Por fin...
Hello everyone,
So after just over a week on the ground here, I've finally got this blog up and running. The point here is to let everyone know how the progress of the Festival Jambalaya Cartagena is going, and also to document my experience here--the places, the people, the customs and the culture. So the posts will involve a little bit of show-and-tell, a little bit of journalism-lite, and quite a good bit of promotion for the festival and for the city of Cartagena de Indias!
Just to get you caught up, I'm in Cartagena for the next 3 months, but for the next 2 I'll be working ceaselessly on organizing the first annual Festival Jambalaya Cartagena. This is a great opportunity I stumbled upon when I was in Rio last year and my friend Kit and I ran into a guy wearing a Princeton t-shirt, who happened to be Tom Andre, the producer of the Jambalaya! festival in Brazil. One of his contacts became the general manager of the Hotel Sofitel Santa Clara in Cartagena, and he wrote Tom asking if it might be possible to do a festival in Cartagena, which is a beautiful and culturally rich city, which unfortunately is lacking a music festival at this point.
The festival will be held the last weekend of June (23-26), and the main idea is to show the similarities between New Orleans jazz and the music of the Caribbean coast of Colombia. But more than that, we're going to be bringing some of the culture and food of New Orleans to Cartagena, and the experience should be really unique and exciting. I'll go into more detail in future posts.
But the past week has been extraordinary, to say the least. I arrived in Cartagena the afternoon of the 13th, with a reservation at a little hostel and little idea what I was going to do. After dropping off my bags, I called a contact: the mother of the wife of a friend of a friend of Pedro Medina, the founder of the Foundation "I Believe in Colombia" (Fundacion Yo Creo en Colombia) and a contact of mine. The woman's name is Gisele, and she's a Swiss lady who splits her time between Cartagena, Bogota, and Rome. (Her daughter is also a fantastic musician who will almost certainly be playing the festival.) Gisele's house is in the breathtaking Old City, and when I stepped inside I was amazed. She has a small courtyard with a pool, a large sitting room with 20+-foot-high colonial ceilings, and a terrace on the top of the house that allows views of all of Cartagena. She offered me a great price for the rest of the month, and I took it.
After that, Gisele has been so kind as to introduce me to many of her friends, many of whom are artists, musicians, and cultural and business leaders in Cartagena. We spent a fantastic day on the island of Baru about 40 minutes off the coast of the city, and we went to a goodbye party for the manager of the Alliance Francaise. My days have been full of meetings and e-mails and phone calls, and have been notably lacking in beach time. But my skin color is returning to a more healthy shade of tan, which was necessary after another long New York winter.
Now I'm in Bogota, and things are going really well. I'm here until Sunday, and I've had nonstop meetings since I got here a few days ago. It's so much colder and rainier here (the London of the Andes), but nice to feel that Big City feeling again. I've got a ton of family I still have to see, so no rest for the weary, I suppose. But I'll write some more soon.
So after just over a week on the ground here, I've finally got this blog up and running. The point here is to let everyone know how the progress of the Festival Jambalaya Cartagena is going, and also to document my experience here--the places, the people, the customs and the culture. So the posts will involve a little bit of show-and-tell, a little bit of journalism-lite, and quite a good bit of promotion for the festival and for the city of Cartagena de Indias!
Just to get you caught up, I'm in Cartagena for the next 3 months, but for the next 2 I'll be working ceaselessly on organizing the first annual Festival Jambalaya Cartagena. This is a great opportunity I stumbled upon when I was in Rio last year and my friend Kit and I ran into a guy wearing a Princeton t-shirt, who happened to be Tom Andre, the producer of the Jambalaya! festival in Brazil. One of his contacts became the general manager of the Hotel Sofitel Santa Clara in Cartagena, and he wrote Tom asking if it might be possible to do a festival in Cartagena, which is a beautiful and culturally rich city, which unfortunately is lacking a music festival at this point.
The festival will be held the last weekend of June (23-26), and the main idea is to show the similarities between New Orleans jazz and the music of the Caribbean coast of Colombia. But more than that, we're going to be bringing some of the culture and food of New Orleans to Cartagena, and the experience should be really unique and exciting. I'll go into more detail in future posts.
But the past week has been extraordinary, to say the least. I arrived in Cartagena the afternoon of the 13th, with a reservation at a little hostel and little idea what I was going to do. After dropping off my bags, I called a contact: the mother of the wife of a friend of a friend of Pedro Medina, the founder of the Foundation "I Believe in Colombia" (Fundacion Yo Creo en Colombia) and a contact of mine. The woman's name is Gisele, and she's a Swiss lady who splits her time between Cartagena, Bogota, and Rome. (Her daughter is also a fantastic musician who will almost certainly be playing the festival.) Gisele's house is in the breathtaking Old City, and when I stepped inside I was amazed. She has a small courtyard with a pool, a large sitting room with 20+-foot-high colonial ceilings, and a terrace on the top of the house that allows views of all of Cartagena. She offered me a great price for the rest of the month, and I took it.
After that, Gisele has been so kind as to introduce me to many of her friends, many of whom are artists, musicians, and cultural and business leaders in Cartagena. We spent a fantastic day on the island of Baru about 40 minutes off the coast of the city, and we went to a goodbye party for the manager of the Alliance Francaise. My days have been full of meetings and e-mails and phone calls, and have been notably lacking in beach time. But my skin color is returning to a more healthy shade of tan, which was necessary after another long New York winter.
Now I'm in Bogota, and things are going really well. I'm here until Sunday, and I've had nonstop meetings since I got here a few days ago. It's so much colder and rainier here (the London of the Andes), but nice to feel that Big City feeling again. I've got a ton of family I still have to see, so no rest for the weary, I suppose. But I'll write some more soon.
posted by robertkelleya at 2:50 PM
1 Comments:
Gonna be any Cajun food at the Jambalaya??
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