Medellín through bullet points

There are people who make lists and I think it’s very fun to approach life through bullet points. It’s another kind of creativity exercise.

So let me give you a random list of observations from Medellín.

• there’s a lot of nature in the city. The green and colours of the plants are so bright, that it seems they are yelling “hey, we are here, we want to grow, to be wild and free”.

• people do inline skating everywhere. Colombia is the country that wins most inline skating competitions in the world. There are many events and sometimes you see big groups of people roller skating passing by. It seems that whenever they have the chance, a bunch of people go skating.

• bike lanes cover many parts of the city. The metro and the cable cars are clean and smooth. The metro can get extremely busy during rush hour. In general, you can tell a lot has been invested in the infrastructure which makes it possible for people to move around the city. Also, in some working-class neighbourhoods, which were less accessible before, there are escalators and cable cars to make commute easier.

• for Christmas, they hang giant decorations over the river. When celebrating Christmas, people from Medellín go big. They fill up the whole river with huge figures hanging from cables which are elevated over the water. I got to see a few of them when I arrived in the city since they hadn’t put all of them down at the time and it was very impressive!

• you can drink tap water. I found that surprising because most of the time when I have travelled to other places in Latin America, that’s not possible if you don’t want to end up sick from your stomach. In those places you either buy bottled water or add a filter to the tap like they often do in Brazil. But in Medellín that’s not needed.

• people wear long pants even though it is hot. The heat isn’t extreme, that’s why they call it the city of the eternal spring. It still can get hot under the sun though, but pretty much everyone wears long pants.

• there’s music everywhere, in stores, bars, cafés or just people with speakers playing music. You might enter a supermarket, there is salsa playing and the employees are singing while working.

• Provenza is one of the most well known neighbourhoods of Medellín. It is the place where many people, specially most foreigners, go partying. Funny enough, there are multiple perfume stores open 24 hours. You can let your mind be creative on the reasons why one might urgently want to buy a perfume at 3am.

• many towns have the same names as in Spain like Segovia, Granada or even one that has the name of my hometown, Pamplona! There is a mall called Vizcaya, which is a province in Spain near Pamplona and I found it quite interesting as well.

• Colombia is one of the countries with the highest number of plastic surgeries in the world. Many women have done interventions which you can often notice. The ones that can be obvious are breasts, glutes, lips and different face ones.

• people are very warm. It has been very easy to get to know people. Paisas, the people from Medellín, are welcoming and friendly. Having grown up in a different atmosphere, it is amusing that total strangers call you mor (the short form of amor which means love). It is also common that people call you early on baby or amiga (friend).

• champeta is a popular Afro-Caribbean dance here which involves many small jumps. When you look at videos, it looks very fun. People are smiling, dancing and seem to move in an effortless way. When I try to do it, it seems I am loosing it and the movements don’t look rhythmic, coordinated or balanced. Maybe after some time I will get it.

• there are more language exchanges than I have ever seen in my life and many dance classes for expats.

• many words have different meanings here than in Spain, for example the word they use in Spain for cute, they use it here for blond. So I guess I am constantly cute now. The word we use in Spain for red wine, they use it here for black coffee, tinto. It’s kind of funny to go in the morning to a coffee place, and ask for a “red wine”. There are other words which are completely different, for example crispetas which means pop-corn and sounds cute.

• it is forbidden by law in Cali (another city, but I found it impressive) that two adult men drive in the same motorcycle. This is to reduce the amount of criminality in the city since many of the cases were with two adult men on a motorcycle.

Being here has been a roller coaster in different ways. I am longing to stay in one place long term but the whole job situation makes me fight on a daily basis to find a company to work at. Once I have some monetary certainty, comes the next part of building a home. I have been doing on average one interview a day the last weeks, some are technical ones which I prepare for hours. Even at times, I need to develop a small project for them in order to showcase my technical knowledge.

A friend of mine has been hosting me. It has been really fun to exchange with him about recruitment processes. That’s one of the benefits of spending time with like-minded people. We talk about recruiters, the communication style that sometimes is used and the nonsense that more often than one would like comes with selection processes.

Probably this selection process has been the toughest in my life because there have been three companies already that made promises which were not kept.

One company told me the process would take two or three interviews. Well, I have done seven interviews with them already. At some point they even told me if I could start next week, that was around a month ago. It made me feel very confused because I knew that there were more interviews coming up. I still don’t know anything about them, I have called the HR contact person multiple times but this whole situation has made me feel very demotivated. In a couple of those interviews, they even told me that they loved my profile because I could develop in Go and speak German, which were both very demanded in that company.

In another company I had passed the interviews and they told me that in a couple of days I would have an answer from their side. It has been over two weeks and the headhunter keeps telling me that he still doesn’t have any news.

The third one had a similar conduct. I did four interviews with them. One included a two-hour technical interview. They told me that after two days they would get back to me. Since they didn’t, I waited till the end of the third day to ask them what the status was. The reply was that they still didn’t know if they were going to hire a new developer or not, that they were looking into the budget. I receive this message after having applied to an open position, having gone through all of the interviews and having spent a considerable amount of time in interview preparation and in getting to know the company.

It feels like a slap in the face. It makes me feel like I can’t trust anyone anymore.

This has been draining a lot of my mental energy. There is the uncertainty that comes as well with not knowing whether I will stay in Colombia or if I will need to go back to Europe to work. Uncertainty holding my hand tightly since I left Germany over two years ago. It is a mental exercise that I keep reminding myself, it requires unsexy patience.

Have a good week.

I love you very much world,

Julia