Back to school.

If you haven't heard about Coursera, you need to check it out. It's a site full of college-level courses you can take for free. You can't apply them toward a degree or anything, but there are tracks you can take for a small fee that give you a certificate or something in case you need proof that you're learning stuff.

I don't need the proof, so I'm just going to class.

There are courses in every subject you can imagine, and I've been browsing the site since my last days in Argentina. I didn't take a class then because we were getting ready to leave the country and I figured I would have other things on my mind. Over the last couple of years I went back and forth between forgetting about the site and not being able to find a class that interested me enough and started in the time frame I was looking for.

Until now. Three weeks ago I joined a class called Better Leader, Richer Life. It's not so much about studying as it is about reflection and self-critique and growth, which is more up my alley nowadays, anyway. It has forced me to think of a few things in new ways, and we've got some challenging assignments coming up.

Oh, and there are like 30,000 students in my class. Wild.

More recently, I discovered the Denver-based site Craftsy.com. They offer classes in a variety of artsy thing, from cake decorating to painting, weaving to gardening. They have a few free mini-classes, but most of them you do pay for -- though it's much less than you would pay to take a class at the studio or community center, and you don't have to go out in the snow. (Not so much a problem for me anymore, but definitely something I would have taken into consideration while living in South Dakota or even Denver.) I haven't taken any yet, but it's on my radar.

Yes, I am scouting real-world learning opportunities, as well. I'm taking a private salsa class tomorrow. I had found a fantastic dance -- and pole dance! -- studio to try, but it's a long walk from our apartment and in a sort of warehouse area. Not really a place I want to be walking home from at night, at least not yet. Of course, there are a variety of yoga studios and gyms to check out, too. We'll see what I land on in the next couple of weeks.

Back to the city life, and...

You may not remember, because when we first arrived in Buenos Aires I was excited and trying to keep my chin up after a very rough couple of months in Chile, but on our first day there I took a trip to the grocery store and spent the next week recovering. In fact, I never really did recover -- we had some wonderful times in that city, but it never quit feeling heavy and panicked to me.

Fast forward to a month ago as we were getting ready to move to Medellín. I was very excited about it, even though it was hard to leave our Panama friends behind, but there was a part of me that was dreading the idea of living in the city again. I was afraid it would be like Buenos Aires.

Good news: It's not.

It's still a city, with its traffic and whatnot, but as I've written about it's incredibly clean and friendly. We've got the movie theater just down the street again, and so many restaurants we'll never be able to try them all. I'm frozen by choices as I consider the various dance and yoga studios I could join -- and I haven't even looked at the gyms yet.

It's a great place to be. If you're reading this, I hope you're simultaneously planning a visit.

Happy birthday, Brent

In honor of one of my very favorite holidays: breakfast enchiladas, homemade banana pudding, and the Broncos game.

Happy birthday, love.

The rainy season strikes!

A few days after we arrived, Brent was told that the rain would start "any day now".  And so it did, about a week ago.

It's sort of like our Panama rainy season, in that it rains for a couple of hours a day. The difference so far is that it has been doing that every single day, with one day where it only STOPPED raining for a couple of hours. And I'm told the season doesn't last as long.

Today has dawned bright and beautiful, however, and if Brent wakes up we're going adventuring.

Let them look at cake.

The market seemed a little thin on Sunday, and when Brent got to talking to one of the vendors, we learned that it was because some of the other vendors were at a food festival at the convention center at Plaza Mayor.

Food? Okay! we thought, so we walked our purchases back to our apartment, consulted the map, determined it was a long but doable walk to the convention center, and we headed out. Luckily, since it was Sunday, Avenida Poblado was blocked off for pedestrian use and we were able to follow it for probably four miles before we had to turn left and walk just a bit further.

We happened to arrive just as the festival was opening for the day. When we walked in, it didn't seem like much -- a bunch of disinterested-looking wine vendors. But we walked through that and into another room -- and that's where it got awesome.

There was so much. We walked through it all twice, then realized we'd totally missed an upstairs AND a downstairs!  And downstairs is where they were holding a cake decorating contest.

I would have loved to watch it until the end, but the Broncos were playing that afternoon so Brent was in a bit of a rush to get me home and get himself to the right television channel. No matter -- we were at the festival for about four hours. Very well done.

Low-rise living in the high rise.

Our 24-floor building has an incredible view from the top (and the area's only rooftop pool, though we know how many cares I give about that):

We live on the second floor.

It's a nice little apartment, carefully chosen after an exhausting online search from my over-hot living room in Panama: two bedrooms, furnished decently (awesome purple barstools, stupidly uncozy living room chairs). The price is higher than one should be paying in Colombia, but we have to keep in mind, A.) it is the lowest 2-bedroom price in this building; B.) this building is brilliantly located and pretty nice with its amenities and security; and C.) we are living in a furnished vacation rental in the nicest, most expensive part of the city. So.

I actually really like it (would love it if it had a couch you could sprawl on). We've got lots of big windows, so it's always light and airy. The bathroom is big, the closet is okay for one (Brent doesn't like to share closet space with me, so he took the spare bedroom. And bathroom, for that matter.)

I've let myself forget that we're only here for two months. We just wanted something to get us started, at which point we'll find a longer-term arrangement. That means more apartment hunting, which I'm pretending doesn't have to happen....

At home in the new city.

We got to Medellín on Saturday (after a nutsy two days of packing and cleaning in Panama). Life in Colombia is off to a fantastic start.

We went to a Vemma meeting and got to see the absolute excitement and momentum that is building here. The first shipments -- and the first checks -- have been received. So awesome.

Brent's office is fantastic. He's got a great assistant who is so excited about the changes and new ideas, and a couple of great doctors who are going to stay on with him.

I've been catching up on work, doing some local research, and walking around our neighborhood -- which is pretty fantastic. We're close to the farmer's market on Sundays, not much farther to the main, trendy bar and restaurant area, and a couple of blocks to two huge malls, grocery stores, and movie theaters.

We've got a gym in the building, but it's lame -- four cardio machines, the treadmill of which I can't seem to get to work. So we're casually scouting gyms and yoga studios, and hiking up these monster hills in the meantime.