After the fear of paragliding past and the adrenaline quit pumping in my body reality checked in and i got a cold this weekend. it was super fun because all the twenty something descended on our hostel and it was a constant party all weekend long. YaY. but it was ok because i was a little delerious.
one of the people who works at the front desk, Raffa, invited us to come stay at his house for a couple days and after all the silliness of the weekend we welcomed a change. we headed up the mountains on sunday with Raffa´s friend Olga. His place is about an hour away, a little orange house nestled in the mountains. We played Parchesee with the one other guy staying there, Sergio, and ate and tried to keep warm since it is so much colder up there.
on monday we embarked on a little excursion to see this man who we were told grows flowers. Colombia and Medellin in particular are famous for their flowers. We took a little cab and walked to this house that was probably half an hour away. Herman is the name of the owner and he is an incredibly pleasant 60-odd year old man. His profession is not being a flower grower but more of an arranger of sorts. In Medellin there is a huge flower festival in the spring on there are about 20 people like Herman who create these incredibly elaborate flower arangements that are about 6 feet across. The arangements are contained in little chairs which they wear on their backs. The men walk around the city showing off their flowers like this. He showed us his flower chairs, some of which are 200 years old.
Herman is also odd because he is an avid collector of very strange things. Li told me that it´s not so much that he´s a collector but he doesn´t like to get rid of stuff. So instead he attaches little pieces of wire to them and hangs them on his walls. He had all sorts of wierd things like tree stumps, bottles, ancient calanders, shoes, nipples from baby bottles, etc. hung on the walls of his house inside and out. He said he started doing it 17 years before and hadnt stopped. It had a really wild effect and made the house a joy to take in.
Herman also is incredibly knowledgable about plants. He has 200 specimans in his yard. there was a wealth of hummingbirds and insects. I think the reason we were at Hermans house to begin with was because Sergio and Raffa were helping him fix his tv antenna but I didnt get bored at all and was completely enchanted by everything I saw.
After having a couple shots of Aguatiente Sergio, Herman, Eliza and I headed off for a walk. It turned out that we were actually on a psychedelic mushroom hunt. We bought a bottle of Aguatiente and drunkenly roamed the fields looking for hallucinagenic mushrooms which Sergio was selling in Medellin when he got back. The day ended up just being the most random wonderful day I can remember and we spent the rest of it picking flowers, walking around and just having a jolly old time. I wish everyone could have been there because it was a once in a lifetime experience.
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