Carnival Adventures in Colombia | English Listening Practice
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We started the year off by going on a trip to Colombia.

and we stayed with a friend of yours that you had a language exchange with and his family, which allowed us to get really deep into the culture of what Columbia is all about. Yeah, it was pretty cool, actually. My friend, Hugo, I

I had been, I don't know how long we had been talking, over a year, I would say. We had a Spanish-English exchange, and it developed more into a friendship with him than an actual language exchange. We just kind of, Spanish and English speakers, we say we Spanglish together, so part English, part Spanish, and as long as we're communicating with each other, it's just a fun conversation. Yeah.

So we actually, uh,

had the opportunity to stay in his house with his family. Yeah. And later, uh, in a family friend of theirs, we, we stayed at his house for a couple of weeks. That's true. But why were we in Columbia at that time of the year? Like we arrived in, in January. So why were we there? We were there. Um, they have a huge event. Actually, it's the world's second largest conference.

Of course, the most famous and well-known one is in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro. That's right. The biggest carnival is in Rio de Janeiro, but we went to...

Barranquilla, in the north coast of Colombia. It's a city in the north coast of Colombia. And they've got the world's second largest carnival next to Rio de Janeiro's carnival. And we wanted to arrive a couple weeks early, right? Yeah, we wanted to arrive early so that we could get to know the city a little bit and just hang out with Hugo, our friend, and

And, I mean, we knew that if we had somebody that was from that area, we were going to have a completely different experience than we would have had just as tourists visiting the city. That's true. Now, Barranquilla isn't a very touristic place. No. Like, there's some museums and, you know, it's on the ocean, but it's not known for its beautiful beaches and stuff like that. But...

If you had to say what drives barranquilla, what would you say? I would say music. Yeah, it's everywhere. Music. Oh, all sorts of music, too. Yeah. The Latin musics, you know, like salsa, bachata, merengue. Yeah. You know, they just go on and on and on. But you hear it everywhere. You hear music everywhere, and it's just vibrant. It is. It is. And, I mean...

There's always a neighbor playing music really, really loud. So I'd probably describe, I mean, it might be a stereotype, but I would say Colombians are typically loud people. But no, we had some really cool experiences. It was actually just...

you know, the day-to-day living or the things that local people do for entertainment. Yeah. So, for example, we had the opportunity to hang out with some of Ugo's friends. We went and we watched a movie together. Yeah. We went and had pizza and drinks, you know. Remember that night after the movie and we all had to pack into the car and

There was this compact car, and how many people there was? Oh, my God. The two girls were in the front. Two girls, Hugo, Gustavo, and me and you. In the back seat where there's three very, very small seats. We had four people. I think Gustavo was like on Hugo's lap. His lap.

But anyway, what they wanted to do is they really wanted to show us this typical food, the arepa, which is like this corn tortilla thing that has an egg inside. And we had to go to this particular place, so it was better for us to all get into this one car and drive so that we could go have this food. But yeah, shenanigans like that that just...

You know, they just don't happen on a typical vacation. No. You maybe go to a museum or you go to a beach, you spend a few hours there, and then you go back to your hotel or wherever you're staying. I really enjoyed it because it was cultural. It was. You know, it really felt like I was part of...

Yeah, and we had friends and they really liked us. And, you know, despite a language barrier, we did our best to communicate with them. And it was just different. But we actually had one situation that was really cool. And I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's a really cool situation.

that was that we got to practice and learn how to do cumbia with one of the groups that was practicing for Carnival for their performance. Yeah, they had a band that had a drummer with a big, huge drum too. Like a bass drum. Yeah, and a guy that played the flute and they invited us to try this

I guess you could say. Yeah, like it's based around the traditional cumbia dance, but they have like a routine that they're practicing for the

So anyway, yeah, they invited us in and they actually asked us if we wanted to participate in the carnival parade. Yeah. And we were really excited about that. And, you know, we went to a few practices and we were dancing in the house trying to learn because we only had a couple weeks. Yeah, we were really excited. What an opportunity, right? Yeah. Yeah.

It was exciting. What an honor. It was. Well, we're talking about it like we didn't do it because we didn't. So what happened? Well, we were invited to participate in one parade. And then they told us it was going to be five people.

Yeah, all the parades. And we had already bought our ticket for the parades and we really, really wanted to see them. So this was something that was a really difficult decision for us because, I mean, we had literally been told that it was an honor to be invited to

to participate with this group. Like there had never been Canadians invited to participate with them. And we had to turn it down because it just, it really didn't jive with our, our plans and how we wanted to experience it. One parade would have been cool, but five parades was just like a little bit too much. That was a full commitment. Yes. And we wanted to be spectators over the parade and enjoy the festivities and really have that experience as well.

So anyway, we kind of blamed it on the hot climate because we're from Canada. Everyone's like, oh, it's cold in Canada, right? I mean, it's the truth. It was hot there. We probably would have died if we danced in the sun for four hours straight in the blazing hot sun. That's true. Some of those parades were during the hottest part of the day, too, or were going to be during the hottest part.

Yeah, we would have, I don't know. We wouldn't have been up for the festivities that happen in the evening time. That's true. So what happens at night? What happens at night is street parties where people throw cornstarch, water, beer, foam, whatever they can get their hands on. They're spraying each other and just... But it's not in a malicious way. No, no.

They're doing it for fun. They're joking around. They're having a good time. Yeah. Some people don't think it's funny, but if you're in the spirit, well, I mean, who thinks it's fun to get, you know, foam sprayed all over their head or something? But, you know, it's just part of the carnival and it's just to laugh. You just, you know, basically get your revenge by doing the same thing to someone else. Yeah.

But yeah, we, so anyway, we had a really, really great time in Carnival. You know, one of the highlights for me was being invited to a block party that they had. Yeah. Where they had this insanely noisy speaker system. Yeah. Like, they're called pickups. Yeah, where a DJ plays through this huge speaker system.

That you can hear for blocks. Like, it's like a concert-level noise. I can't describe it. But anyway, throughout the night, more and more people come, and they're all dancing and hanging out, and there's some street vendors selling food, and, you know. By the end of the night, the street was packed. It was packed.

There was probably 300 or 400 people. So some of these experiences were really cool. And as tourists, I don't think that we ever would have got to have them. No, no. But the later part of the vacation, we decided to explore some other areas the last month. We went to Santa Marta, and we only went to Cartagena for one day. I wish we would have spent more time there.

But we had a place rented in Santa Marta, so we just decided to spend the last three weeks, I would say, at the beach, just enjoying...

I don't know, the sunsets and the sand and having a beautiful apartment really close to the beach. So something I would like to ask you right now that our podcast listeners would probably be interested in hearing is after three months of being in a full Spanish immersion situation, what sort of impact did that have on your language learning? Well...

This is the part that's kind of interesting. Okay, so I would say that I had full immersion for a month because when we were staying at Hugo's place and then later at Arturo's place, we definitely had full immersion. We were talking to people all day and all night in Spanish. What I found happened was the words and the grammar that I already knew, I learned how to use.

But, you know, as for getting better and learning more than I had learned prior to my trip, I don't think that that happened.

You know, I realized when I got back home to Canada that I really should have been inputting a little bit more information, maybe reading or studying or doing some extra exposure outside of the time where I was out talking to people to really get the most benefit and the most learning.

For me, anyway, I don't know how long I would have to be immersed in that situation to learn fluency, but it definitely wasn't in a three-month period of time in another country. So, I mean, it's a bit of a reality check. I mean, some people may have different experiences and they may learn better, but for me, that definitely wasn't the case.

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