Category: Colombia
This Tastes Wild: Ivan Ospina’s Kitchen
Ivan Ospina remembers being on his Grandmother’s sugarcane farm and smelling the sweat. It never bothered him. He liked it. Now, closer to Bogotá’s cosmopolitan beat, when he smells sweat, it reminds him of the country, of the farmers, of where food really comes from. It reminds him of Guarapo, a fermented sugarcane juice. Ivan says there was always a big pitcher of it that was fresh and everyone used to sip. But then there was a pitcher of really strong, fermented Guarapo that Ivan used to sneak off and drink when no one was looking. It was what the farm hands used to drink, and it was delicious.
Colombian chef Ivan Ospina grew up eating the same boring rice, beans and tasteless pieces of meat in a small farm town in central Colombia. When he came to Bogotá as a young kid, he started to reflect on how his country’s gastronomy could be better. Now, at 39 years old, Ivan’s restaurant and kitchen are transforming the way Colombia tastes. Continue reading on Beacon…
The Broken Song: Making Salsa
There are a couple of places around Bogotá where they play Salsa. This one was a modest looking place that sits just off this side street in Centro. It was housed in an old colonial and the only way you know you’re there is the name engraved into a stone block next to the door. It reads Quiebracanto.
Colombia has a strong tradition of Salsa that resonates from the Pacific-coast city of Cali. So when I found myself at a salsa club listening to Toño Barrio, a Cali-based Salsa group, I tried to remember the fast, complex Salsa step, the rules I had learned several years back. But sometimes it’s better when the rules get broken. Continue reading on Beacon…
Oil, These Leaves, And Aura
Through those tiny porthole windows, New York City must have looked mammoth, maybe even terrible, as her plane hovered above the tips of the city’s skyscrapers, dipped its nose toward the runway, reversed the engines, and landed. I always get a rush when I see the skyline out those tiny airplane windows. I can’t imagine what it all looked like to Aura though – this place so new and different from her own.
Aura Tegria didn’t seem as scared, as nervous as I thought she might be when she told me that she and Vladimir were in Bogotá to apply for U.S. visas. She wasn’t just going to New York City on holiday either. Continue reading on Beacon…
Cowboys in Colombia: Spurring Andrés Albarracin
His spurs clicked and we walked down a winding dirt road with deep ruts and emerald green grass growing up through the fresh mud. The air was wet and cool. Andrés Albarracin told us the stables were just ahead, at the end of the road.
Andrés Albarracin is a Vaquero – a Colombian cowboy whose horses are just as much family as his mother and father. Riding horses used to be viewed as lowly farm work. But now horse riding is gaining a new status in Colombia, and the world of this young cowboy is changing because of it. Continue reading on Beacon…
Confession Of A Tortured Convent
I am 100 years old this year. 100 years… Can you believe I’ve remained intact through this brutal history? Can you believe they still come to live inside of me? I know what I look like on the outside. I look like I used to. I look like I always have. And that’s what so many of them remember me for.
But that’s not who I am…
A building called Calle del Sol in Bogotá’s Candelaria neighborhood was constructed in 1914 and destined to be a convent. But after being abandoned by the nuns that built it, and later seized by a Colombian Dictator’s regime, the building changed from a place of good to a place of evil. Nowadays, its residents say there are ghosts. Continue reading on Beacon…
This is Heaven. This is Hell.
Colombian journalist and novelist Gabriel García Márquez was 87 years old when he died on April 17th, on the Thursday of Holy Week in 2014. Gabriel García Márquez wrote in One Hundred Years of Solitude, “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
Continue reading on Beacon…
Rum And Poetry: In The Company Of Two Colombian Maestros
A mask of gray stubble covered his face. Slicked-back hair. Glasses. He sat in a chair next to a bench filled with books and scraps of leather. The man wore a green sweater and a worn navy coat. It was hard to tell if he was a particularly dignified man or not. The thing is, he was coarse around the edges. If there was dignity, it was hidden, quiet. He propped himself up with a cane in one hand while he poured the bottle of Scotch whisky with the other. It went into my glass.
Someone introduced him to me as Maestro.
Colombia has a strong tradition of honorific titles. Profesor. Doctor. Don. Señor. They are titles that grant respect. Awhile back, I had a surprise encounter and met two men who invited me to celebrate with them and drink their rum. They went by a different title: Maestro. Continue reading on Beacon…
A Painter’s Progress: The Graffiti of Marcel Marentes
Marcel Marentes told me he was painting beneath a bridge one day. The police arrived. One officer jumped off his bike and ran down beneath the bridge to see what Marcel was doing. He was sure they were putting up pro-rebel symbols – something that qualifies as a serious crime in Colombia.
“Who is it? ELN? FARC?” asked the first policeman up top, referring to the country’s two largest rebel groups.
The second policeman came down and looked at what Marcel was painting under the bridge. Continue reading at Beacon…
Taking On A Beer Monopoly Never Tasted So Good
If beer really is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, then, at least to Colombian Berny Silberwasser, God must have forgotten Colombia.
Back in the 1990s, Silberwasser’s Colombia was awash in tired, Bud-Light-like swill. So Silberwasser set off on a pilgrimage in 1997 to taste his way through the craft beers of Europe and the U.S. And there was enlightenment. When the beer enthusiast and culinary arts graduate came back, he decided to come to the rescue for Colombia’s next generation of drinkers. In 2002, Bogotá Beer Company came alive. Continue reading on Ozy…
photograph: bogotabeercompany.com
Wes Michael Tomaselli 