Photos from Year 1

Our Apartment

Calle 64 #7-62 Apto 1104

Edificio Concorde

Baden's first room.  Best room in the house!

You can't really tell from this photo, but our master bedroom is quite large, has an ensuite bathroom.  The horrendous bedspread was provided for us by CNG.  We've since gotten a new one.

Front of Concorde

Cyclovia on Septima

View of Lourdes from our office window

Year 2

We have been here now for 15 months.  Pretty set on staying for at least a total of four years, so that would mean through the school year of 2015.  Right now it's storming and raining, not exactly encouraging me to want to stay.... but the weather for the first 2 months of school was quite lovely.  Last year when the rain started (around the same exact time last year) I got really bummed because I didn't know that we would go through really awesome weather too.  

At this point in time, we are really enjoying our jobs.  Dave and I both find our positions fulfilling and by and large truly love the folks we get to work with.  In fact, I feel such a strong sense of community here among the international teachers.  I guess also connecting with other teachers who are parents doesn't hurt!

Baden continues to love jardin, and we continue to love having him attend Arca de Noe.  He is attending five days a week, three half-days (8ish-noon) and two full days 8ish-3:30).  He's having fun, learning a lot, and staying very active-- extremely important for this little boy and for his parents' sanity.

Baden won't start CNG until our fourth year here.  We're pretty much ok with this since by then he will have received three years of total immersion in Spanish in pre-school; CNG is not a bilingual school with primary instruction in English and a few hours a day in Spanish. 

Izaura is at home with Alex during the day.  She is just a sweet happy little thing.  Not quite so extroverted as her big bro-- but most of us aren't.  We plan to send her to Arca for half-day starting next August.  

We are often having the conversation "where will we go...."  In fact, this is a conversation we have with many of our coworkers.  Guess it's part of the mindset.  More and more we are settled here in Bogota despite not being in love with the city itself.  There are so many factors outweighing the bad: great jobs, great childcare and help, great pre-school, great opportunity to learn Spanish, cyclovia, mini-trips out of Bogota, great new friends.  Makes being here doable.  

When I think about where we go next, I don't necessarily have a specific country in mind so much as specific priorities for our living arrangements.  I want us to be near green space, either with a yard or near a park or in a building with a courtyard.  Getting outside here can be a hassle and I feel limited to going out at specific times especially when I'm with the kids.  Like sometimes, I wish I could just take Baden out for a short while in the late afternoon/early evening, but it doesn't happen.  Closest park is a 15 minute walk (Gimnasio Moderno- which I'm working on getting daily access to).  

There is so much I need to backtrack and start archiving on this blog-- like the birth of our daughter!  More to come.

People ask us how long do we plan on staying overseas. We usually say something along the lines of, "Well we have a contract for 2 years, but we plan on at least 4 years..." We're not trying to sell everything and live overseas for a short while. I'm thinking 8-10 years. I hear you can fall in love with the life. We'll be making less money but saving more!?!? Living in the Bay Area, the thought boggles the mind. You gotta have some bank to live well in the Bay Area. Property prices are obscene even after the housing bubble burst. I've also become more and more interested in living in a place like Vietnam or Amsterdam or Addis Ababa.

So beyond the exciting idea of our future, the nitty gritty is we got to really start to move shit. We've freecycled and craigslisted a number of things already. I've opened up a storage unit and now we just have to start moving things into the unit. I'm trying to go for at least one trip a weekend to the storage unit. Just get things there. But the hardest part is getting the stuff there. Every time we move something out of the house and just reduce the clutter that much more, I get excited. I'm ready to start my Latin American adventure with AL and Mr. Babyman. 

Apostilles, condos and our tempurpedic

You know what the fuck an apostille is? I had no idea until we got the checklist of paperwork that we have to gather. An apostille is like an international notarization. We gots to go to Sacramento to get an apostille. It's super deluxe. I was even pronouncing it wrong till I talked to my cousin, M&M. There is all this paperwork that we have to gather, notarize, and apostille. It's kind of absurd. And wouldn't you know it, my passport expired. So now I've got to pay $110 and wait for it to come back. Mr. Babyman also needs a passport. We have to create a personnel file and make a file for a Colombian work visa. Paperwork sucks. I hate dealing with bureaucracy. I always think of that Oscar Wilde quote, "Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."

