The only mosque in Cartagena is situated somewhere that even many locals residing here for so many years couldn’t identify on a map or had never heard of. After swinging between the idea of going to Sector Marlinda Calle Segunda in La Boquilla where the mosque was supposedly located, and not opting to go because nobody was sure if a mosque were there at all, we eventually hit the road and took a taxi to go to the place which eventually turned out to be a wonderland.
The district is undergoing gentrification so that it can function as a more well-liked tourist haunt, but the architectural pattern is still preserved and the colonial legacy is silently there. However, you don’t find so many cathedrals or museums in Getsemaní, enchantingly present everywhere in the city, underlining, as many of my local friends told me, the piety and strong religious integrity of the people in Latin America.
Mompox, officially Santa Cruz de Mompox, sits on an island with the Magdalena River, Colombia’s famous river flowing gracefully at its feet. Once Colombia’s mineral vault, Mompox continues to represent a living exhibition of colonial architecture that has been jealously preserved over time. It doesn’t, however, come as any surprise it earned a UNESCO world heritage status.
Two teenage boys rap to a table of tourists. They take turns rhyming and passing a small toy boat between them. It’s their speaker, loaded with beats off of the internet. They slice the air with it as they punch their lyrics with heavy gestures, their shoulders bouncing, knees dipping. Patrons perturbed dart annoyed glances over their mojitos. But these boys are good.
Twice in three days I found myself navigating the Magdalena, first on a speed boat from the town of Magangué, a 90-minute trip, and next on a small riverboat with a local tour guide. The sheer girth of the thing is overwhelming. So much water. I live in Los Angeles. We do not have a river like this, though we often speak of ours as if it were once as grand, and ever as important. Flowing for a mere 51 miles, the primary significance of the Los Angeles River is its mismanagement, which now has it largely paved with concrete. Though I doubt such a calamity will ever befall the Magdalena, the threats it faces could be perceived as similarly damaging.
“Morro dos Prazeres” opens with a group of kids playing a kind of backwards version of cops and robbers. Here, it’s the robbers that go after the cops and once they catch them, force them to kneel down and rough them up, whacking them about the face with training guns made out of cardboard.
The Cartagena Film Festival is holding a retrospective screening of John Sayle’s films. All the more reason to ask the man himself how he came to be the father of American independent cinema while all along working behind the scenes for the big Hollywood studios making uncredited script work or as they say script polish.
Ethan Hawke wanders the streets of Paris looking like someone who has swallowed something big he cannot easily digest. He is an American writer who has seen better days and who is in Paris to reconnect – after a stint in a mental institution – with his little daughter.
Encountering a new place is an omnivorous experience. “You eat it,” says Alexander, “You want to taste everything; you want to try everything. You can only feel that enthusiasm the first time when everything is fresh. You want to learn the language, the music, everything.”
Cartagena’s lights are lit, while one conveniently turns a blind eye on darker streets like El Cartucho in Bogotá – or worse, leaves them burning. Ciudad Delirio, Cali, another easy rom-com, another mirage of love that promises to last longer than the dance. Or so you would like to say, thinking you have out-witted the magician. But love is not simply blind; love is the moment before you have it figured, when you are gawking wide-eyed at what could only be magic. In Colombia, between wonder and loss, someone helps me say it right: films may be an illusion, but joy is not. The astonishment, like I’ve heard them say, is real.