Giron

Hello Friends, Family & Blog Stalkers! I hope everyone is doing well. We had a great day today and it was very humid. I'm pretty sure the humidity was brewing for the storm that we just had this evening. I'm pulling Jay off the PSP to add to our blog this evening. He's making friends here left and right!

Drumroll!!!!!!!! -Cue Stud Muffin(top)

Okay here's the deal: I'm a little heavier in these photos than I would really like to be. Not only that, some people tralvel and the airlines lose their luggage. It seems to me that when we took the last Avianca flight Bogota to Bucaramanga they lost a bunch of my hair and I look really bald (thus the ball cap for the rest of our trip!) Today we procured a taxi and went to visit this really old (circa 1635) town named Giron (he-roan). Our driver was a great guy named Pablo who was very informative. Giron has been declared a Colombian National Historic Monument. All of the pictures from today are from the town. They have all kinds of laws regulating the various ways in which the town has to be preserved in its historic colonial state.

One thing you notice right away here is that there are very few airconditioning systems. Nothing has AC. All this is OK because you just roll with the windows down/ house doors open. The weather here is really great. Today was like 75degrees with maybe 40-50 percent humidity. Everyone was talking about global warming and stuff because of how hot it is, but when I think of hot, I thing of Quantico, VA (90 degrees, 90 percent) or sunny San Miguel, AZ (120 degrees, 4 percent). This weather is awesome by comparison. (I can totally see why it is that all the natives around here wore only loin cloths- I think I could be down with a grass skirt or a kilt of some sort!)

This is a photo of one of the churches we visited. I can't remember its name, but if I recall correctly, this is the oldest one in Giron. You can see where they added the bell tower some 50 years after its founding.

I remembered the church's name. ( It came back to me all-of-a-sudden like). It translates to The Chapel of Our Lady of the Snows. The thing is, it NEVER snows here. Las Nieves is the name of one of the quebradas or breaks/ off-shoots of El Rio de Plata. (That is the River of Banana. Just kiddin! Plata is silver and Platano is Banana- does anyone know how to spell Babelfish?)

We were walking around chatting with Pablo about how long the kids attend school here in Colombia when we happened upon a bunch of school kids about to go to class. (This was around 12:15PM and classes start around 12:30) Kids go to school in two shifts: morning and afternoon. Sounds cool until you hear that classes run year round except for weekend, holidays, and a brief 2 week summer vacation (probably more for the teachers). I started shootin the breeze with some of the children when they mobbed me! They were extremely interested/ excited to hear that we were Americanos (or the ever preferrable Estadounidenses). I'm not sure what I was saying exactly, but I have a really skinny neck in this picture. Notice the set of fingers making the rock n roll sign?

I saw some movie where these guys went to a concert. The band was really rockin' and instead of making the rock n roll sign, one dude extended only the little fingers of each hand and held his hands together so it makes like a really big rock n roll sign. His buddy was like, " Dude, what are you doing?" The guy, the answered his pal "theres just too much rock for one hand!" Demasiado rock para un mano!

In the next picture you will see all the kids mimicing me holding up two hands chanting Rock and Roll! Rock and Roll! I was just trying to pass on a litle bit of the Red, White, and Blue but I think some of it got lost in translation. They'll just have to see the movie I guess.