Car city
I spilled a little bit of tea over my machine and lost all my previous entries (they may be recoverable in a google drive hidden somewhere but it´s highly unlikely), so this is the start of journaling online, where eventually I’ll throw all this text into an LLM and be able to perform semantic search (aka hello world of LLM programming).
Am currently writing on a latinamerican keyboard macbook air m1 purchased in Barranquilla Colombia and have been here for the past five days. I’m very confused by this city and I’m already looking forward to a change, any change at all and may end up going to Cartagena for this week just for interesting things to do. Even during what’s supposedly “el mejor tiempo de la ciudad”, the city feels blank and empty due to the cars, the lack of density anywhere, and the seeming reliance on shopping malls to provide any sort of central gathering place.
Let’s just say it’s not a city I’d like to come back to in the near future after Carnaval. How did Colombia get it so wrong? What went wrong in planning, was it the corruption that derailed any sort of cohesive design for a communal, walkable urban center, or just lack of insight into what makes a livable place?
I’ve felt the dire lack of any interaction, of any spontaneity here. Walking by bars just show groups facing inward, businesses shutting their doors. My one encounter with anyone friendly was the dance class I took led by Kathy, and even then the lesson was subpar compared to what’s readily available back in Mexico.
Without density comes a lack of knowledge sharing and turns into a lack of culture. Look at the hellscape that’s become of LA and the isolation it drives. But yet, LA still has it’s areas of openness and community and while I do think a week isn’t nearly enough time to discover and latch myself in anything deep in a city, Barranquilla and it’s supposed open arms are so bogged down by a car culture that’s just this close to being driven away by density. Still, there’s a month left and who knows, maybe people do really hang out at malls here.
ryusuke hamaguchi
I’ve watched two films by him now ‘Drive my car’ and ‘Happy Hour’. Both were entrancing vast portals into, on the surface, a closed Japanese culture and relationships, but the depth of his characters and their motivations and overall fates ended up feeling very human to me. The moments of endurance in the face of change really hit home, whether it be a change in or fading of love, or a discarding of past grief. An impactful quote from ‘happy hour’ was “once you believe something, it’s hard to change your perception.” and to me this marked the midway point in happy hour’s 5 hour length where previous perceptions began to change all at once, when all of the current relationships began to unravel, and then to spark other, new changes.
If life is constant change, then isn’t it supremely better to rely on that as the path forward; to be certain of future differences and of time making past memories indifferent? Why do we live as if forever was a real idea?
writing
I’d like to start writing more, especially short form essays that lead to discoveries within myself and of other things.
The best part of Barranquilla is that I’ve increasingly felt that this time alone in a completely new environment suits me at this exact moment. I needed a reset, a light to hold my current friendships up to and examine. I needed to see if they were truly missed and the answer to that is yes, I wish I were back with them.