To be honest, it was love at first sight. As I noted in my first post on arrival in Medellín, the City of Eternal Spring makes a powerful first impression. The city of 2.5 million people looks as if someone dumped it from a pitcher high above into the lush valley. High-rise apartment buildings climb without pattern into the sky as the crush of buildings splashes against the rugged landscape, while low-rise barrios full of paisa creep up the steep mountainsides, the valley far too shallow to hold the sloshing population.

It’s been a week since I returned to my home in Denver. I’ve got more topics to write about from my 6 weeks in Medellín, but this love letter feels pressing. Sightseeing experiences (a hike to Angelopolis, Comuna 13, el restaurante La Mayoría, and maybe more) can wait. The thoughts swirling in my mind can’t. I need to try to make sense of what is calling me back to Medellín a mere 7 weeks after returning home, a decision I made after being there only two weeks. Why do the remaining 7 weeks feel like an eternity from where I sit now?

The fact that I’ve been laid out with a pretty nasty cold I caught just before leaving Medellín could have something to do with it. I’ve certainly felt physically miserable since getting back. Illness has also redoubled the sense of isolation I feel on my return. After acclimating to the ability to bask in the energy-building community that was never more than an elevator ride away for this late-blooming extrovert, being stuck at home has been an unwanted kick in the spiritual and emotional teeth. I didn’t even get to join Thanksgiving dinner, damnit!

Or maybe it has to do with the fact that this first experience with slow travel marks a new beginning for me in more ways than one. Although I’ve experienced a lot of personal growth since my divorce, officially recognized by the courts now almost 2 years ago but more than 3 years in the making, my life also fell into a comfortable rut. I’m blessed with a large group of friends I get to see regularly in well worn paths to our neighborhood tavern. As someone who yearns for new experiences and vistas, however, I have found that too much regularity is stagnating. My creative juices thrive on new inputs. I’ve said for many years, since long before my divorce, that I wanted to live outside the U.S. for a while. My thirst for the new has a lot to do with that. I’m proud of myself for beginning the process of figuring out an expat existence in a very tangible way.

This trip was also a first milestone in my journey to embrace the call of travel writing that has beckoned me for so long. Thirty years at this point? I’m also proud of the fact that I followed through on the “Baja Aha” I had while in residence at the Modern Elder Academy (MEA) this summer: I don’t have to make a living as a travel writer to BE a travel writer. And I didn’t just follow through on starting the process. After returning home from Baja, I committed to publishing 25 pieces before the end of 2022. This is post #26.

I want to think my infatuation with Medellín is more than that, though.

The fact that I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Denver writing this while listening to a reggaeton playlist my friend and fellow traveler Paula made may be proof enough that Medellín left an indelible mark on my soul. I’d never heard the word reggaeton prior to agreeing to go dancing to it one night in Provenza. For anyone who likes to shake it to music with a driving beat, reggaeton delivers. The love of the crowd for artists like Daddy Yankee and Bad Bunny as they sing the words of every song at the top of their lungs is also infectious. Turns out it’s also a great genre for grooving while writing in a coffeeshop. Someday I’m going to understand those lyrics and be ready to sing along with the crowd.

Another word I’d never heard before but which now occupies a fair amount of mental cycles for me is bachata. I’d bet that a very large percentage of the American population has heard of salsa dancing. I’d put the same bet on the fact that the those who have heard of bachata dancing is vanishingly small. Although I got a late start, not taking lessons for the first half of my trip, I’m now 8 sessions into developing my bachata skills, and I’ve found an instructor in Denver to keep learning until I return to Medellín.

Dancing is a huge part of Colombian culture. I’ve loved moving my body to the beat since college, when I was regularly one of the first to break from the crowd at a live music event, emerging from those standing around with hands in their pockets, bobbing their head to the music. As I’ve aged, my willingness to dance like no one is watching while EVERYONE is watching has certainly abated, but I still love to move to the groove when I get the chance. Colombia gave me lots of those chances, and I grabbed them. Well, most of them.

Most of my dance experience has been of the “move with no rules” variety. I mean, no rules other than staying in beat with the music. I’ve been told by enough people over the years that I do that well that I feel pretty confident that I won’t look like a fool in that scenario. If you know me, you probably know that not looking like a fool has always been extremely important to me. Probably – no, definitely – too much so. That fixed mindset has been a real limiting factor for me. Although I’ve long thought of myself as a lifelong learner with a growth mindset, my work at MEA helped me acknowledge that view of self was incorrect. In truth, I have sought to grow in areas in which I am already strong. Deepening my knowledge and skills in certain areas rather than embarking into new fields of endeavor. As I wrote in my MEA workbook, “I’m not (yet) good at being bad at things.” The “yet” was added after the thought first came to mind without that word included as I realized the original statement was itself an example of a fixed mindset. One, simple, three-letter word makes all the difference.

