No Need for Summer Time in Cali

When in England the last weekend of March with the clocks moving forward is always one of my favourite times of the year.  All of a sudden, the extra hour is created that rapidly lengthens as the summer progresses, giving us long, and occasionally warm and sunny, evenings that are perfect for playing sport, BBQs and drinking outside with friends.

It has to be said, one of the best things about living in Cali is the climate, I think it's officially described as semi-tropical but makes socialising in the evenings so pleasant and easy.  Last Saturday night we stayed up playing the Colombian game 'sapo,' (sort of like darts) and drinking on a terrace overlooking the city until 4am with no worries at all about the temperature and no need to go to a bar as you generally do back home.  This can't be said of all Colombian cities, the varying altitude throughout this mountainous country means every city has it's own individual climate.  Bogotá (2,600m) is pretty cold and grey generally, the coast is incredibly humid and hot, Medellin (1,500m) is very pleasant and Cali (900m) can be too hot during the day when the temperature is around 30oC, but is a perfect 20 or so in the evenings.

Typical early morning from my room

The year round summer does seem strange at times however.  Hearing friends back home now remark about the sun coming out and having no need to wear coats doesn't really register with me - it's always like that here!  Nearly April?!  The month and seasons are pretty meaningless in Cali, some months of the year there's more rain but they all sort of merge into one really.  Leaves on trees fall off every now and again instead of all at once, grass grows year round, sunrise is around 6am, and sunset about 6pm - all this comes from being so close to the Equator, which is only 300 miles or so south of Cali near Quito, Ecuador.

There's always pros and cons to everything.  Caleños talk with great excitement about whenever they go somewhere 'cold' - by cold they mean about 15oC or so in the mountains above Cali, not -20oC on a winter's night in the north of England as it was in December.  I'd like to see them experience that and talk with such enthusiasm about not being hot.  Some people say they love the rain that comes in torrential downpours a few times a week, but being from Manchester I'm not convinced by this, I don't think I'll ever miss the constant pissy drizzle I was subjected to all my childhood.

Cricket in a tropical climate

Even though it can seem strange playing cricket in January, there's more advantages to this climate than negatives.  The whole Caleño lifestyle is based around socialising, and the wonderful weather makes this possible.  Adults drinking and dancing salsa on the street, story tellers in the park at the weekend, children on their bikes every night - it does make for a lovely lifestyle, and one that doesn't make me miss the cold and wet of a January night whatsoever.


Here's a link to my second Guardian article that I had published 2 weeks ago about teaching English in South America.  They spelt my name wrong, again, but have since learned how to spell Colombia, so some progress made.
I've also written a few pieces for my fellow Geography graduates, Michael Gray and Joe Richardson, from Leeds University on their "Gradulthood" site, which is about us graduates from the recession foraging our way into the world of work, in an ever more competitive and demanding job market.

Minutes, Minutes, and how to run a Colombian Business

Mobile phones are just as big a part of life in South America as anywhere else in the world, but the cost of ringing cross networks here in Colombia is pretty expensive comparatively, and most people can't afford the direct debit, monthly contracts with hundreds of included minutes that we all have back home, just having simple pay as you go deals instead.  Consequently, 'minutes' are a recurring feature on any street in Colombia.  Basically it's some random Tom, Dick or Harry with a phone for each operator, Comcel, Movistar and Tigo, who you pay a couple of hundred pesos per minute or so to use their phone to call someone on a different network.  A very simple idea that all of a sudden gives a lot of people an enterprising opportunity for employment in a country where about 40% of work is in the informal sector.

Minutes in action

It's more or less like having a phone box on every street corner, and generates quite a few interesting social nuances.  First, if someone's calling you from a 'minutes' phone and you don't necessarily want to speak to them, for whatever reason, it's already too late, you've picked up because you don't know who's calling you and are then having to think of an excuse on the spot for ignoring the said person.  Next, there's the annoying one bell phenomenon.  If someone wants to talk to you but is too tight to use their own minutes, they'll give you a quick 'one bell' and hope you call them back, and be unreasonably annoyed if you don't.  My policy on this matter is to ignore these futile attempts to control you , if someone really wants to speak to me, they will pay a few hundred pesos to do it.  Phone etiquette also goes out the window.  A call creeping over from 59 seconds to 1 minute means another 200 pesos to pay, so conversations just end rather abruptly with the bare minimum discussed.


