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Colombia: Villages near Armenia for retirement:
I´ve lived in several pueblos over the years and I´ve noticed the Colombians are pretty colloquial. They always think their village is safe and the neighboring villages are overrun with narco traffickers. As far as the average pueblo I´d say that they are all probably the same, with bad guys spread out pretty much everywhere.
Colombia: Half and half:
i´m going with a half baked theory that posters on this list are half and half.
Half filter the drink the water, half don´t.
Half think they owe taxes in Colombian, half don´t.
Half think most Americans are fat and half of Americans are obese. Half don´t think that is true, and even it it is true its acceptable.
Half think Trump is a fuçking idiot, half don´t.
Half think you need an immigration attorney to handle your visa application. Half choose to do it themselves.
Half want to live at the beach, half want to live in the mountains.
Half want to live in a pueblo or very small city, half want to live in the city.
and so forth......slow day at work, just ruminating......enjoy your day.
Colombia: Can you drink the water in Colombia:
This question came up on another thread which was too long and convoluted to continue, so I opened a new thread.
NO, quite frankly, Colombian water is not fit to drink all the time and in all parts of Colombia.
1. The water comes from the rivers. Go smell the rivers and look at the trash and dead stuff floating in there and you´ll get an answer to your question very quickly. Think Medellin is safe from it? Go down close to the Río Medellin and look and smell. You won´t like it I assure you. Sometimes even raw sewerage floaties.
2. When there is a drought the water sources shrink in volume thus concentrating the contaminants.
3. There are no Clean Water laws in Colombia. People indiscriminately dump everything in the street and the street drains go directly to the nearest creek or river. I´ve seen them pour paint and paint thinner, engine oil, dog crap, all kinds of pollutants running down the gutters when it rains hard, as it does pretty much every day for a few minutes, especially in the winter.
4. When you get up first thing in the morning and turn on the tap you can smell the water. Sometimes has a rotten egg or rusty iron odor, sometimes strong chemical odor like paint thinner, sometimes heavy doses of Chlorine. All are bad for your digestive system and all are carcinogens when mixed with other pollutants.
5. After a heavy rain you can pour the tap water through a paper coffee filter and watch the paper filter turn brown.
6. Water in the fincas is worse. Many finca houses have water barrels on the roof with stale water and all kinds of stuff floating in there. Many fincas also don´t have real septic systems. They just let run off flow to the nearest brook. Cattle, pigs, chickens are not fenced out of the water sources, fecal matter floaties everywhere.
7. A similar problem exists in many cities and towns in the US. Pollution is everywhere. Google water safety and read about thousands of American cities and towns that have contaminated water with hundreds of different chemical and organic pollutants.
The only solution is to filter your own water. When I´m traveling I carry a pitcher filter with me. At home I install a whole house filter under the kitchen sink, or at the very least a water filter on the faucet. Cost only a couple hundred pesos and takes an hour or so to install. Then change the filter regularly and as needed, especially after heavy rain.
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Colombia: Tragic landslide, southwest Colombia:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/colombia-landslide-kills-least-14-60-injured-130114593.html
Colombia: Tragic landslide, southwest Colombia:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/colombia-landslide-kills-least-14-60-injured-130114593.html
Colombia: City Other Than Your Own:
Neither Medellin or Manizales is ¨small¨. My take on it would be to take some time out of Buca and travel to the other cities and hang out till you find the one you like best. I spent two months in Buca and liked it okay, but it never appealed to me as a place to live permanently. For me, I´d be happy just about anywhere in the coffee region in Quindio, Risaralda or Caldas, and I also like Popayan. The climate is a big factor for me, I like the cool mountain air of the coffee region. Any city larger than Armenia would not really appeal to me to live in the city proper, I prefer pueblos that are half hour or an hour from the city.
Colombia: What's A Gated Community?:
agree with whoanellie.....conjuntos can be any size, the one I live in has 40 attached houses that are either two and three stories, some have roof gardens. Some of the houses have an apartment with a separate entrance, like a duplex. There are probably 50 or 60 families here. We have a gated driveway and a doorman on duty all the time.
I lived in another conjuntos in Pereira that had five high rise buildings, and in Medellin I lived in a conjuntos that had only 12 apartments but no doorman, just a locked gate out front that automatically closed after you went through.
the advantages for me are higher estrato so families are a little more educated and some of their kids are my students so I get to know the families pretty well. The doorman is not armed, but would quickly call the police if something unusual was going on. There is a fence around the development with a concertina wire on top. I don´t like the fence or the wire, but it does keep out the beggars and the street dogs. It also separates us from the noise of the dogs and roosters outside the development, and there aren´t any buses with screaming brakes or roaring motors all night long, or big loud trucks. People here are very nice and I feel welcome when I see them on the street or outside their houses.
Colombia: Shipping costs:
when i moved here i unintentionally left my $600 DSLR camera in US. Without thinking, my friend sent it to me by Fedex and it wound up costing me $200 between shipping and taxes. Had I know that in advance I would have sold it in the US and bought an inexpensive point and shoot to use here in Colombia.
Colombia: Expats who returned to US or Canada:
I´m curious what it is like to return to live in the US or Canada after living in Colombia for a few months or a few years. What did you experience? What where some of the challenges? Are you happy you went back?
I´ve been here almost 8 years in Colombia and from time to time I think about going back to live in Tennessee. I wonder if I could re-adapt to US lifestyle.
Colombia: Barking Dogs:
I second what afarestegui said, the dogs have been one of my biggest challenges for nearly 8 years in Colombia. I have actually moved a couple times because of dogs, and roosters.
One next door neighbor would put her dog on her balcony every morning at 5 am and he would bark for a solid hour. Then when she came home from work at 6 pm she would put him out there again and he would bark for a solid hour. I asked her why, and she said she did it so he could exercise. True story.
Another next door neighbor had a German Shepard that she would lock on her balcony every day while she was at work, then when she came home she would hose off the balcony washing the dog excrement onto the sidewalk below. That dog barked at every thing, a taxi going by, kids in the street, a plane overhead, music, street vendors, all day long that son of a perrita barked and barked. I wanted to poison the son of a perrita.
After that I moved to a pueblo, and son of a perrita, my neighbor had 3 dogs and 5 roosters. I lasted three months there and moved again.
Then, in another pueblo I was walking across the central park one night on my way home from class and three dogs rushed me and one latched onto my leg and left parallel three inches scars four inches long on my calf. He literally dragged me down like you see in the wildlife videos when the wolf takes down the deer. Luckily two men where nearby and they rushed to my aid, otherwise I would have been badly mauled.
After that I moved to a gated community and found some peace and quiet. Except, about 100 yards away on a balcony outside the gates a man puts his dog on the balcony all day long when he is at work and that damn dogs barks at everything. Luckily it is far enough away I can ignore it most of the time, and luckily he brings the dog in at nights.
You get so pissed off at these dogs crapping all over the place you sometimes harbor maniacal schemes to grab them all and neuter them on the spot. NO body neuters their dogs here and there are no leash laws and no noise laws. You just have to live with it.
As stated before, the dogs and their excrement everywhere, and the roosters, has been my biggest disappointment in Colombia.
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