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| Santa Marta coastline |
I guess
today is the Super Bowl, or at least that’s what the calendar is telling me, however,
it doesn’t really feel like it. I went back
to the Santa Marta market, except I got lost trying to find the actual market,
in the massive amounts of street venture people selling everything from a
potato to half a cow. The market literally stretched for 4 city blocks in each
direction. At one point, I found myself
inside, in a poorly ventilated area, walking through vegetable of all kinds,
and then it started to smell terrible.
Then came the ¼ mile of nothing but (what smelt like) the spoiling meat
of the butchers. It’s a strange place,
it smells like garbage, there are random spots with standing water,
always, and the meat just sits in the 90 degree heat, all day, flies all over
it, people touching it. It smelt so
terrible I had to almost run out of there, I was pretty sure I might throw
up. It was bad enough that I actually
located a tall blue bin, that I half thought I might need to contain my mess,
except when I peered inside I found more heaping piles of rotten disgusting
meat… that did not help things.
I guess it
doesn’t spoil though, because it is the same food that I eat when I go to
restaurants, but I’m not sure how it’s still fine. The cheese is the same way, it’s odd.
Finally I got
to the actual store, which was the busiest grocery store I’ve been inside in my
life. I chuckled a little when one of
the locals had her tiny bag searched by the police, yet my giant backpack was
no problem at all, not even getting a second glance. The strangest part was all these people, but
no Super Bowl parties, no cases of beer, and carts full of snacks, it was just
tons of Spanish speakers that thought football was played with a little round
ball.
That night I
watched the Super Bowl, I mean I guess I did, but it felt strangely
different. It was me and a guy I met,
Zach, from the states watching the game at our hostel. No one else cared that the game was going on,
or probably even knew it was the Super Bowl.
The game being televised in Spanish didn’t help the cause one bit, and
with the lack of a Super Bowl party, and the Super Bowl commercials (they don’t
show those in Colombia either), it felt more like just another game, than the
grand daddy of them all.
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