I'm also meeting with realtors to talk about selling our condo. I'm thinking we would leave for Bogota on July 22. July 20th is Bogota's Independence Day. I don't want to arrive on that day or the following hangover day.


The only major item that we're thinking about shipping is our tempurpedic mattress. It is arguably the best material good we own. Everything else goes into a 5 X 5 storage unit. Been on craigslist trying to sell everything we can. It's kind of cleansing and freeing. We collect a lot of stuff in this world and become overly attached to that stuff.

Just a weird thing to think about

So the school that we're going to be teaching at is the school that mbh's brother went to for kindergarten when mbh's family randomly lived in Bogota. We may even live in the same neighborhood as mbh's parents did because it's within 15-20 minutes of our new school.  Of all the schools and positions that we've applied for, we get a job in Bogota Colombia. That's some weird ass shit.

Holy Shit! We're moving to Bogotá!

Every so often throughout the day I'll just trip on that. We've got 5 months to get our shit together and move to Colombia for at least the next 2 years. Now it's all about getting rid of shit... and we've collected a lot of shit.



So we got the Lonely Planet and Bradt guides to Colombia. I just read that Lonely Planet's USA headquarters is based out of Oakland California. Pretty fucking cool. I never heard of Bradt but just found out that it's British. Just a different way of looking at the same thing.


The one thing that I am a bit apprehensive about in Colombia is being a vegetarian. I'm actually lucky because I think it will be ok in Bogota. It won't be great like the Bay Area but it will be pretty damn good for Latin America. On www.happycow.net you can find vegetarian restaurants all over the world. Bogota has 26 locations for veggie/vegans restaurants or stuff like dat. I have made a vow to myself to visit each and every one of them. I've always had this dream of being an international food critic and when I went vegetarian it changed to international vegetarian food critic. Bourdain got a bad ass life of travel. But I'm going to go to every location and then review it on happy cow. Then through the magic of the internets, I will be living the dream. Live the dream baby. <insert turntable scratch>


But you know people the world over use some lard to cook shit. And I know that when I ask, some people will just lie to me because they will. People do shit like that. It is what it is. Oh yeah fyi, I'm a lacto-ovo vegetarian. I just don't have the will to go vegan. Shit is too damn hard.


So in my devouring of all things related to Bogota, I learned about this former mayor of Bogota named Antanas Mockus. This guy is rapidly becoming one of my cultural heroes. He helped to change the culture of Bogota. I'm really interested in hearing what people say on the ground.

Check out this Danish documentary about Antanas Mockus and Enrique Penalosa. It tells an interesting story about a cultural change of a city. I think a lot about how to change culture in my school and Oakland. It's a hard fucking thing. Mockus and Penalosa were leaders in the culture change of Bogota. It's inspiring like Tunisia and Egypt.

2nd day of interviews

The night after our first day I signed up for this website called international school review. It's a website that allows for teachers to post up reviews of the schools anonymously. I learned about it from another teacher at the IRC.  It costs $29 to sign up but I figured it would be worth it. All the while I kept in mind to take the website with a grain of salt. People that are unhappy are the ones that are more likely to post up reviews. People that are happy don't tend to bother as much. After looking at it though, I decided to not go with the Casablanca American School. First, the school came to the IRC totally late to the game. They weren't even on the list of schools attending. Then, they had more than 10 jobs to fill. Why so many jobs? Seems like there was a mass exodus of teachers. Finally, after looking at the International schools reviews, it kind of confirmed my gut feeling. The school wasn't going to be the right fit for us.


So we got to the IRC at around 9am in the morning. We could take more time that day because we didn't have any interviews set up and there wasn't much going on except for second interviews and then second interview sign up opportunities at 12:30. When we got there, we immediately checked our mailbox. We had a note from the school in Beirut.


