Duuude!!!!

Arriving back in Bogota after my whirl-wind introduction to the familia Bejarano-Sanchez, it was quite a relief to just cool out and relax a little bit after being on the go and jet-lagged for the past week. For a the next few days we pretty much just hung out at cata’a place and made small voyages into the centre of the city and other areas of interest to catch up with cata’s friends and, more importantly, eat.

It was during the week of self indulgence that my sinful love affair with the Colombian standard, Bandeja Paisa, began. I cant remember why we were out, but we needed a place for lunch, so Consuelo suggested a place nearby called Las Acasias, that specialised in Antioquian cuisine. Antioquia is an area in the mountainous heart of the country that is famous primarily for two things: Coffee and Pablo Escobar, the now very dead former drug trafficker who called Antioqia’s capital, Medellin, home.

Antioquian quisine is very popular all over Colombia, so you regularly see signs at restaurants with pictures of Mustachiod men in white clothes and broadbrimmed flagging you in to try the goodness. Las Acasias was no different, and as we were seated a little rush of exitement swept over my body in anticipation of finally trying the dish that I had heard so much about both in Oz and in Colombia. In spanish, the word bandeja = tray, and paisa = slang for a person from the Antioquian region, but a more accurate translation would be bandja meaning fucking, and paisa meaning massive plate of tasty shit that will clog you up for 3 days before you discharge something the size of a house brick.

This is no joke. When my plate came I actually peed just a little bit, i was that excited. This thing was HUGE!!!! Having already nailed a bowl of meat and potato soup, a couple of arepa’s (tasty lil’ cornflour patties) and two glasses of sangria, I was a unsure as to wether I could tackle this beast and come out on top. I mean, when it comes to food, I don’t fuck around. I can smash a couple of Ultimate whoppers no probs and fuck off a large pizza with the lot easy, but this shit was something else.

The plate alone was the size of the steering wheel in a semi-trailer, and was packed to the edges with rice, shredded beef, beans, a whole fucken fried platano (like a banana but bigger), a chorizo, a morcilla, chincharon (pork crackling but meatier), avocado, arepas and topped of with a fried egg. FUCK!! I didn’t know wether to cry in joy or pain. I felt like Steve Erkel fronting up to Mike Tyson. This thing was BIG. Not only big, but heavy. This thing would sink the country if they weren’t careful, and apparently in the countryside the serve ’em BIGGER! WHAT??!!!

The story goes that after working in the coffee fields all morning, the workers would be so hungry that the needed something more subsantial than bread and hot chocolate to satisfy their ravenous appetites, and so some genius paisa lady (and it definatly was a lady, cos Colombian men just DO NOT cook in the same way that Aussie men DO NOT drink vodka cruisers or UDL’s) came up with this feat of culinary brilliance. And what a feat it was….

Half way through  I was feeling full. I ate all the goodies first: the egg, chicharon, chorizo and morcilla, spicing ’em up with a little beans and rice, but that was my downfall. The problem is you are lured in by all the tasty meats, and so once youve got these down you’re already feeling pretty full. You then look down at your plate and realise youve still got a sea of rice, beans and shredded beef to get through, not to mention the arepas and avocado. SHIIIIITTTTT!!!!!

So, there I was, faced with a battle that I wasn’t sure I could win, but not ready to accept failure in a new and challenging land…

I’m not sure wether it was the jetlag or a delirum caused by an over-indulgence of fried meat, but all of a sudden I was transported back 5 or 6 years ago, to a pub in Adelaide where they served these massive chicken parmigana’s the size of a lounge cushion, topped with three different types of meat. I friend had taken me there, and I recalled watching him mop up the remains of his parmie with a slice of bread before getting up and heading to the salad bar, as I sat there with half of mine still sitting unscathed on the plate.

Somehow, seeing my friend slay this beast with such ease brought up a sense of envy in me that forced me to eat on and finish this monster off, regardless of the consequences. I am an egotistical person and dont like to be outdone. It’s not that I’m a sore loser, I just have a problem with not winning, not being the Alpha, just as all men (yes ALL men) do, and as my mind resurfaced back into the restaurant in Bogota, that same feeling from years ago came back to me as I looked around the room.

Business men were nailing their meals with the ease of experience in this cuisine, and I wanted in! A second wind (litterally. I mean, beans, c’mon?) came over me and I raised my fork and attacked the plate like a leashless pitbull in a kindergarden, relentlessly, taking no prisoners!

