Presenting A Colombian TV Show

What I haven't told most of you is that the primary objective - I always set myself little aims that I want to achieve during my trips - while traveling South America for me is to learn Spanish. The main reason I chose Colombia as the country to start in was simply because the cheapest flights from Europe to South America went to Bogota. Now when I got the surprising opportunity to become the presenter for a TV show in the Caribbean of Colombia it shook up my plans quite a bit. It meant that I wouldn't be taking a ferry from Cartagena to Panama and that I wouldn't be able to visit many beautiful places in Central America that I had planned to go to. However I had thought about the opportunity that I was given in depth, it meant traveling around the Caribbean of Colombia for three months with a film crew. We would visit different cultural festivals and events to demonstrate to the people how a person coming from a western culture would experience such a different surrounding. When there wouldn't be any festivals to attend we would be staying in Barranquilla to relax and do some work on cutting the episodes etc. Now not only would they support me in getting a place in Barranquilla but also in improving my Spanish. By simply telling me to go to that person and spark up a random conversation (it is supposed to be as natural as possible) they encourage me to speak as much as possible, even with my limited spanish. Also they would be able to correct me quite easily meaning I had quite a few teachers at the ready to learn spanish. After realizing how this would speed up my learning process, in addition to me having a real base to get back to and having all the costs during the shoots covered it ended up being an easy decision to make. In secret I was kind of happy to settle down for a little bit. I think the phase of simply traveling from place to place has stopped for me. I now want to see and experience various places more in depth, instead of just passing through. This might mean that I will stay in different areas of the world for a little bit longer, a few months should usually be enough to get the kind of insight that I am wanting looking to get. The first festival we visited was 'La Festival De La Ciruela' (ciruela being a particular kind of fruit that grows a lot around here) in Campeche. The first two days of the shoot were quite silent. Nothing wild going on yet, so we interviewed some people about the festival, the fruit and the history behind it. One of the people was 'Mercades Roja' (I am almost definitely spelling that wrong) who took us to his farm to climb up the ciruela trees and harvest the fruit ourselves. He was one of the founders of the festival and had just celebrated his 80th birthday a few days ago. It was quite surprising to see how fit he still was, still able to scramble up in between the branches as if it was nothing. Maybe this fruit has some magical properties to it that keeps old age symptoms at bay (or people in the 'developed' countries are too comfortable in an unhealthy lifestyle). During midday the festival officially started with a parade passing through the centre of the town. Many cars had been decorated with different accessories that resembled the fruit in some way. On top of these cars were little girls that danced to the beat of the loud champeta music while throwing ciruela to the people standing on both sides of the narrow streets. In the end of this procession we reached a big area in front of a stage from which loud music was blaring. The little girls, which I forgot to mention were dressed up in all sorts of costumes meaning to resemble the fruit in some way, usually just including the colours red and green seemed to be enough, were now climbing up to the stage. It transformed into a little contest, I guess the equivalent in english would be a beauty contest. However here they look for 'the queen', and in this case 'the queen of the ciruela'. After the little girls had been 'presented' (that is what it felt like anyway - one of them was so young that she could hardly walk and had to be held up by her mother) the older 'queens' of the surrounding areas presented themselves. There was to be a big crowning ceremony on the main day of the festival for the 'queen'.

The main day of the festival was on Sunday and with about 70.000 people passing through from around the area the little town of Campeche was completely packed. Everyone had now got their big sound system out and was blaring anything from european 90s music to traditional music from the caribbean coast. Masses of people were passing through the narrow streets through which me and the film-crew did a few rounds for some raw footage. After that the situation changed for me a little bit and became quite difficult to go anywhere without people asking for a picture with me. Only with the help of the crew I was able to get out of some of these situations when lines had started forming. How surreal it felt. There was a moment where I felt particularly out of place when some of the artisans that I had gotten to know while busking, were selling their artwork just in front of the restaurant we were eating in. It felt like just a few days ago it would have been me walking up to these people sitting in that very restaurant to do some busking. After having finished our lunch we head to the stage where the 'queens' now presented their costumes and dancing skills to get some more points from the crowd. There I ran into Jessica, the woman that had taken me to a model shoot just a few days earlier happened to also be there. Originally she was meant to participate as the queen of one the surrounding regions but after not having any time to prepare any costumes for the show she cancelled it. However I met up with her again a little later and we headed to the another, much larger stage which had been prepared for the final crowning - it seemed to be a massive deal. There the the celebration really started with popular musicians from the coast showing off the local music. I got to practise some of the local dances with Jessica before the crowning took place. At about 1am the 'queen' was finally decided on - it hadn't really been worth waiting three hours for, but we had to film it nevertheless. Hence we only got back to Barranquilla at 2:30am. Too much sun, a lot of brain activity due to constantly having to translate everything in my head in addition to all the dancing and the outgoing and energetic way in which I am supposed to behave caused my low energy levels to show. To the extent that the next morning I couldn't even remember getting into bed. I wouldn't have thought that this job would take so much energy.