Shakira's homecoming concert

A few days ago someone mentioned that there was a Shakira concert coming up. I dismissed it right away on the grounds that I don't particularly like her music, especially after suffering the prevalence of it here in Colombia. Then someone mentioned that she was in fact half Colombian (so sorry I didn't know!). THEN someone mentioned that the upcoming concert was in her home town of Barranquilla, at a huge football stadium. THEEEEN someone mentioned that the tickets were Ps17,000 (US$7). I still wasn't sold on the idea, but THEEEEEEEEEN someone showed me their ticket, and the power of the embossed words was too much for me to resist: "The Concert of the Decade".

Really for real

Well, given that it was only a cheap 2hr bus ride away and that it was absolutely pissing down rain in Cartagena, pretty soon a posse of gringos was formed for an assault on Barranquilla. The bus seemed to break down a few times but got us there only an hour late - we had all played that silly game before so had left early in the day in order to allow for a decent drinking window before the 7pm kickoff. We completely demolished a couple of bottles of rum before heading to the stadium (me hanging out the doorway of the overcrowded bus), where it was panda-fucken-monium. Massive snaking lines did not look inviting, the scene looked like a military operation, and as per usual we were all beating off attempts by punk kids to pick our pockets. A few of us had written some messages in Spanish on Peso-sized pieces of paper in hope of turning a few young lives around with messages like "This fake Peso will self-destruct" and "Please stop picking my pockets". It didn't seem to have much effect because my pocket was in fact picked during the concert for a grand total of Ps5,000 (US$2).

Shake it Shakira

However, that did not take anything away from what was in fact a brilliant concert. I felt safe enough after the ten searches endured on the way in, and found a nice little spot in our section which just happened to be right adjacent to a bunch of uni girls... who just happened to be studying English. Over the course of the concert we danced around - only possible thanks to the concrete steps used at the stadium for seating - and during the somewhat lengthy costume changes we joked around a bit. Shakira's home crowd were clearly clued in on every single song, as a roar of recognition sounded after each starting couple of notes. Obviously recognising this, Shakira adopted a policy of strong crowd participation - the sort not seen since Bono still had his mullet. I admit the music wasn't as bad as I thought. The overplayed shitty song that I keep hearing over here was my least favourite of course, but I had never heard 99% of her material and a lot of it was decent enough, even enjoyable. Having a team of gorgeous translators only too happy to regurgitate soppy love lyrics into my ear was also pretty damn decent.

Shakira is hot

Seeing as the Gringo Posse had arrived mostly without accommodation, we were hell bent on performing an all-nighter so that we could just crawl onto a bus back to Cartagena the following morning. Luckily the uni group were easily talked into kicking on a bit (for study reasons of course), so we followed them from dodgy place to dodgy place keeping the dream alive. The sun came up, I pulled up stumps and headed for the bus terminal. At some point I realised that thanks to Colombia's finest I had in fact gone two nights in a row without actually sleeping, so I pencilled in a recovery day or two of sleep and not much else.

The stadium