First taste of Colombia, seasoned by application anxiety

I've often studied while abroad. If you count bottling organic beer, running sheep dogs, or teaching English twelve hours a week, I've even worked while abroad. But I can say now that nothing in my past experience has prepared me for the disorientation of trying to apply to graduate school while abroad. Here we are: in a hostel full of Danish, Irish, Polish travelers bound for the Amazon, a salsa festival, or the Galapagos Islands, Brianne and I are snuggling ourselves under wool blankets to type out personal statements from the surprisingly chilly capital of Colombia. The part of my brain that's trying desperately to persuade an admissions committee of my intellectual vigor, as it turns out, does not harmonize very willingly with the part of my brain that's trying to embrace perpetual disorientation (does our bus leave on Argentinian or Chilean time?), infantile Spanish (does "nuestro compromiso es su seguridad" mean they've decided to compromise our safety?), and earthy body odors (when's the last time I showered again?). The two investments I'm making this year - in graduate applications and in months of purposeful vagabonding - may not be as easy to reconcile as I had hoped.

The difficulty of that project in some ways touches my memories of Bogota, where the cold climate, temperamental internet, and somewhat sketchy vibe made settling down to reserach gender performativity a little bit challenging.  From what we heard from other travelers, there's much to see in Colombia, and if we had had more time and money we would have loved to take one of South America's many 8-13 hour bus rides to trek the Lost City trail or curl up in a Carribbean hammock. But constrained as we were by the graduate school albatross we've foolishly strapped to our necks, we had to make the best of what we had.

We treated ourselves to Colombian coffee while writing from our charming hostel

We took advantage of one sunny morning to get a view of the city from the nearby mountains.

We ate regularly at a fabulous vegetarian restaurant run by possibly the five most adorable women in the world. Pictured: the best guacamole I've ever had.

And we sampled some of Bogota's eclectic street scene, which for your information includes miming and betting on trained guinea pigs.

After a couple of days, we also decided that the time had come to move on, and - since we didn't have the luxury of really exploring Colombia - to find somewhere a little warmer and more relaxed where we could knock out our graduate preparations without feeling like we were missing out on our own trip. Luckily, at this point in our vagabonding, we're both pretty comfortable treating our travel plans as possibilities and our airline tickets as flexible suggestions. And so, hours later by plane and by bus, I'm now writing to you from a wisteria-scented patio in Mendoza, Argentina, the Malbec capital of the world. But more on that, and on the gorgeous bus ride from Santiago to Mendoza, to come later. For now it's time to get back to my wine and my writing sample. Welcome to South America.