My experience with dancing where rules apply has been much more limited. My parents sent me with the rest of my private school classmates to an evening ballroom dancing school called Fortnightly that met – wait for it – every two weeks in fifth grade. That was a social nightmare that occurred prior to my musical awakening. My memories of those classes are more of my female classmate who was so nervous the first night that she puked in front of everyone as the boys and girls were lined up on opposite sides of the room for our first pairings. I guess we danced. That part didn’t sufficiently anchor itself into my long-term memory. What I do recall is having to show my mother that girl’s name on my dance card after every subsequent class after making fun of her at home after that first class. I’m glad my mother taught me those sorts of lessons.

Then, my first wife and I decided to give swing dancing a try during our short-lived, ill-fated marriage. You’ll just have to trust me that I was not the problem in that dance duo, but it was not a pretty sight either way.

Then, for the next 20+ years of my relationship with wife #2, she tried without success to get me to give dance lessons another go. My excuse – the experience with wife #1 was too scarring. I made a lot of mistakes before that marriage ended. That one has got to be somewhere near the top of the list.

On arrival in Colombia, I was immediately introduced to the importance of dancing to the culture. My hotel Selina held a Salsa Night every Monday, complete with free lessons to kick things off. Then I learned that dance lessons are offered at the Valley Spanish School, a place a friend in Denver had recommended I check out. Then I learned that private lessons and dance socials are things that my fellow travelers were embracing in great numbers while in Medellín. It took me a while, but I jumped on the bandwagon.

I decided to go with bachata rather than salsa based on the fact that bachata moves a bit more slowly and is generally considered easier to learn because of that difference. It seemed like a good place to start, and it’s been a blast. While it does move more slowly, it’s filled with subtle complexities and many different possible moves and variations that in my mind make it far from “easy.” It’s also a very sensual dance that involves close contact with your partner, and yes, that definitely adds to the appeal for me as someone who did not expect to be single at this point in life but is enjoying the freedom. Sorry, not sorry.

Anyway, after 5 private lessons, I had the basic steps and count down and had added a handful of moves to my repertoire. I was also determined to embrace the learning mindset I’ve learned I could use more of so I went with great expectations to my first bachata dance social at Parques del Rio my last Monday night in town. The weekly event begins with a free lesson, followed by an open dance session in which partners pair up for a song or more if there’s a willing connection on both sides. The general idea, though, is to dance with as many different people as possible.

Oof. First, it was obvious from the start that the dance lesson was not aimed at beginners like me. The sequence they were teaching felt like I was trying to learn more moves in 20 minutes than I had in the previous 7 1/2 hours of private instruction I’d received. Plus, the beat, which I learned was “Dominican style,” was much faster than what my instructor had been playing for us. I decided to bail and wait for the dance social to focus on practicing what I had learned in my lessons rather than trying to triple my repertoire at 1 1/2 times the beats per minute I was comfortable with.

In the end, I only managed to work up the courage to ask three women to dance, and only one of those was a stranger. The other two were friends that were part of the crew I was there with – one a beginner like me whose toes I spent a good bit of time on top of and one a very skilled bachata dancer who graciously told me that one of the moves I led her through is her favorite of all the many that she knows. Although I prefaced my request to dance with the stranger with the fact that I’m a beginner, her palpable disappointment at the limited variety I was able to offer her stung a bit.

Afterwards, I was a bit disappointed with the fact that I wasn’t more comfortable with looking foolish, but I am also learning to be more gentle with myself. I made a good first step, and I’ll do better next time. That’s what a learning mindset is all about after all.

Ultimately, my ongoing love affair with Medellín may have everything to do with the fact that she represents all sorts of new beginnings. There’s an intoxicating headiness to that. Our parting also resulted in her inflicting a few “cruelties” on me as my friend and fellow traveler Elliott pointed out. I was pick-pocketed on the Metro on my last day, losing an old phone for which I already had a replacement waiting back in Denver. I also left my Kindle on the plane after arriving in Denver, in part because I was distracted by the cold I had come down with my final night in Medellín. The onset of the cold caused me to miss an orchestral performance of Pink Floyd’s music that I was scheduled to attend with Elliott and other friends. “She didn’t want you to leave,” Elliott observed.

That makes two of us, mi amor.