Life here conspires against timeliness
Or how to embrace tardiness
Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who’s currently on a Remote Year trip around the world. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
Colombians are not known for their punctuality.
That’s what Sebastian, one of the Remote Year organizers, told us soon after we got to Medellin — a gentle encouragement to take a more flexible view of time while in this city. And it’s true — things don’t start on time here. The van scheduled to pick us up at 1 pm for a Medellin vs. Nacional futbol match never showed up — it broke down somewhere — so we ended up cabbing it over more than a half hour later. The salsa band scheduled to perform at 10:30 hit the stage at Son Havana well after 11:30. The very meeting in which Sebastian gave us this tip started quite a few minutes late — after people had a chance to get drinks.
It makes for funny conversations when punctuality is actually essential. Last Saturday morning, I took a group tour of downtown Medellin, in the middle of which was a restroom break. “We’ll meet back here in 15 minutes,” our guide Dio said before starting to walk away, then turned back urgently to add, “15 German minutes!”
What is it that makes some cultures more punctual than others? Until recently, I thought this had to do mostly with collective tradition and its influence on individual behavior. Grow up in a place where everyone’s on time, and you get socialized to turn up at the appointed hour. Live where events rarely start when they say they will, though, and you learn to arrive fashionably late.
What I’ve been learning though, is that punctuality and tardiness may have much less to do with culture than with place — the literal setting. Some places, by their nature, encourage timeliness, while others basically make lateness unavoidable.
Meaning even if you think you’re a punctual person, you may find yourself, despite a lifetime of habits, becoming unpunctual in Medellin.
Take last Saturday for example. A group of nine of us planned to visit Comuna 13, a once very dangerous neighborhood that’s been transformed by artsy community projects and a series of outdoor escalators that connects the place to the rest of the city. The plan was this: Meet at the front of the San Javier Metro station at 2 pm. Take a quick walk to the escalators, ride up for a leisurely walking tour of the neighborhood watching street performers and taking photos of murals, then come early evening, get a drink at a bar overlooking the city. Return home for dinner at a reasonable hour after a chill day.
Well, things went haywire before any of us even got to the Metro station.
I really thought I had plenty of time! My friend Femi and I’d finished our tour with Dio at 1 pm right by another Metro station just a 10-minute ride from the meeting spot. This is when I made a crucial mistake: I decided to buy lunch.
The lunch itself was fine! But I’d just used my last 50 mil peso note to tip Dio — and the restaurant, which turned out to be cash only, cleaned me out of all the cash I had left. No matter — I had credit — except when I got to the front of the line at the Metro ticketing booth, I learned the Metro, too, only takes cash!
Femi and I both tried to get Ubers, but to no avail — they were all busy, or our international Uber ratings are shot. That meant I had to get in line for the ATM. Reader, I do not know why there are so few ATMs in Colombia, but pretty much every ATM here has a permanent queue of people waiting to withdraw efectivo. It’s the kind of inconvenience that might get people ranting or starting a fight in the U.S. — but in Medellin everyone simply stands patiently waiting their turn….
A half hour later, I finally had pesos — with which I got in line again for the ticketing booth. Once I got a fare card things went more smoothly. The train came and got us to the meeting spot pretty efficiently. But by the time we arrived, we were a half hour late.
Which was fine, because we were actually the first to arrive! Another group had gone through the same cash-and-Uberlessness problem and got to the station a few minutes after Femi and I did. The third and final group actually did get an Uber — and took the longest to arrive due to traffic. But we’d all made it!
Then it started raining.
At first, it was just a sprinkle. We got on a bus instead of walking to the escalator. By the time we reached our stop, though, we were in the middle of a torrential downpour! Everyone on the bus hopped off to rush under the awning of a little deli shop type place! We stood crowded and damp, watching water fall from the sky! Street vendors came to hawk white plastic ponchos — quite successfully!
A couple people started wilting. “I’m ready to call an Uber and go home,” Connor said and Femi agreed, but they were talked out of it — it helped that no Ubers were available. To fortify ourselves, we bought beers, we bought snacks. I’m not sure how long we ended up hanging out there, having an impromptu happy hour under a random awning. Forty minutes? An hour? Then when the rain finally eased up a tiny bit, we set out with our ponchos and umbrellas.
Getting anywhere in a downpour is an adventure in itself. Sweaty and bedraggled, we eventually made it to a restaurant — not the one we’d planned on, but one that was more easily accessible — to eat fries and empanadas.
And Jhonatan managed to take this video of all of us.
Life here conspires against timeliness. By this I also mean that I’ve gotten somewhat lazier. I’m on a two-week break from work right now, and far in the back of my mind are worries about returning to days of on-time meetings and deadlines.
But for now I’m reveling in my unpunctuality.
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love
How the week organizes and tyrannizes our lives. “What makes a Tuesday a Tuesday, and why does it come, so remorselessly, every seven days?”
The empowerment in saying no. “Successful women of color are expected to obligingly—obsequiously, in fact—say yes as a way to demonstrate gratitude for successes we’ve earned on our own.”
Why so many people are getting divorced right now. “The pandemic seems to have led many people to the same realization: Life’s too short for this shit.”