November 8, 2007
Day 771
Urzuz at his house.
I hung out with Jaime most of the day and got to know his neighborhood in Cali, but then he had to leave for Bogotá. He called a few of his friends to try to find me a place to stay, but they were all out of town. He finally got hold of another guy from Couchsurfing named Urzuz who could host me. I took a taxi to the bus station with Jaime and a few of his friends, and Jaime gave the driver instructions on how to get to Urzuz' place.
It was late at night, raining, I had all of my possessions with me, and I had no idea where we were going. Suddenly we were outside the city altogether and there were no more street lights to give me a bit of comfort. The driver pulled down a deserted and potholed alley in the city's industrial zone and started looking around nervously. It was a perfect situation to get robbed or worse.
After a few minutes, it became apparent that the driver was lost, even though Jaime had given him specific instructions. He called Urzuz on his cell phone and figured out that he had pulled down the wrong alley. I was screaming at him to get us out of there, that people didn't live in deserted alleys in industrial zones. He backed the car out, but then pulled down another dark alley a block away. He got on his cell phone again, and this time I saw a figure backing into the shadows in the distance. I thought that was it, this guy was going to rob me of everything I owned and then kill me. But when we got a little closer, I realized that the shadowy figure was actually Urzuz!
I stood corrected, some people actually did live at the end of dark and deserted alleys in the middle of industrial zones. Urzuz introduced me to his house mates Claudia and Rambo (yes, that was his name), but I was still too shaken up to hang out. The house was a kind of open air structure, so I set up my tent in the back under the roof and went to bed early.
The photo album for this entry is here.