When mbh had interviewed for her position the day before, it was done knowing that they had already offered the position to someone else and that the school was waiting to hear back from that person. However, when I had interviewed with the really cool headmaster later on that day, he really took a liking to us and seemed really interested in hiring us. He had even set up a second interview for the following day. At one point in the interview when his phone went off, he turned to mbh and said "I think you're job just opened up." He was a real jokester and was making a bunch of playful jokes at my expense which was a real good sign. The headmaster even went over how much we would get paid at the school and how much we could save based upon our experience. No one did that in our first interview.


Anyways, the note said that the other person had accepted the job mbh wanted and that the headmaster could not in good conscience offer me the job because we wouldn't be able to survive in Beirut on just one salary. This really bummed me out. It was definitely a shot to the gut. After that interview, we both did research on Beirut and had started to envision ourselves in Beirut. Mediterranean climate...my favorite. A good jumping off point for Europe, Asia, and Africa.


However, we did get a note from the school in Colombia. They wanted us back for a second interview. These were the comedians. That meeting was at 10am. This was a good sign. While I was sitting around waiting, I heard one girl call up the recruiter for Senegal and say that she was declining his offer and going with Quito, Ecuador instead. This sounded like good news to me.


But what was going on with Vietnam. I saw the recruiter and I went to talk to him but he was just about to step into an interview with another person and told me that he would come and talk to me after that interview or drop a note in my box. They have to do a ton of interviews.


Well before he got done with that interview, mbh and I had to go and talk to the school in Bogota. The second interview went well. They were really interested in mbh (duh) for her literacy work and talked to me about if I could teach AP Economics. While I haven't taught AP economics, I have a pretty firm grasp of Econ and didn't feel scared to teach it. My political economy class is my favorite class to teach and I seem to get the best response from my students. Anyways, they said that I would have to get trained in AP econ, but they would pay for it all. At the end of the interview, they told us that they were really interested in us and that they would contact us around 4 with their decision. That was really great but we tempered our enthusiasm because of the whole Beirut thing.


We went back down to the lobby to wait things out and there I got a chance to talk to the recruiter for Saigon. He told us that he liked us but that we didn't have enough IB experience (actually any) and his board wouldn't go for that so he would have to keep looking. Another shot to the gut. That school had been our top choice. Feeling like shit, we decided to go and get some lunch. During lunch we got an email from the recruiter in Senegal. He wanted to know if we would do a second interview. We agreed to meet up later on in the day after our lunch.


So when we did our second interview with the Senegal recruiter that went really well. The guy was a cool guy and told us more about his school and answered some more of our questions. He seemed really interested in us and told us that he would contact again in a while. We basically figured that he was going to offer us positions. After that interview, we went down to the lobby and checked our mailbox again. The school in Bogota had already dropped a note and wanted to talk to us. We called them up and went to their room to talk to them. They offered us positions and told us that we were the team that they wanted and that they hadn't offered our positions to anyone else that whole conference. Then they went over the salary and benefits and told us to take our time to make our decision. They told us that we could tell them the next day if we wanted and that they were waiting for us. Mbh told them that she wanted to make a decision today but would need some time to think it over.


After that we were on cloud nine. We had a got offered positions in a school that was on our short list. Then we went to the cafe to think things through and when we were there we got an offer from Senegal. What a fucking position to be in! Offers from two schools that we wanted to work in. I knew where I wanted to go (Colombia), but mbh was torn. She speaks French and loves the ocean so she was really torn. At the cafe she left to talk to her mom and I called up a good buddy that gives good advice and has a wife with family in Bogota. I got to talking to him and then his wife and then mbh came back and I let her talk to my buddy's wife. My buddy gave the good advice that he would defer to his wife because at the end of the day you want mama to be happy. Cuz when momma ain't happy nobody is happy. Ice-T said at the end of the documentary Good Hair, "trust me, if a woman ain't happy with herself, she's going to bring nothing but pain to every f'ing body around her." Words to fucking live by. So I deferred to mbh. Then she talked things through and came to the decision of Bogota.


We headed back to the hotel to meet up with the recruiter and sign the papers. He was ecstatic and hugged us both. So now, Mr Babyman, mbh, and I are going to be moving to Bogota, Colombia.