Minutes on a personal level are one thing, arranging nights out and such is made a bit more complicated by having to nip in and out to ring various people, but you get used to that.  However, I learnt the other day that the phone package at the language institute where I work is also minutes based, and that they have run out for the month.

So a bizarre situation currently exists where a business cannot ring anyone and just hope people call them for the next week or so.  I asked the obvious question of why they don't just get some more minutes, and how this would be just inconceivable in any developed country.  A business nowadays just couldn't operate or survive without a phone or internet, but it appears possible in Colombia (at least I hope it is possible here otherwise I might be looking for another employer soon!).  I was then told that they only gets 500 minutes a month anyway which I found bewildering.  500 minutes?!  That's about one Colombian working day, and seen as a fairly menial quantity even for personal use, and this leads me onto a more general topic of how businesses work here.

Foreign businesses often get a lot of stick in South America, especially the big transnationals, where they're seen as a capitalist threat to the established businesses of a country.  But on another level I can understand how they do so well here.  Foreign owners and managers obviously impose their own policies on efficiency, organisation and communication.  Colgate have a big presence here in Cali and I can't imagine they ever run out of minutes, and when you're in a competitive market these things obviously work in your favour.  Hence if someone wants to learn English at one institute and they don't contact you, they'll just go a few blocks away and enrol there instead.

I do often think about opening my own business and whilst it's never an easy thing to do, no matter what country you're in, if you imposed certain things on your employees in Colombia, you'd already be a mile ahead of the opposition.  Punctuality that means you open on time, respond to emails and get a phone package with minutes and you're onto a winner.  This is all part of living abroad though, there's some things from a different culture that'll you never understand, but add a novelty and variety to your everyday life that you'd never get at home, but make you appreciate those ever so basic things from your own country all the more so.

Help for Expats Abroad

Being an English teacher abroad, it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on the news and what’s going on around you.   At the best of times, things such as strikes can spontaneously break out and disrupt your daily business, as has happened this week at the uni where I used to work.  Students have taken it upon themselves to strike against University “financial irregularities,” or corruption to me and you, and consequently bugger up transport around the place.

Then there’s events like elections, in Colombia the sale of alcohol in shops, bars and nightclubs is brought to a complete halt by law for the entire voting weekend.  A bit drastic insisting on people vote sober some might say, but there are serious safety reasons behind “La Ley Seca” (Dry Law), which when looking into Colombia’s recent history, isn’t hard to fathom why.

However, volatile political regimes and different systems of government around the world do mean that in some cases, your adopted hometown can very quickly turn full circle into a virtual war zone, as in some areas of the Middle East at the moment.  The news has been dominated by the ongoing situation in Libya and the plight of British expats trying urgently to leave the country, a lot of these people will have similar jobs to myself, being teachers in international schools, universities and institutes who've gone to live abroad for a different adventure and experience.  It just so happens that on this occasion the adventure has unfortunately got a bit too real and so they've had to frantically pack up and put their life on hold for the moment.


The British Foreign Office appears to have received a fair amount of stick about how they’ve been 'evacuating' these expats, and it got me thinking about a possible predicament in Colombia and what’d happen here in a similar situation.  I’ll emphasise now that Colombia is currently very stable politically, probably more so now than at any point in the last thirty years or so, but natural disasters such as the earthquake in New Zealand, can happen here and provoke much needed diplomatic help for citizens abroad.

As Britain supposedly has the highest amount of expats from the developed world with figures suggesting up to 5 million of us live abroad (I'm not sure what that says about Britain itself!), it's no small feat to look after and provide assistance when required to them all through costly embassies and consular offices.  Obviously, most enquiries are probably to do with passports lost on a drunken night out, amongst other more bizarre requests, some of which just take the piss really, but do provide entertaining reading.

From time to time however, more serious situations arise as in Libya and New Zealand now, and British citizens genuinely need help, and for this the Foreign Office has a service called 'Locate'.  It encourages expats abroad to register their personal details in case of emergencies so that assistance can be organised, whether that be sending an email with some advice or an entire chartered plane as in Libya's case.  If you're reading this from abroad and you're not registered, I recommend doing so.  I've got no experience of actually using it myself, but you never know when it could come in handy, and for the sake of spending a few minutes giving a few details about yourself, it's hardly an effort.

It's worth looking at at their travel advice whenever you're going away, it's specific for just about every country in the world, and is constantly updated.  I do think it can be a little too cautious, but I suppose they have to be like that, and going on a weekend trip to Paris is not quite the same as backpacking around South America, but it's horses for courses, and if anything did happen, your parents would be the first to complain anyway!