But, alas, it was not to be. Personally, I blame the appetisers, but that is a poor excuse, and a put my fork down and raised my hands in defeat as a small portion of beans and rice stared back at me, a sense of calm came over me: I was a beginner in a sea of champions. I had just got here, less than week of the plane, how could I compete with the stomachs of a race brought up on a steady diet of meat and beans with the modern Australian wank of gourmet hamburgers, rocket leaf and red-wine jus?

Tasty as they are, a glutton trained on this diet can’t compete with the likes of these titans. It’d be like a bare-knuckle fighter being trained in ballet!

“Calm yourself young soldier.” I told myself as the waiter removed my disgrace from the table, “You have four months more to prepare.”

And with that, made it my mission, no, not my mission, but my duty, to leave Colombia as a champion of the plate. Chefs and cooks alike would cower in my presence, and no dish would be left intact. It would be mine. Oh yes, it would be mine…..

Having witnessed central and suburban Bogota in all it’s manaical glory, I was roused out of bed at 5am in the morning so we could get a head start on the traffic en route to Cata’s parent’s rest house just outside of the “sleepy” little pueblo of Sylvania, about two hours south of the capital.

I had known about this little voyage for a couple of months now. Consuelo had told us over the phone in Australia that she was planning a big, family get together so the extended family, about 40 of ’em, could welcome back Cata and meet me. From what cata had told me, apparently I was going to be a bit of a guest of honor, which didn’t really do much to relax me about the whole situation, especially when I was about to meet 40 of her family and spend two days with them knowing about as much spanish as a pissed monkey.

My mates will guffaw at this, but I don’t really enjoy being the centre of attention in any situation, unless im maggoted, let alone one that involves the family of my girlfriend. BUT, this said, with the very positive experience I had so far with cata’s family, as we set out that morning I really wasn’t that worried at all. All I had to do was eat barbeque, drink beer and be nice…..easy, thats pretty much my life philosophy summed up in a few words…except when im punching the fuck out of real estate agents.

We got on the road in two seperate cars: Cata and me with Consuelo in her Mazda hatchback and Felix riding solo in his sedan whatever-it-is. Both cars had to stop on the way to pick up members of the fam. Felix had the duty of collecting some visiting Italianos who were some how related (fucked if I know how) and us Cata’s cousin Adri, her mum Yolanda and her two small kids, Juli and Sofi. So all up thats seven of us in a hatchback. Sweet.

The Apartment complex where Adri and her parents live, in seperate flats mind you, was about 20 traffic jammed minutes away in a lovely leafy, green area of Bogota. On the way Cata informed me that her granparents had lived in the same building as well for many years until they passed away a few years ago, so it had a bit of sentimental value for the whole family. Property is a weird thing in Colombia, a lot sales and rents still go via private avenues, so it’s not uncommon to see vacant plots of land or buildings with big signs saying “NOT FOR SALE, NOT FOR RENT, NOT FOR USE” or something like that. This is because it has become increasingly regular for land/properties to be sold off by very sophisticated scam artists who don’t actually own the said area to very unsuspecting people who now share claim to the land with another person/persons. Suss as.

Seeing this was a grim reminder of some of the less desirable elements of the country which, considering we ourselves are looking to buy property here sometime in the near future, made me very thankful that I did have a posse of well heeled Colombians on my side.

We got to Adri’s at about 6.30am and I was introduced to her mum Yolanda, her dad Jairo, who is about the biggest Colombian I have met yet, and her two her two kids Juli, 4, and Sofi, 3, who did what most small children do when they set eyes upon me for the first time: start bawling. The female portion of the Fam and I set out once the little ones relaxed and realised their life wasn’t at threat, leaving behind Jairo, who was going to make his own way up later on. Adri’s husband Alejandro, who I was yet to meet, was working as were about 6 or 7 others, which meant that my quota of ‘mucho gustos’ was considerably lessened.

Driving south out of Bogota was a pretty full on experience for me. Having only been in the ritzier north and central parts of the city, it was shocking to see quality of life visibly decrease before my eyes as we drove along. The green, nature stripped roads morphed into smoggy, crowded 4 lane highways and the houses and businesses lining them gradually became more and more decrepit and dishevelled. Eventually, as we got further south, only the facades of the first row of building seem to have been made with some sort of knowledge in construction, and the soft-top dirt roads that ran between them led up to the shanty town, slums that covered the hills behind them, similar to Brazilian favelas but without the pretty colours or romanticised charm.

