Connections are great. I'm speaking of people-connections: the kind that get you free stuff because of who you know. At my age, these usually take the form of friends' parents. Some of my better connections in the past include: a family member of a family-run microbrewery, who would bring cases of beer to band practice, a fellow sports fan whose father could get good tickets to Leafs games, and restaurant tickets to Jays games, and my sister who, being a musician, has been able to sneak me onto guest lists for various concerts through her music friends. One of these concerts was even a fairly well-known band, Islands.
And let me tell you, if this past Friday was any indication, living in Colombia is going to have its perks.
Allow me to explain. After talking music with some teachers last week, a couple mentioned they were going to something called the "Miche Rock Festival" on Friday, and invited E, K and I to go with. The Festival was basically a battle of the bands, mostly local bands with a couple coming in from other parts of Colombia, including Cartagena and Bogotá. (I just learned how to easily do accents! It's so much easier than I thought! Just option-E and then the letter you want the accent to be over. On Macs, anyway.)
Well, it turned out that one of said teachers (who we will call K2, like the mountain, since there's already a K) was able to get us in to the VIP area, since her boyfriend is in a band which has played at the festival before. Sweet! There's our first connection. I don't know if this is how all concerts work in Colombia, but VIP area simply meant the best spot. Front and centre. Also, there were dudes constantly wandering through, selling beer for a dollar and plantain chips for 50 cents (though that was probably the same in the commoners area).
And you know what, the bands were pretty good! I wasn't sure what to expect, since it was a rock festival, and all of the music I'd heard so far down here had been exactly what I had expected: salsa, merengue, tropicalia, latin pop, etc. I hadn't heard the faintest hint of rock. But there were some very solid bands, and only really 2 that I genuinely wasn't interested in, and in both cases this was because they played some serious death metal, with growling and everything.
(Aside: whenever one of the heavier bands played, and there were 3 or 4 that fit this description, a fairly large section of the commoners area turned into a sort of rotating mosh pit. People just ran around in a circle, like that game where you get a bunch of people in a pool and run around the outside until the current is strong enough that you can just float along. They were relentless. Between the 3 or 4 bands, they must have been running in a circle for more than an hour. I kept expecting the circle to start levitating, like a gyroscope.
More aside: During the second-last band's set, the VIP area, which had been fairly tame compared to the revolutionary commoners, became a hockey style mosh pit. This is the type where people run at each other from several meters away, ultimately ending in a body check. The funniest part was when the male host of the event, an energetic and engaging radio-DJ type, came down and started hockey mosh pitting with 4 10 year olds, getting them all to team up on him. They loved it.)
The best band of the evening by far was a sort of reggie-ska group, who had, in addition to the standard band set-up, a trumpet, flute and congas. They played a Bob Marley cover (all bands were required to play one cover), and a couple of their own songs, which weren't as reggae, but in the same sort of vein (I'd describe it better, but I don't remember all that well). Also, when the radio started blasting through the loudspeakers right in the middle of one of their songs, they just shrugged it off and started the song over, which was a stark contrast to one of the growlers, who had walked off the stage after their own sound problems.
At some point, I asked K2 what "Miche" was. She told me it's a local music store, owned by a guy who is coincidentally named Miche. Good to know - I've been wanting to get a guitar, now I know at least one place where such a transaction may be possible.
Oh yeah, and Miche is a parent at my school.
After Miche Rock wrapped up, we headed over to a latin jazz bar which we had been invited to by M2, another teacher. M2 also happens to have lived in the U.S. for many years, after growing up in Barranquilla, and has been tasked with taking care of us North American teachers. In the last week, she helped us get cell phones, internet, and apply for our Cedula, which, from what I've gathered so far, is sort of like a SIN number with a photo ID, and is necessary for doing almost anything around here.
Anyway, this jazz bar is a favourite spot of M2's, and on Friday it was her sister's birthday, so they had a big crowd of people there. It's a really nice bar (no 1.00 beers, that's for sure), and is completely hidden from the street - there's absolutely no way anyone would know anything was happening inside this building without already being in the know. In addition, M told me this is where the musicians from Barranquijazz (Barranquilla's upcoming jazz festival) will be hanging out after their shows - and there are actually a couple of pretty big names, namely Ahmad Jamal and Joao Bosco.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that the owner of the bar is M's dad? Good old connections.
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