The Global Reach of Blighty's Sport and Music

I was watching the Super Bowl highlights last night, not really understanding American football as usual, but thinking how this event, one of the most watched in the world, represents completely different things inside and outside America.  Inside, it's the end of the domestic season for the national sport, the culmination of a 6 month long, nationwide competition.  Whereas for the rest of us around the world, it's the $3,000 a seat, Black Eyed Peas performance, and million dollar commercials that send a message loud and clear to us all - this is the country that puts on the biggest show on the planet and the place to be.

Well, the Super Bowl and America may have their moment once a year, but I think one of England's greatest exports of recent times, the Premier League, has a much wider and more profound impact around the world.  The video below is shown on Fox Sports and ESPN all over South America, and I imagine further afield too, before the start of the games and really does paint the country in a fantastic light.  Beautiful, iconic landmarks, both old and new, lovely weather (!), brilliant English music and some of the most historic clubs in the game make our 'football' look much cooler and more exciting than that American version over the pond.   With end to end games like 4-4 draws and 5-3 wins last weekend, you can see why.

You only have to walk around any city centre in South America and see the hundreds of people wearing and selling counterfeit Man Utd, Chelsea and Arsenal tshirts to realise the incredible reach the Premier League has, much more so than the traditional American sports, and that despite America's dominance of TV in Latin America.  More English games are broadcast live here than back home, and the main broadcasters, ESPN and Fox, are included in standard cable TV packages that most homes have across the continent, rather than an expensive Sky package.

It's easy to see how our 'big' teams can so easily claim to have millions of fans across the globe, and how that plays such an influence on potential future stars of the game.  Hugo Rodallega at Wigan is the one current Colombian schoolboys look up to, but Faustino Asprilla's Champions League hat-trick for Newcastle against Barcelona is what is constantly brought up in conversations with Colombians.  The rags to riches stories of Brazilian players using football as a way out of the favelas to the grounds of top European clubs is a dream of many young men here, and even though it will remain just that, a dream, for the vast majority of them, that is more than enough motivation to spend a childhood devoted to football in the park.  The hopes and dreams being to escape lives where drug gangs and poverty are much more prominent than social provision and education.


On a slightly different note, the new Coca-Cola commercial for South America is also introducing the masses over here to English culture.  Oasis' "Whatever" is the song  for the "Reasons to Believe" advert, basically telling us the world is not all bad, we should buy a coke and be happy.  Very clever advertising, getting a load of kids to sing Liam Gallagher's words in a less Mancunian accent appears to work wonders.  My kids at school are all asking me if we can sing along to it, so a great excuse to introduce them to not just that, but all the other magnificent Oasis tunes too, and then the Manchester music scene aswell, The Smiths, Happy Mondays et al - a lesson planned like that!  Maybe Oasis should strike whilst the iron's hot, get back together and do a South American tour on the back of this?  On the other hand, I'm sure the royalties from that advert will be more than sufficient for a few more years before the inevitable reunion tour.

Back in Colombia

Here I am then, back in Cali!  This is the first time I've returned overseas to a place I've previously lived in, I was in Santiago, Chile, for my year abroad, but despite having probably the best year of my life overall, didn't really feel the urge to go and live there again, there's probably something in my head that is afraid of going back to somewhere with such fond memories and then not living up to expectation second time round.  Anyway, I wanted to return to a place I know, with friends, contacts and so on, and Cali fitted the bill, so I've now been "re-settling in" for the last two weeks with Stephen's family, an English guy who's lived here for 30 years or so and who works at the Santiago, where I was last year.

Landslide near Medellin, December

It's strange to be here again.  Memories come flooding back, both good and bad, and it's hard to think that lots has changed in the seven or so months I was away, not least the fact I've crossed a continent on a bike, which is a great talking point with any of the many Americans that I know here.  Cali's weather seems to be exactly the same as I remember it, hot, sunny and tropical most days, but it's worth mentioning that since I left last June, Colombia has suffered torrential rainfall up and down the country, due to the La Niña weather phenomenon, causing deadly landslides and flooding vast areas of land.

I managed to get one of my old jobs back in the school I worked at, but that's just one day a week.  My main job was at a university, but things don't look great there now.  Rumour has it they're under investigation by the government for corruption, staff pay and hours reduced and the suspension of recruiting new teachers all lead to me to believe it doesn't look good to work there again!  I've been handing my CV into language institutes, schools and other universities, so just have to keep at it and hope something comes up, which it should, and tout private classes in the meantime.