{"id":282,"date":"2011-05-26T19:02:15","date_gmt":"2011-05-27T00:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seecolombia.travel\/blog\/?p=282"},"modified":"2016-02-19T20:47:02","modified_gmt":"2016-02-20T01:47:02","slug":"why-did-i-choose-to-live-in-colombia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seecolombia.travel\/blog\/2011\/05\/why-did-i-choose-to-live-in-colombia\/","title":{"rendered":"Why did I choose to live in Colombia?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Puedes encontrar la version en espanhol \u00a0de este post aqui<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Colombia,<\/a><\/p>\n

Hello Everyone!<\/p>\n

My name is JL , please let me start by saying that I’m\u00a0honored to be part of the See Colombia Travel Blog team and to work along such a diverse and superb group of lovers of Colombia,\u00a0thank\u00a0you for letting me join the club guys! As this is \u00a0my first post in this blog I thought it would be a good idea to kill two birds with one stone both \u00a0introducing myself to give you a little context and answering one of the\u00a0questions\u00a0I’ve been hearing the most in the last couple of months from my friends and family that know about my nomadic way of life: Why did I choose to live in Colombia?<\/p>\n

Being the son of a sort of diplomat that had to move from country to country \u00a0quite a lot and quite often \u00a0 – my dad worked for the U.N, the IMF, the World Bank among other international entities basically developing\u00a0alimentary\u00a0plans for underdeveloped or extreme weather countries – I spent my early \u00a0childhood convinced that it was absolutely normal for everybody to\u00a0switch\u00a0languages depending on your interlocutor, to move every few months to places that bared no resemblance to the previous one you lived in and to easily \u00a0leave things, people and places behind. It wasn’t until around \u00a0the time I turned up ten or eleven, when we kind of settled down for a while in Peru, my native country, \u00a0that I started to realize that such way of life was actually quite a privileged one and that I was developing a different life perspective in which love of travel and cultural diversity was vital, from that point on I promised to myself that I was never going to stop traveling ever!<\/p>\n

Stubborn as I am – ask my wife – I managed to keep that promise for many, many \u00a0years traveling around the world first as a backpacker and later when I \u00a0turned my passion into my job, as a professional traveler. For some random reason I decided to\u00a0establish\u00a0that 7 months was the line that defined “living” in a country from just visiting it, under that perspective I have “lived” in nine countries, until I recently decided that Colombia was going to be the tenth …..and the last one.<\/p>\n

\"Global<\/a>
This is the amazing Global Encounters team which I worked with during the last seven years. Great crowd, I love you guys!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I talk about my former job I’m referring to Global Encounters, \u00a0the great Latin America tour operator that I co-owned until recently with Marc, Bart and Karin my very good friends and former business partners. During the last seven years, along with them, \u00a0I learned and traveled a lot more than before through \u00a0all Latin America, based most of the time in Buenos Aires, Argentina.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, after a 3 month long stay here ( my fifth time in Colombia) \u00a0in which I\u00a0irreversibly fell in love with the country\u00a0\u00a0I seriously started thinking on not only moving, but actually settling down in Bogota. I was already getting \u00a0a little bored of Buenos Aires, a city I used to love with passion but that – to me- now lacked of the Latin,\u00a0unpretending\u00a0and relaxing vibe I was looking for. This time, as an adult, the decision of leaving all the many good things I had behind wasn’t that easy but I have always trusted my instinct and it was shouting to me that I had to come here, and so I did. I have never been happier with any other decision I’ve taken in my life.<\/p>\n

\"Cartagena<\/a>
Vallenato , a (the) Colombian girl and party in a Cartagena night, it doesn’t get much better than this…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Why did I choose to live \u00a0Colombia? Because this is \u00a0still a hidden paradise, \u00a0the last one in Latin America, that we as travel professionals need to look after so it\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0become a Tourist trap, so we don’t spoil it, so we keep it faithful to its roots and culture, so we can develop a responsible kind of tourism that benefits all equally. \u00a0Because people here are the most polite, generous, uninterested, unselfish people I have met in my whole life and in all my travels, because this is a country that breathes hope, because Colombians are more than willing to let everyone know that heir country bears no resemblance to the stereotype that is still in the mind of most people.<\/p>\n

Why did I choose to live in Colombia? Because I see a lot of foreign people moving down here, investing in the country which re assures me \u00a0that in a few years \u00a0this is going to be the capital of South America.<\/p>\n

But the most\u00a0important reason is also the most simple: I feel HAPPY here. Wherever I go in Colombia, big city or small village, I can tell there’s a huge change going on in this country, a change that implies people are becoming proud of being Colombians, and\u00a0a\u00a0happiness I can’t describe floats in the air. And I want to embrace it. \u00a0And be part of it.<\/p>\n

JL<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Puedes encontrar la version en espanhol \u00a0de este post aqui Hello Everyone! My name is JL , please let me start by saying that I’m\u00a0honored to be part of the See Colombia Travel Blog team and to work along such a diverse and superb group of lovers of Colombia,\u00a0thank\u00a0you for letting me join the club […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[35,3,115,66,97,131],"tags":[356],"yoast_head":"\nWhy did I choose to live in Colombia? - Colombia Travel Blog by See Colombia Travel<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/seecolombia.travel\/blog\/2011\/05\/why-did-i-choose-to-live-in-colombia\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why did I choose to live in Colombia?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Puedes encontrar la version en espanhol \u00a0de este post aqui Hello Everyone! 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