Cartagena

This week we’ve had a delegation from the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship of the U.S. visiting the church in Barranquilla, and I’ve been tagging along on their activities around the city. Cartagena is an old town on the Colombian coast, about an hour and a half from Barranquilla, that historically served as a Spanish port for the shipment of gold, and on Tuesday we drove there to meet with representatives from a Human Rights organization associated with La Universidad de Cartagena.


After the meeting, however, we had time to play, to explore the old walled-in city, visit the shops, and most exciting for me, watch a bit of the filming of the movie adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Amor en Los Tiempos de Cholera (Love in the Time of Cholera), which I just read a few weeks ago. The old town park was filled with cameras, horses, and folks wearing period costumes.


At the end of the day, we ate dinner on the beach overlooking the sunset. From now on, these colorful beads will represent, to me, the peaceful and beautiful Colombian coast. The ceramic necklaces are a traditional craft of folks living on the Caribbean near the town of Santa Marta, and vendors with armloads of necklaces walk up and down the sands selling them to beachgoers. We watched the swimmers, these vendors, and the waves until the owner of the beach-front restaurant rode his motorcycle to the water’s edge to invite us in for dinner.