whose obscure euphemism could be hard to decipher for a foreigner. Having lived in Colombia for 5 years now, I thought I would celebrate my residency’s birthday (3 days ago!!!) by writing the Colombian […]
Coffee?? Not again!
The first week of the year has always been quiet so I’m taking advantage of my time here to do a bit of bonding with friends. You know Colombians (at least those in Bogotá) are a well-behaved bunch?! In a sense that alcoholic drinks are only reserved for parties. No drinking at lunch. No drinking after […]
How Colombians celebrate Christmas
A ‘luxury’ version novena, in which a Vallenato band has been brought in to celebrate the hostess’ birthday which happened to be on one of the novena days. Christmas celebrations in Colombia really start nine days (I know, rather different from the Anglo-saxon 12 days) before Christmas, which explains the name of the rather beautiful tradition novena, when […]
The hottest song in Colombia at the moment
I’m not embarrassed to admit that recently I fell in love with ONE thing about Colombia. It’s the first thing related to Colombia that I admit I’ve fallen in love with. The country’s been making some really good music and the rest of the world would benefit from knowing about that. So I’m starting a series about Colombian music! […]
It’s AMAZING!!!
Every foreigner who has lived in Colombia for 1 year would know that Colombians say everything is ‘AMAZING!!!’ When you come to experience the thing which they call amazing you are like.. ok.. underwhelmed, to say the least.. For example, let’s say you’re travelling to somewhere, say Cocuy. You’ll often get the response ‘it’s BEAUTIFUL!!! You’re […]
No pain no gain baby!
These are clips of a TV advertisement I recently saw, which rendered me absolutely speechless. I’m no social science expert so I hope I won’t be getting any attacks about how flawed my arguments are. I just want to share how I found it incredibly sad and unfortunate that these images seem to show such […]
I’m VERY CONFIRMED! CONFIRMADISIMA !
I previously moaned about how flakey people are. (Now I’m starting to think that perhapsrather than being nationality-specific, it’s more a problem with the tech era in which we take advantage of having a cellphone to flake on someone just because something else more interesting has come up.) Recently I found myself bewildered by this term in a group […]
How to arrange to meet in Colombia II
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, […]
El Chocho
Video courtesy of Lydia Cheung Spanish speakers (or, more precisely, Colombians, since I have not yet explored the extent to which this word is country-specific and so might only make sense to Colombians as there are so many regional differences in Spanish) will be shocked at the title of this piece, that’s to say the least.. Actually I was […]
Where’s the love?!
In a country where it’s a social norm to give a cheek kiss even when they first meet, (although I’ve never quite worked out whether it’s a handshake or a kiss, since whenever I held my hand out it’d be totally ignored and the person in question would give me a kiss on the cheek instead, while other times when […]
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