The Pros and Cons of Colombia

Pro's

Relaxed, non judgmental, if it crossed their mind that they could be.
Somehow modern infrastructure, vehicles and buses, despite the lack of repair or recent enhancement. The 80s were good to Colombia.
Colombians leave foreigners alone, and are live and let live in general. It is considered a bad idea to bother or victimize them unnecessarily, and you will be treated with a casual and perhaps curious deference by all that you would come into contact with under normal circumstances. This actually draws expats to Colombia who just want to be left alone.
The people are calm for the most part... A Colombian will never get in your face.. you might end up dead a week later, but he will calmly and perhaps logically either submit or defend his logic.
Tragically beautiful
Amazing Bird Life, I felt like I saw a new unique bird species everyday without even trying
It's true about the women, they are consistently attractive, and sometimes stunning, and some of hem are fantastic flirts.
Colombia is open for business. Whatever corruption here might be, it usually will not stop you from doing business in the safer areas, as long as you don´t take others on.. They want you there, and can usually see past exploiting you up front to the general benefit you might have.

Con's

is there a war going on?... well, kind of... Civil Rights Laws keep it from boiling over in most of the county, even though the armies can be arrayed and staring at each other for years within miles of population centers you might find youself in. If the Rebels don't shoot first, it just stays that way.. tense, but oddly fascinating. It's hot in a number of places you might want to visit, like the Amazon, and you can get kidnapped, but recently they have been returning people within months.

The most brutish thing about Colombians in the north, the thing that makes me see them as ghoulish, is that they stare at you, and they don't greet you, and you might greet them, and smile, but they just keep staring at you with a blank or challenging look on their face.. it's disconcerting. At first I would smile or say hi and wait for their smile, but it would never come.. I guess I usually never use the usual greeting here "bueno", but they just stare.. if you have a conversation, the might eventually be polite, and open up, but they just stare, and it's kind of horrid.

Latin's in general have this maddening ability to just pretend that things they don't like aren't there...they also walk down the street as if no one else is there, even if hundreds of people are there, constantly walking over each other, or walking into you because they are having a conversation.. the middle class and upper class women are the worst at this..it makes them ugly.. they are in a fantasy land..

In Northern Colombia, there is a real looseness with the truth in the transportation sector. In fact, there is a real looseness with the truth when it comes to money in general in Colombia. As with the Chinese.. they never act as if it is personal to deceive you... you happen to have money, and it would make their life better by getting it from you even if the bus doesn't exactly go where you want it to or cost that much.

Colombians never have change, for denominations as low as two dollars and 50 cents US...

The people never live in the countryside, so it can feel kind of hollow, or nice a bit like the American West where there is no water so people live in towns..but it's not lack of water.. it's fear.. so it's weird.

They aren't callous, but they subtly don't give a shit about each other until you get pretty far south in the colder Andean areas..

bull fighting is fascinating but cowardly.. it taught me that Colombians are afraid to face each other as individuals
They are well groomed savages in some ways.. the distance between the endless empty civility they express and their capacity for savagery is a surprisingly short one.

Colombians don't have a sense of humor.. as if to reinforce it, the national version of John Stewart was killed by paramilitaries about 10 years ago..they are wary, and some can be cajoled into laughing, but in general they are always just kind of quietly wary..

Colombians don´t know how to have a conversation about anything they haven't already discussed.. they just repeat themselves all day.. telling everyone how fine everything is.. how wonderful and great...  que rico... there is very little authenticity at all in Colombia

Colombians are notoriously uninterested in foreigners.. you just kind of mean nothing to them, are too outside of what they can imagine, or want to care about... you can´t make them feel safer, and you can´t make them feel better about themselves. I had the same conversations with everyone I met in Colombia.. until I wanted to scream: How far away is it where you live, how much does it cost to get there.. how many hours in a plane.. They just want to leave Colombia, they don´t care about what they find when the get there, they just assume it will be better... I humored it the whole time I was there, but now I am realizing how dumb they are.. how uninspired their whole system was... no one criticized anything or anyone except occasionally the president for not killing enough FARC. No one wanted to know about the outside world, but not because they were so proud of Colombia, although everyone would give you that empty smile and display so much pride in Colombia, but it was apparent to so many that the country with the 3rd largest population in Latin America should have been better at things like Soccer, Etc.. but Colombia is like a family in crisis, and no one wants to criticize, like not puffing each other up with bring the whole house of cards tumbling down...

Colombia also isn't the coke party in the sky people dream it might be.. they are really quite emotionally conservative.. that party happened in the 70´s was over by the early 90´s, and those still alive are all embarrassed by it now...

If it wasn't for the FARC, all of Colombia would be a big cattle ranch, as they are the secret power while the FARC and the Cartels get all the headlines, the remainder of the uncleared lands are being protected from the cattle ranches by own form or another, because they creep into every place they can, and the civil war helped them by driving people into the cities and off of the arable land, with food these days as likely to be packaged as fresh.
The FARC come across like a bunch of quietly indignant 10 year olds, new to ideals but fervent in them, and carrying machine guns.. whatever glamour they might have had 30 years ago, and whatever moral authority they might have had is fading or gone.. they employ children to fight on behalf of drug dealers, Venezuela, and a communist fantasy that died 15 years ago.. whatever abuses they must have clearly been railing against in the 60's, as this is a truly conservative country, and I can see that it could have made one irate back then, they seem a kind of oddly out of touch and childish bunch, clearly parroting internal propaganda,as their leaders have become quite rich... things they have done give me chills, like the Valle de Cauca Deputados Sequestrados, but their most impressive moments of the last 20 years seem to be on the behalf of the Narcos, not on the behalf of the people of Colombia, who could give a shit anymore, are just tired of being wary, wouldn't even know what to do with relaxation if they had it, maybe pretend to be Cuban or Argentine like they are prone. Watching an interview with any FARC member reveals they have been sucking on their own hot air for more than a generation, that the revolutionary spirit infects only them and those whose ignorance is guaranteed by being stuck within their territories so as to make them look honorable as they are the only show in town...