The songbird of Cartagena and other things

Hello jolly fun seekers,I hope everyone is well. The first thing I`m going to talk about is the other things because no one is going to believe me about the songbird part.

First some observations about Cartagena: I love it it is a beautiful city, lots of stuff to see and do. I have done a good job playing tourist here. So far I have been to the Castillo San Felipe which is huge. It was built in 1627 it sits atop a promontory and it occupies one square city block. It was built to portect the city. Cartagena is where all the gold was stored that the spanish got out of central and south america awaiting transport to spain. It`s walls rise up very high and are very thick. There are lots of cannons. There are tunnels running all through it. Those people must have been very short, I could barely stand up without hitting my head inside them. Old Cartagena is also a walled city. A rather large wall 3-4 meters high in most places as high as 7-8 in other places and 4-5 meters thick. It is possible to walk along the wall in many parts of the city it gives you an excellent view of the ocean. For all of this the spanish don`t seem to have been very successful at defending their treasure. I went to the naval history museum here and they have dioramas of all the attacks on the city. Many were successful about the only one that was unsuccessful was a rather large French force that laid siege to the city by land and sea and began to fall to tropical diseases. There seems to be a pattern that the spanish were always playing catchup . Someone would come and beat the shit out of them and they would think ¨OOPS! better fix that hole.¨ For most of the design they used an Italian engineer, maybe that was the problem. I mean look at an Italian sports car, it looks good but you´re always having to do something to it to maintain it. Interesting; Italian engineering is the same all through the centuries. I´ve also been to a number of museums. The most interesting so far has been the Museum of the Inquisition. Yes that is the Spanish inquisition. It is pretty interesting, they have a display about witches and about witchcraft and the nice liberal view the catholic church took towards them. It also described the possible punishments that were practiced upon them when found guilty of being a witch. That was almost 100% by the way to be accused was to be guilty. But then came the good stuff, the torture room where they had examples of the different devices used by the Inquisition to make the victims tell the truth. Yeah right, a little bit of time with one of those devices and I would confess to anything too. Some of the devices doubled as execution devices. How efficient. Other museums visited were the museum of modern art. It wasn`t particularly big but I enjoyed the paintings and sculptures on display. Then there was the museum of gold and Zenu culture. The gold were all examples of pre-columbian art. It is absolutely fabulously beautiful. The Zenu were people who lived around the present day Cartgena area and worked with gold. The naval history museum was primarily a waste of money. Those dioramas I mentioned earlier were about the best part of it. The rest of it seems to be ¨Well we have all this junk that is all naval related let´s put it in some rooms and call it a museum.¨
The women here are absolutely gorgeous. Of course this might be a partial reaction to Panama where everyone looks like they were beat with the ugly stick. I´ve checked out some of the nightlife, one of the places I ended up at was the HardRock Cafe. I went there on thursday because I´d seen that they have karaoke there on thursday and I like to do that once in a while. So I go there and it turns out it is not just karaoke but a competition. It is run in a gong show type of format. The more they like you the longer they let you sing. If they like you they will let you sing half or more of your song. So I was the 4 or 5 person to go up out of about 15 people total. As usual everybody before me and after me sang some sort of slow love song. As usual I decided to rock out. I sang Lookin`out my backdoor by Creedence Clearwater Revival, the crowd loved it. So all of us sang our songs some people got gonged after the first verse. I got quite a way through mine. So at the end there were 4 people left, I was one of them. Beleive or not. The 4 of us all had to sing an acapella song. So I went first. When it was over they judged by acclamation and guess who won? Yours truly! So you may be wondering Charlie what was that song you sang acapella? Well when I introduced it, in spanish, I told the audience that this was a very popular song on latino radio in New York and New Jersey. I then sang the Schaefer beer jingle---in spanish. Yes really. So to that anonymous cuban guy who worked at the western electric warehouse when I was working there in the summer of 71 whose name I don`t remember, thank you for teaching that jingle. Well that´s all for now.

Hasta la vista baby
Charlie