I finally had a real weekend in Cali. Waking up at 5:30 every morning really destroys any prospect of a social life for me since I'm ready to go to bed at about 10pm, but I took Thursday and Friday off, so I was well rested for Friday night and Saturday. Friday we went out to some swanky clubs in Granada, a neighborhood that is known for being a little posher and stuck up. It's a trade off though, because since it is a higher class/more expensive neighborhood, Granada is also safer at night. The clubs either played a lot of American hip-hop or Salsa. And Saturday night I went out with my new housemate Nancy, an American, and a bunch of Colombians we work with. 

Sunday was by far the best though. We got up at 6:30 (the word for hangover is resaca) to run up a nearby hill called Cerro de las Tres Cruces, which, yes, has three crosses on it. It was FULL of Colombians, from little kids and their parents, to young adults, to the elderly. At the top of this hill there is a market of sorts every Sunday, with tons of little stands selling Gatorade, water, chopped up fruits (mango, papaya, banana, pineapple, coconut, yummmm), and baked goods. And all of these Colombians sitting around toweling off sweat, stretching, lifting weights in the little cinder block gym there, or, literally a few feet from the buff guys doing curl-ups, SITTING IN PEWS LISTENING TO SUNDAY MASS. Haha, Catholicism...

While we were doing a few sit ups with the dudes in the gym, we ran into two guys from CIAT, Juan and Hector! We ran back with them to their apartment, which reminded me a lot of student housing in the U.S. (dying house plants, no kitchen table since they usually just eat in their beds, etc), and familiarity is nice at this point. Since you can order in all different types of food (BRILLIANCE), we got Chinese fried rice, which Colombians are strangely fond of, delivered and watched Colombia beat Peru in the Copa America.