My first week in Medellín

Hello everyone.

First: One experience I have taken with me from my last blog is that it was best to use english as the written language for a blog as I have aquaintences from different parts of the world who speak different languages.

This blog will be about my life as an exchangestudent in Medellín, Colombia for rest of the year 2010. Medellín is a big city in developement and a boosting economy with around 2.3 million inhabitants. At the time of writing, they are constructing around 60 buildings with 10 stores or more here. It´s the second biggest city in Colombia after the capital - Bogotá, which has more than 7 million inhabitants. The first time I had the chance to visit this beautiful city was in july/august 2007, when I was travelling through Latin-America, see my other blog about that trip. After I came back from backpacking, I decided to attend the University of Oslo to study "Latin-american studies", which is a 3 year bachelor. This study consists of spanish, human geography and "area-studies", like history, politics and culture. When I got a chance to do an exchange I decided that I wanted to go back to Colombia and Medellín, something that I have been thinking about ever since I was here in 2007.

So here I am - I arrived a week ago, 27th of june, completely excausted of jetlag and hours of flying. Took me a couple of days to get used to the 7 hours timedifference to Norway and here, and also the climate is quite humid compared to the norwegian one. At the of writing, it rains quite a bit here in the afternoons, but usually not for long.

Since the university does´nt start untill august, I have 4 weeks to work on my spanish which is quite crucial considering that I have to take all the courses at the uni in spanish.
The uni is named La Universidad Nacional de Colombia - with its biggest headquarters beeing located in Bogotá, but it also has a department here in Medellín with around 10.000 students.

I´m living in a hostal now, but will move to an apartment which I will share with a colombian friend I have had the pleasure to meet here. The area which I live in is called "El Poblado", and is considered as one of the nicer neighbourhoods in the city. Quite safe and clean, both night and day. Well, I can write and write. There is a musicfestival going on this weekend with a lot of latinamerican music, but also classsical music and theater is going on.

That´s it for now. Updates and photo´ will come.