"A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places." -Isabelle Eberhardt
"A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places." -Isabelle Eberhardt
Getsemani, Cartagena – Day 3
Aimee Geurts • Apr 01, 2019

Started our day with fruit and arepas at hotel. These arepas were not stuffed but instead stacked with ingredients including ham and cheese and a fried egg. This confused us on the definition of an arepa. So many ways to serve them! It’s a good thing on April 27th I’m going to the  El Camino de la Arepa cooking workshop hosted at the Museo de las Americas. I will get to the bottom of the arepa mystery!

From here we wandered through Centennial Park as Jennie had been tipped off there may be a sloth sighting. I was really hoping we didn’t see any sloths as I find them extremely creepy and do not understand why everyone thinks they are so cute! Lucky for me, nary a sloth in sight our entire trip. We did see red squirrels, an iguana and a pack of dogs lying in the shade of the center statue.

We were on our way to a different bookstore I had randomly spotted the night before. I thought I knew exactly where it was but turned out I was a little lost. We eventually found Libreria Nacional S.A. I wandered around looking for Alice in Wonderland and didn’t see one. I found a lady to ask and she gave me an emphatic NO! I decided to take one last peek through the kid’s section and found two different versions on a very top shelf; one illustrated by John Tenniel and one by a French illustrator named Benjamin Lacombe. I spent my entire days food and drink budget on the Lacombe version and am so happy I did. It is lovely and worth it.

From here we thought we were walking to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s house but instead ended up at La Presentacion Arte y Cultura , mostly just because I can’t read a map and got confused as to my destination. In the end I’m glad because the reviews of Garcia Marquez’s house weren’t great and sounds like you can not really see anything anyway. La Presentacion was one of my favorite stops. The art was modern and the setting unlike any other modern art gallery I’d seen before as the rooms surrounded a lavish garden courtyard. We had a coffee in the coffee shop and had to go directly to Pavia to eat because the coffee was so strong we both felt we were going to have heart attacks. This time we ordered a side of rum with our limonade de coco and dropped the shot in…yum! We felt like mixologists.

We had a cooking class planned for 4pm. We found the destination and when we arrived, they were getting ready to close and had no idea who we were or who the people who we thought we were meeting were. So that was cool. We couldn’t get a hold of who we had scheduled this with so off to the wall we went to watch the sunset. We were BY the famed Café del Mar but decided to get beers from street vendors and hang out on the wall instead of going into the restaurant. We fell in love with a dog who had a tail that wagged sideways but decided it was best not to figure out how to bring him home. It seemed like the entire town came out to see the sunset and there were tons of vendors selling hats and selfie sticks.

Andres’ hugs were calling us so we headed to the Rum Box to try the food. We got the best hugs and this time he even whispered sweet nothings in our ears. We just had some appetizers and we were disappointed. They were both fried and just not great. The drinks were good again and we got more sweet nothings on the way out so all in all it was a good time. We stopped at a little corner market on the way back to the hotel and got rum, coconut water and limes and a delicious dulce de leche pastry thing. We took our wares to the pool, where the air smelled so strongly of garlic I was glad we had a tasty treat because it made me hungry.

The post Getsemani, Cartagena – Day 3 appeared first on The Book Nomad.

By Aimee Geurts 07 Feb, 2023
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By Aimee Geurts 29 Jan, 2023
A poem
By Aimee Geurts 20 Jan, 2023
In Great Circle Jaime says, “The compromise is that I’m living day to day without making any sweeping decisions.” I realize I have fallen into this way of thinking. Whispering to myself, everything is fine today. Although I do still enjoy imagining other lives, get caught up in the swell of possibility, for the first time in a long time I feel settled.  Jamie’s sister Marian says, “Is that compromise? It sounds a bit like procrastination. You don’t think you’ll go back to being how you were before, do you?” I know I won’t go back to being how I was before. I know that today. I’m not sure what I’ll know tomorrow. Reading articles about women realizing they are tired of working the corporate ladder and feel vindicated in my low-paying jobs with no benefits. When the farmer in Spain doesn’t reply to my emails about a room and board work agreement, when the Airbnb host in Greece offers me his camper van instead of his home, I decide it’s all too much and I give up. I’m not upset about it. I’m relieved. Instead, I make easy plans to see the Redwood Forest, right here in the good ol’ U. S. of A. I plan to stop in Medicine Bow, WY on my way from Denver to Bismarck next time I’m there. My next adventure is right around the corner instead of a nine-hour flight away. I make plans to make less plans. I stop looking for more jobs. The low-paying jobs I have now are quite fulfilling and they pay me enough to cover my health insurance and put a little aside. What they give me is time. Time to have lunch with my sister-in-law on her birthday. Time to take a 4-day weekend to see my new niece. Time to take a walk downtown on a Wednesday and bring Roxy a sandwich while she slings books at the low-paying bookstore where I no longer work. Time to read all the books in my house. Time to volunteer in the middle of the day. Call it compromise. Call it procrastination. I call it feeling settled.
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