Anapoima Natura

There are lots of "puentes" or three day weekends in Colombia, and we haven't really been taking advantage of them to explore as much as we should, so when I saw that we had two puentes in a row in June, I figured we had to go somewhere.  Luckily, our neighbors felt the same way.  We decided to go in together on a three bedroom house with its own pool at a little resort called Anapoima Natura.  Anapoima is a two to three hour drive south west from Bogota.  It's down the mountain enough that instead of being in the 60s all the time, it's in the 80s, which sounded pretty perfect,

The Anapoima Natura resort seemed like a good fit for an easy trip, since we could have our own house, but there was a restaurant with breakfast included, plus some other fun outdoor activities.  The houses and apartments were all along one little road.  The houses themselves were very open with lots of windows, but the greenery was all strategically planted to ensure privacy.  For example, this was the walkway up to our house.

The pool was on the left and the bedrooms were on the right.

A bunch of the trees were mango trees, and we had fun spotting the fruit.  We grabbed a quick lunch at the restaurant and then hopped in the pool.

To make the afternoon even more fun, there was rum for the adults and spray jets for the kids.

After a few hours of general silliness we pulled the girls out and cleaned them up.

I made pasta for dinner, but managed to catch some pictures of the sunset in the process.

Once it got dark, the girls decided to have a dance party.

Elena had a really hard time falling asleep.  She didn't settle until almost midnight, so that was rough.  Luckily, the sun rose on a new day.  The breakfast spread was simple but good, and Elena was thrilled to discover that they had Minion plasticware for the kiddos.  She and Viv had orange juice, croissants, and "hot dogs" as we call breakfast sausages here.  The real fun though came after breakfast.  There were a series of games set up near the open air restaurant.  Jeff and Viv went to try out the foosball table, while Elena and I played a round of minigolf. 

By the time we got down the hill, Jeff and Vivian had switched to ping pong.

It didn't go very well, so they decided to try badminton, which is a bit slower moving.

Not much better . . . The general consensus was that it was time to try out the common area kids' pool.  It was a cute set up with shallow water, a couple waterslides and other spray and splash features.

Viv loved it, but Elena never quite worked up the courage to go down the slide.  She wanted to go back to our pool and float around with her circle, so that's what we did.  Eventually, we ventured out again, but we let the girls stay in their bathing suits.  Elena went on a lizard hunt,

and Jeff and Vivian discovered that tennis was their sport.  They actually succeeded in sustaining a volley or two!

We were in and out of the pool for the rest of the afternoon.

Elena fell asleep on one of the lounge chairs, and the rest of us played Exploding Kittens, which took some getting used to.  Elena woke up a bit for dinner and a shower, but then she went right back to sleep.  We let Viv stay up and watch some basketball, but it was an early night all around.  

It rained both nights, which made for nice background "music".  It also meant that the pool was quite chilly the next morning, but Jeff and Vivian were determined to get one more swim in.  Well, Jeff may have been more determined than Vivian.

Elena got a bit sunburned, and she's been sleepy/sluggish all day today.  Hopefully she didn't have too much fun in the sun, but we shall see.  Overall we agreed that it was a fun and easy outing, and it was lovely to spend the day outside in the nice warm weather.  We may have to plan another Anapoima excursion soon.

Fun Times

I have been really bad about writing, so this will be a catch up blog going back to the end of April and through May.  I have to make sure I document the cuteness and craziness that is life with the Goerss girls.

The school had a series of "special" days.  One was pajama day.

Then there was the Earth Day parade.  Vivian's class theme was save the earth, so she was a recycle warrior.

Elena's class theme was animals, so she was a "lizard" (I don't do fancy costumes).

I caught the end of the parade.

That same week was also about Avengers superheroes.  Jeff and I went to see it on Thursday, and then I took Vivian the following Saturday.

In between, Jeff and I finally went out to play tejo.  We went with some embassy friends to a place they had been to before.  It was not super fancy, but it was a lot of fun.

The chickens were a nice touch.  The first step is to pick your prefered tejo out of the box.  It's kind of like finding the right bowling ball.  You can probably guess which one is mine and which one is Jeff's.

You stand behind a line and then toss your tejo towards the clay at the end of the path.  The goal is to get in the center of the little white triangles and/or to hit one of the little white triangles and make it explode.

This is made much more entertaining with lots of beer and empanadas.

There's an attached bottle opener, and the empties go in the metal bin along the side benches, very organized.  I settled on Club Colombia Roja, which is apparently much fancier than the Poker beer ;-)

The tejos can get pretty wedged in the mud, so there are tools for prying them out and what looks like a potato sack for cleaning them off.

Basically, your hands are going to get dirty.  We found it amusing that they put our group of Americans at the very end, with an empty lane to protect the locals from flying tejos.  We did okay, but were clearly amateurs.  The only time we got fire was when one of the triangles fell off the clay mound.

Every so often a guy would come around and smash the clay mound smooth again.  Then he would take a beer from our carton as payment.  It was a pretty laid back system.  We had a lot of fun and would definitely do it again.

The girls are both still swimming and doing other crazy activities.

Mothers' Day and Teacher Appreciation Day fell in about the same week as Elena's class presentation, so there was lots of love.  I got a rose and a heart balloon. The theme was still animals, and she was still a lizard. Her teacher knows me.

Elena was more excited about the rose than I was.

The student council also arranged for little jars of candy and messages from students for teacher appreciation day.  That was especially sweet for me after being out of the classroom for three years.

Midway through May I went to a baby shower for a friend.  It was at the Four Seasons that's a bit farther from my house.  They have a restaurant called Castanyoles which hosts a Sunday brunch that's almost as cool as the ones in Bangkok.  The space itself was lovely.

The brunch was not very expensive and it included all you can drink mimosas, bloody marys, or gin and tonics.  There was even a gin and tonic rolling bar that came to your table.  It was a bit crazy.  There were outdoor cooking stations for eggs, pasta, and Colombian food, but I only got pictures of the stuff inside, before sitting down with my sushi.

There was also a wood fire pizza oven, and about fifteen minutes in a couple cheese pizzas showed up.  They were yummy too. I could have stayed there all day, but after a couple hours my neighbor and I rolled ourselves home.  We've promised our husbands we will go back with them, so we'll have to figure out a good time to make it happen.

Our May ended on a great note with the performance of the Primary play, Superstan.  It was a fun and silly musical.  The main character was Stanley Marvel and Vivian played his best friend, DC.  There were lots of silly jokes and song and dance numbers, and Vivian even had a solo.  She did a great job.

We're super proud of her and so glad that she's found something she really loves doing.  Overall, things have been good but busy.  We have a couple long weekends in June and then school's out for summer.  I think we're all ready to switch to a summer pace.