(From Jach): (Colombia #12): I thought I was done with my - TopicsExpress



          

(From Jach): (Colombia #12): I thought I was done with my sketches of Colombia, but I guess Colombia wasn’t done with me. Last night, we drove into an area of Cali that I’ve always found mysterious and intriguing. There is something sensuous and alluring there, and it’s also notorious for being a dangerous area of the city. Enter with caution. It was dark. The area, so close to our home, is called San Antonio. Our destination was the Cali Theater. We were going to a Marimba concert. The group of four musicians: “Tamborimba.” To me, San Antonio has a resonance that is a mix of New Orleans, Venice, San Francisco, Soho, Tribeca, and the somewhat seedy sections of any major city in the world. The streets are narrow and daunting. They are also steep. Cali is a city nestled in the Cauca Valley amid the foothills of the western arm of the Andes Mountains. San Antonio is full of hills, and at the peak of one of them, there’s a church with a park filled with vendors selling their wares. The buildings of San Antonio range from shabby to run down and all the way to abandoned. The people follow the same continuum except for one additional group: the very wealthy. San Antonio used to be a declining area filled with people lost in poverty or homeless, drunks, addicts, and those who slipped through the cracks or the gaps in society. The area was slipping into despair and extinction. Maybe it had already slipped there. In the evolution of many major cities, there is a reclamation process where wealth people and developers go in an area and buy up abandoned properties for nothing and then promote the area as hip and trendy. The monied people or the wannabe monied people buy in and prices go up. Resurrection. Well, that sort of happened in San Antonio. The poor are still there. They wander the streets by day and sit on the stoops well into the night. And there are trendy restaurants and bars on every block and some of them are sensational. There are fashionable boutiques next to smelly little hole-in-the-wall “fast liquor” stores. Behind the shabby facades with peeling paint and chipped walls with rusty wrought iron barred windows, there are tiny shabby little homes housing six to ten people, with bluish lights, broken tile floors, and slow rotating ceiling fans. Behind doors that look the same, there are elegant lush court yards with elaborate water features, orchids and other exotic plants growing on trees that are 20 to 30 feet tall. There are open air kitchens with the latest high tech appliances, and dining rooms with no roofs and living rooms with no walls and swimming pools. There are grand staircases leading to second story bedrooms with ceilings that are 25 feet high and individual bathrooms with huge showers that seem more like greenhouses. These places are furnished with the latest designs from London, Paris, New York. Stunning. Excessive. Embarrassing. We parked on a steep hill and curbed our wheels. We walked two blocks to the little Cali Theater. We were about 10 minutes late but everyone was still in the lobby. They opened the theater doors 10 minutes later. It was a small theater with small seat, but every seat had a great view of the stage. It was a simple stage. Black walls. Black side curtains. Lights. Nothing more. Three marimbas were on the stage. Based on the length of the pipes, one was a base, another sounded the notes in the mid-range, and the third focused on the high notes. There was a set of drums with cymbals and other percussion instruments. The musicians, two men, two women, entered the stage, took their positions, and entertained us for nearly 90 minutes. The music, oh the music . . . what a delight. There were only 100, maybe 120, of us, but it was as if they were playing for thousands or for royalty. The joy, the movement, the sounds. Incredible. After a standing ovation and three encores “otra, otra, otra,”we walked out into the night smiling, happy, at peace. It was my first experience with marimba music. It will not be my last. And it was another memorable Friday evening in Colombia. I keep saying it: I love this place.
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 15:37:49 +0000

Trending Topics



Recently Viewed Topics




© 2015