Leaving Medellin

My last hours in Medellin were a little chaotic. When you arrive in a city with the intent to hang around for a while you take your time visiting the tourist sites... 5 weeks in and I had only ridden one cable car and visited Parque Arvi (Dutch and I had planned to return with the girls [L, his girlfriend and her roommate] to do some horseback riding but it never happened, plus we fled Medellin for a few days after L's baby-daddy put a hit out on Dutch, that didn't help). 1 different cable route, Pablo Escobar tour, day trip to El Penol, many museums, Jardin Botanico, etc all still on my To Do list.

I scurried to El Penol on my 2nd to last day, bolted across town to the other metrocable, and squeezed in a stroll around the botanic gardens before sunset as it began to rain. I decided the Escobar tour was kind of bullshit. Not sure how I feel about someone making money off one of the most violent people in human history, I'll look up pictures of his shit on Flikr and google images instead.

Dutch and I often talked about "the future", future plans to finance further travels, what we were going to do when we got home, if we would ever go home, how he was going to get to Caracas for his flight home in the next few days. But we never directly talked about my leaving, even on the day I left. We had cooked up some fish for dinner at the guest house, our conversation just the same as any other day. I bought one last $1 DVD off the street for some evening entertainment, Prince of Persia--only... the street people fucked up, the disk really had a 40 minute Assassin's Creed mini-movie marketing/promotion thing on it.. at 8pm it was too late to find the vendor on the street and threaten him with physical harm.

I normally bought my dvd's from the same guy near Parque Berrio, 2 blocks south of the metro line about 20 feet away from the corner near a bunch of fruit and vegetable stands. One day I was flipping through the flicks when I thought I felt water (or something) land on my head, as I reach a hand up to feel my head the guy responded with the Spanish equivalent of 'aww shit, those fucking kids are at it again', a few kids lived on the 2nd or 3rd floor of the building and would periodically spray people with squirt guns. So we all lined up with our backs on the brick building wall hiding behind a slight ledge between the 3rd and 2nd floor, and continued our conversation for a few minutes before poking a head around the ledge checking if the coast was clear.

This guy didn't have the best selection of DVD's but he had the worst limp I have ever seen (probably hit by a car or motorcycle accident). Plus when we talked he didn't treat me like a cash-cow gringo nor was he hostile towards me. Normally a single dvd would cost about 2 mil but after I talked to him a few times he would sell me one for 1 mil (.50 cents). If the DVD didn't play on my laptop I could come back and switch it without and grief or fear that he wouldn't be there. Honestly, it was just nice to come around the corner and see a familiar face-- give him a wave, stop by and say hey, chat about the day, pick up a movie for the evening, and continue my stroll. Plus if I was giving my money to a shady guy on the street I felt better about giving it to him than a perfectly healthy young male who could be working in construction or something, or maybe it was just white guilt.