La ruta de lost Chiu

"Wow!" said Tali. "Look at the octopus on that door!" And she wasn't joking. Just to clarify, it wasn't a live octopus, but a rather fabulous door knocker. As we continued walking through the streets of Cartagena over the next week we noticed more and more elaborate knockers and doors. And, since I love creativity in practical things, not to mention I love doors, I started taking photos of them. Lots. Fast forward a few days and Tali and I are on a street art tour during which some things about the fancy looking doors were explained to us. Firstly the doors themselves. Many are large with a smaller door within. The small door was used daily by servants, members of the house, some visitors. However, when an important visitor came, then the door would be opened to it's fullest to show respect for the esteemed guest.  The other thing that was pointed out were the metal studs on the outside of the door. I had assumed there were merel...

Hello world! If you have ever learned any programming, you might recognise the significance of this "hello world" post,  the excitement of achieving the first step of learning a new language mixed with the "OMG there's so much more to learn" and the worry of "I'm never going to learn all of this..." Deep down there is a belief that if you stick at it you can succeed. Experience reminds you that many well-meaning projects don't get much past the "Hello World" post... This is my "Hello World" for my journey worldschooling as a parent. We've been on the road in South America for a 2 months now. It's not that no worldschooling has been done in that time, in fact a lot has, but I feel we have now saturated the "we are on holiday" mode of our travels and our search for meaningful routine existence on the road has well kicked in. Including the little parenting voice that nags about maths, writing, readin...

I'm not quite sure where to begin with Cartagena. We ended up spending 11 days there, a little more than our planned 6 days. We met interesting people, generally felt comfortable and generally enjoyed the feel of it. We did far too much to fit into just one post so this is a bit of an introduction / summary rather than the full picture. Cartagena is a city full of contradictions. One of the most popular cities for tourists in Colombia with its stunning old town and vibrant street life, is also, sadly, one of the poorest cities in Colombia. Full of Caribbean culture yet, firmly attached to the mainland on which it sits. In 11 days here are just some of the things we managed to do: Spanish lessons with the lovely Gustavo Street Art walking tour A night at the pretty Playa Blanca beach A ride in a horse drawn carriage Helped out in a village clean-up Visited 2 international schools Hours of walking through beautiful streets Made connections at the newly opened co-wor...

Leaving the chilly weather of the interior we headed up to the north coast of Colombia for a taste of the Caribbean. As we plan to eventually make it all the way to the bottom, we thought we should start at the top. We stayed in the medium sized town of Santa Marta for about a week. Santa Marta has the honour of being the oldest still inhabited town founded by the Spaniards in Colombia, and the second oldest in South America (the oldest European founded town is in Venezuela). We had an air bnb lined up and when we explained that we were looking for Spanish lessons, our host, Raquel said she would be happy to help us with that herself. And she did. And then some. For the next few days Raquel drove us around, spoke Spanish with us, took us to the beach, took us with her family into the hills on a Saturday and even thoughtfully provided her young daughter, Sofia, for Tali to play with! Despite no common language, the girls hit it off. The family could not have been nicer! So welcomin...