2010/10 Hunterman Discovers Medellin
ClubHombre.com: -TripReports-: 2010/10 Hunterman Discovers Medellin
I know, I know—that’s kind of like saying I discovered sex, that night with Jodie behind the cabin at camp—it was there all along, I had heard of it, my friends had experienced it—but I just hadn’t had the pleasure myself.

Why it took so long, I couldn’t really say. For a while, I had a young Latina girlfriend (half upper-class Mexican, half Beverly Hills) who was fluent in Spanish, bi, and 100% up for helping us recruit those sexy Paisas I’d been reading about for our bedroom adventures. But it just never worked out that we could get away, and then we broke up. And she was such a high-maintenance sweetheart that I was nursing my financial wounds for a while, trying to get back on my financial feet during a vicious recession.

But life is too short to let little things like debt load hold you up—after all, you can’t take it with you.

I had some misgivings about going alone to a country where I couldn’t speak the language. Déjà vu: my first trip to Rio was with my cousin David who spoke no Portuguese but at least had been there before, knew the ropes (more or less—I found out it was “less” when I joined ClubHombre a couple years later), and had a bilingual landlady who was very helpful.

I had started studying a bootleg copy of Pimsleur Spanish a year ago, but was only up to II:11, and hadn’t really mastered the first 40 lessons. I’d done each lesson only a couple of times, compared with 4-5 times each for the 90 Pimsleur Portuguese lessons—after which I was ready to start learning Portuguese in Brasil. But I felt completely inarticulate in Spanish.

My cousin David and my friend Wayne, both mongers (but not hard-core enough to join CH), considered coming with me but chickened out. Still, my old friend Jack had offered to let me stay with him, and said he could show me around a little. He’d moved from Los Angeles to Medellin about five years before, and found a wife after a couple of years. He was enough of a monger, before he got married and retired, that I felt I’d be OK. And my old buddy Sandman was living there, and had offered to show me around.
  Subtopic Posts   Updated
AFTERTHOUGHTS30  2010/12/13, 07:03 pm
MONDAY: One for the Road6  2010/11/26, 02:31 pm
SUNDAY: Hit or Miss, Hit and Miss10  2010/10/14, 08:48 am
SATURDAY: It Just Keeps Getting Better17  2010/10/18, 04:23 pm
FRIDAY: The Luck of the Draw4  2010/10/08, 01:54 am
THURSDAY---Off To A Late Start6  2010/10/05, 06:53 pm
Travel and Wednesday Arrival14  2010/10/23, 03:19 am