Hundred of people commuted on the streets eating breakfast or bought meat at whole sections of highway converted into open air Butcher’s, or waited patiently in long queues for public transport. This wasn’t the type of poverty that you might see in Africa or the Afghanistan with starvation and disease, but the living conditions in these parts were a world away from what some might call ‘poverty’ in developed nations. Looking at all this for the first time one thing kept running my mind as I’m sure it would with anybody who grew up privelidged in a western country, and that was how glad, not not glad, how extremely fucking LUCKY I was to be born where I was.

So attention all you dickhead, Aussie hip-hop, wannbe hard cunts all over the world who keep talking about “growing up rough” and all that bullshit, come to Colombia and check this out, you would’nt survive a day in places like this, so quit the act and be thankful that, even if some of your life has been tough (who the fuck doesn’t have problems?), you didn’t have to deal with that shit in a dangerous slum with out sewerage or running water.

As we began to pass through the outskirts of Bogota and the traffic thinned out and the landscape slowly became more and more un-developed, Consuelo told me, via transaltion from cata, that many of the houses covering the hills we had just passed were built by farmers and other such people who had been displaced due to Guerilla occupation of the country side and Narcotic activity. Not being able to work safely in their pueblos, thay came to the city for jobs but, obviously, found that the reality was much less rosy. It might be cool in the west to look at drug dealing and leftist militias as some sort of romanticised act of rebellion against equally corrupt governments who are enslaving the people via democratised dictatorship, which in a very thin sense has some truth to it, but the reality is that ideology and guns dont mix (like two dicks and no chix! Sorry.) on either side of things and the Colombian public have been paying for this for decades.

Have have met shitloads of Colombians in the years that i have known Cata, and the one thing that has resonated from all of them is the efforts the country and its people have made to shake their reputation as a nation of drug dealers and violent, kidnapping militias as is widely publicised in the western media. So, if you ever meet a Colombian, do yourself a favor and don’t play up to the stereotypes like an ignorant dickhead. Trust me, I know, I still have sensitive areas in my groin as a result of Catalina and one too many coke jokes.

By the time my dubious attempt at making some serious and insightful commentary on the social climate in Colombia had crashed like Haitian high-rise, we were descending through a hilly, rural area outside of Bogota and getting closer to our destination. Coming from Australia where a “rural area” basically means an area with fuck all but a couple of farms, service station and a pub, it was pretty interesting to see how much activity was going on. Every 5 minutes or so there would be whole clusters of shops, mainly restaurants, selling everything from bread to cane furniture. There were heaps of cows just chillin’ on the side of the road (not behind fences, literally on the side of the road), heaps of dogs and amazing valleys and hillsides of sub-tropical flora.

Now I was in postcard South America. Seriously. If I had an image Colombia in my mind before i left it was something akin to this. With all the spanish chatter going on between the ladies and giggling of the kids coming from the back seat i was able to zone out and lose myself in the scenery as we winded downard through the hills.

Silvania is approximately 1km lower in altitude than Bogota so the temperature was beginning to become more like what I had expected in my ignorance and, just as a few beads of sweat began to form on my brow, i was jolted out of my daydream by the cry of “SILVANIA!!!” form Consuelo. Here we were, in the town cata had once described as a “shithole”. If this were true, I thought, i can’t wait to get to a place she actually likes.

It was only about ten in the morning, but already the palm lined streets were filled with people running errands, doing the shopping or just chilling out the front of there homes, and old men sat drinking beers or soft drink in the little bars that lined the main strip. The thing that got me about this place was the colour. All the little shopfronts were painted a rustic pink, blue, red or green, bi-coloured beer umbrellas jutted out everywhere and the produce and groceries on display were so bright and saturated that it nearly made me puke.

Silvania is in no way touristy or or sleek, which added to my initial fondness of the place and, judging by the stares i was getting, i was probably the first cracka any of these dudes had seen in a fair while. Crossing the town only took  a few minutes (it’s small but not sleepy, like a midget on ice) and soon we were on a one laned, pot holed road on the way to the rest house, avoiding horses, live stock and small children.

10 minutes later we arraived at the gates of casa Bejarano and, holy shit, was i stoked.

“DUUUUUDE!!!! This palce is fucking massive!!!”, was the first thing that came out of my mouth.

I then realised that i probably shouldn’t use expletetives in front of small children and my future mother in law, but then I realised they dont understand english, so fuck it.

