The bus ride home

I'm not entirely sure I was so surprised by my bus ride from Aguadulce back to Bogota. Normally I hang out with Doña Blanca, a shopowner that works and lives nearby to wait for my evening class, but today, I had to head straight back to Bogotá. However, to my pleasant surprise, some of the kids were heading the same direction and I was offered a seat in the middle of a bunch of kids and an amused driver. The kids live maybe fifteen or twenty minutes away by bus, and pay a thousand pesos one way, the equivalent to around 35 US cents. At first, I thought it seemed so far, over rolling green hills, the páramo, a special part of Colombian biodiversity high up in the colder parts of the Andes. In retrospect, I think it was mostly just the scenery that made it seem like they lived a universe away, considering it was almost exactly how long it took me in my school bus in a typical US suburb. Unlike me, who was pretty tired from a day of trying to get the kids to listen (they're adorable kids but preschoolers just don't quite understand inside voices yet, or motor skills), they were energetic, singing songs, which they attempted to teach me, and telling me about their homes. Normally bus drivers either ignore me or stare a little (I'm just very clearly not Colombian), but I could see smile lines forming as he laughed at the kids antics.

In class today, the kids had to learn the names of countries in English. To be honest, I took 6 years of Spanish and don't entirely think it was part of my curriculum, or that I had learned my countries in English either, but they had fun drawing a world map and labeling countries. We ended early though, and after class, I showed them some pictures of places I've been, my home in New York, my family in China and some of my friends in Europe to give them more of an idea of what was actually in the countries we were learning about. On the bus, the kids looked more through my phone, enjoying the photos I had taken of their class and taking some road trip selfies. Classes are fun, but relaxing a bit with my students can be just as great