Cartagena

So, i arrived in Cartagena on Saturday. Stayed in a pretty lame hostel, read a lot. Got reacquainted with being in Latin America. On Sunday night I took two of my roommates to go on a traditional Chiva. A Chiva is an open bus/truck with a live band. The music is the typical Caribbean coastal music called Vallenato. Its heavy with accordion and actually sounds pretty good. There is a person on the mic in the front of the bus telling jokes, explaining the historic sites and then cueing up the band, which sits in the middle of the chiva. So they have this dance contest where the girls and then en the guys from each row get up and shake their bonbons. Well, I just have to say I represented the US and NY pretty damn well. Oh, did I mention the bottles of rum they give while driving around... this country knows how to have fun that´´s for sure. So we stop on the walls of Old Cartagena. The whole old colonial city is surrounded by a gi-normous wall with canons. The chiva brought us to the top of one part of the wall where there were various people to try to extract your tourist pesos( due to Colombia´s reputation, most of the tourists in Colombia are from other Colombian cities). One of the highlights on this trip was this amazing Afro-Caribbean dance troupe. There wasnt much light so the pictures don´t do it justice. The other highlight/lowlight was this endangered sloth that some dude was carrying around to take pictures with. They are really weird looking but it was sad that people can just take these animals and try to make $ off of them. Then again, if a person is poor and trying to get money for their family, does the flash of a camera annoying an endangered species not justify the situation? That´s not for my gringo-ass to judge... needless to say, I respectfully declined to take a picture of or with the sloth, much to the chagrin of it´s ¨keeper¨ I want to include a picture and tell about the rest of the night. I will return later today with my camera to get some pics and videos. Be well ....