“This is fucked…HOLY FUCK….look at this view!!”

“Yes, baby, i know, it’s beautiful. Please stop saying fuck.”

“Oh, shit, sorry georgeous. It’s just that this place is fucking insane.”

“ZAAAAACK, NOOOO!”

But seriously, this joint was crazy, like, Rick James crazy. I couldnt believe we were staying here. I had seem pictures but they did very little justice to the actual reality of the place. The rest house is a three level, white washed villa with a roof of red clay tiles, a BBQ gazebo and a massive red tiled patio/balcony area with a ludicrously georgeous view of the valley and mountains that seperate Silvania from Fusagasuga, it’s somewhat larger neighboring town. The villa was the type of place that would be rented out for a European matchmaking reality TV show, without the Euro sleazyness.

The villa was not only where we would be spending much of our downtime away from the bustle of Bogota, but it was alos where Cata and me planned to get married, so I couldn’t have been happier. It beat the shit out of a church.

We got all our stuff inside and were stoked to see breakfast already being prepared. 10 minutes later we were sitting down to a meal of Caldo (beef and potato soup with coriander), areapas con queso, hot chocolate and cheese. Oh, yeah. Colombia is like a non stop porn channel for food, and not long after brekky was done the fam started preparing for the asado (colombian for fucking awesome BBQ). The rest of the family rocked up slowly, as did a couple of neighbors and I was introduced slowly and pleasantly, trying to be as eloquent as possible with my loose grasp of the language and slight shine on from the three beers I had downed after brekky. Again, the fam were as cool as hyper-colour shirts and nintendo were in the early 90’s, so things were slammin’.

Cata and me lay on a blanket surrounded by fruit tree’s and talked shit with the rello’s, drank beer and messed around with the kids as the smells from the asado drifted over us. Consuelo had given me a sneak peek of what was on the menu for the day and, I can tell you, it was nothing short of being spoogingly good. Corn, potato, guacamole, platano (fried banana), steaks, chorizo and morcilla (blood sausage filled with rice, peas and spices) all washed down with big, cold glasses of Refaho (I think thats the name?), which is beer mixed with a Colombian soft drink called, ever so creatively, Colombiana. So good.

Breakfast had barely digested before all this was served up, but I couldnt have given a shit. I don’t believe in eating responsibly or sparingly so I was all over this puppy. Australians are pretty proud of our BBQing skills and, shit yeah, they do kick arse, but comparing this to an Aussie BBQ was like comparing a Sherman tank to Ute. It’ll just get rolled over. Colombain food is like Slayer, heavy, and the locals sure know how to put it away. Cata’s uncle’s, and a couple of her Aunties too, were going back for thirds when all I wanted to do was take a dump and go to sleep.

And that I did.

I woke up at about 6pm still full from the OD of meat a fews hours ago. I made my way down stairs, grabbed a beer from the fridge and took a seat on the patio with everyone else. By this stage everyone was either sleeping or drinking, having just slept there was only on option for me so I took up a post with Jairo and his son Andres, who had arraived while I was sleeping. Bad move. As i found out the hard way, these two are the smartarses of the family and, being a few beers deep and a little jolly, decided to get their kicks by fucking with me and my shit spanish.

“Zack: Changua.”

“Que es changua?”

“Chorizo?”

“Chincharon”

“Que?

“Chicha”

“Que? No entiendo”

“HAHAHAHAHAH”

“what the fuck…..”

And on and on and on for three hours until I was drunk and exhausted from trying to decipher their crazy shit. On top of this the Italians (who spoke spanish) were getting in on it as well, so my brain was going from spanish to english to italian back to spanish all while trying to keep a sober front. There isn’t much you can do in a situation like this except sit there and take it on the chin and accept that you are the foreigner and thus, the piss must be taken. Fair enough. It was pretty fun anyway, Jairo is a good dude and it turns out that Andres is a fellow metal head so, in between getting ripped on, we discussed the finer points of thrash in broken spanish/english. Metalleros por vida!

With my brain well and truly rooted from the days activties, at least 9 Aguilas and four hours of spanish, I bidded Buenos Noches to everyone and headed off to bed, keeping one eye open just in case Jairo and Andres got any ideas.

Unlike the previous night/mornings death sleep, jet lag had caused me to wake up several times during the night, and i had awoken, unable to drift off again, at somewhere around what i guessed was about four in the morning. ... [Continue reading this entry]