Okki Goes to Cartagena

After our cab finally dropped us off at Okki's trailer, we both went inside crashed out of exhaustion. I took the sofa bed, since Okki's spare room was being occupied by his friend Pauley, who'd come down from Aspen to play in a poker tournament that evening in Black Hawk.

All four of us in the New Year's party crew slept well, by our mutual reports, since we'd done most of our drinking at Okki's place before we ever got in the taxi. At the club, mostly we drank water. If you're going to dance late into the night, this is the only viable strategy, whether you're at Burning Man or just at a regular club.

The next day we got off to a slow start. We took the first coffee of the new year on the back deck of the trailer, overlooking South Boulder Creek.

Okki brought up the September floods, which had threatened to sweep away the trailer park.

"They said a huge wall of water was coming down the canyon," he said.

But the trailer park was saved because the five-hundred-year flood plain on the other side let the creek to expand out along Valmont Road.

He pointed out the spot on the bank, about eight feet down from the deck, where the water had reached. At night, it sounded like a freight train was passing by in the dark, even though you couldn't see the water.

As for breakfast, Okki declared himself in the mood for breakfast burritos, a suggestion I endorsed, so we went in search of them in his car.

We first stopped at the Barnes and Noble at 30th and Pearl so that he could buy a guidebook. He wanted to read up about his destination while on the plane. His flight to South America was to leave from DIA late that evening.

As we suspected, the store was open on New Year's, but he pickings for Colombia were slim. He settled on the Lonely Planet Guide for the nation as a whole, since there was nothing more specific within the country. It was more to his style than Fodors.

After we went through the line, he remembered he also needed a Spanish phrasebook. We went back inside and checked the language section. But that genre of book completed confused the sales associate working there, as if she had never heard of such a thing. We went back to the travel section and found a couple of them there.

The staff person there also seemed to find our request to be challenging. He fretted for a long time that there wasn't a phrasebook specific to the nation of Colombia. I held my tongue until he was gone, and then both of us agreed that one of two choices for Latin American Spanish would do just fine.

"There's nothing really different about the grammar," I told him. "Argentina has an extra pronoun, like voce in Brazilian, with its own verb conjugation, but that's about all there is on that level."

As for me, I purchased the other Latin American Spanish phrasebook that he didn't want, the one from the Eyewitness Travel Guides series put out by Dorling Kindersley (DK). It had a very splashy color cover with a sturdy binding, and it was about as thick/thin as you would want it to be.

I explained to Okki that I like to keep track of the trends in this niche of publishing---phrase books---and to keep my collection up-to-date.

For our first meal of the new year, we finally settled on Illegal Pete's, a local institution down on the east end of Pearl Street Mall that does roll-on-the-spot buritos---Front Range style---as well as a local microbrews. Illegal Pete's had the virtue of being open, and parking was free because of the holiday. There was gratefully no line. We both got steak burritos, mine with extra sour cream. For my drink, I ordered an Upslope Brown Ale, the darkest thing they had on draft. He got something else from the same microbrewery.

Back in the trailer, while Okki began the long slow-motion process of packing for his trip, I helped him practice new Spanish sentences from the phrasebook he had purchased that day.

I also mocked the Dorling Kindersley one I'd bought as being inferior.

"Useless page...useless page...useless page..." I said derisively, while flipping through the lengthy front material of the book until I finally got to the first page of basic Spanish words. Even here the layout was atrocious.

"Most of the phrasebooks they put out now are unusable," I said. "The old ones were much better in both content and design."

But at least the one Okki purchased was humorous in its style, and might be more helpful for his way of communicating. You never really know until you are in a situation in which you need to depend on it in order to talk to someone.

Despite being multilingual, Okki didn't know much Spanish beyond the most basic words and phrases. Instruction and practice of some the pleasantries and useful sentences was called for.  He picked them up easily and even composed a superhero-like flair of arrival to go with his "buenos dias."

Then I read sections from his guidebook on the history and sites of Cartagena, which we both decided was a great "portal" to South America. He used his printer to print out his hotel reservations there, as well as the four-page Swedish-language guide to the city's fun activities that Stefan has composed for him, based on his trips there over the years.

The day was punctuated with drop-by visits by Ash---who would be tending to Okki's hermit crabs in his absence---as well as Keith. Before saying good-bye that evening, I helped Okki mentally rehearse the order of his flights, through Miami and Bogota before finally arriving in Cartagena at five o'clock the next afternoon local time. I find it's very helpful to do this, to let the scope of the day's journey enter into your consciousness ahead of time.

Then I left him in the capable hands of Keith, about two hours before his shuttle bus was due.

He and Stefan are going to have a fun trip, almost certainly. They travel well together, the two countrymen. Among their goals there are attending a techno music festival in Cartagena, sitting on the beach in Santa Marta, and hiking three days back and forth through the jungle to the Ciudad Perdida.