Oh Popayan

Things got a little more interesting in Popayan than expected...first we got robbed...at a church...in the middle of the afternoon. After that though things were pretty awesome! So we report that we've been robbed and the police are on the scene within a few minutes and when I say police I mean 6 policemen with automatic weapons. Needless to say, we had their full attention, while we were in the squad car some guy ran up to report that someone had just stolen his car... they told him they would call the dispatcher and shooed him away.

After going to some of the potential culprits homes for questioning we headed back to the police station where they took an extremely detailed police report...3 times in Spanish and then once in English- we are pretty sure the only English speaking guy on the force just wanted to practice. In fact he said he hadnt had occasion to use his English in 3 years but there seemed to be a lot more gringos around Popayan recently (thanks to Lonely Planets description of a quaint colonial border town)... and asked us if there was a white people conference or something...rrrrright. He also bought us coffee and "candy" (really halls cough drops, they eat them like candy) at the police cafeteria. Then he gave us money to go call our parents. So we were escorted- reggaetone blaring and siron on (when someone got in our way) to the only place to make international phone calls in Popayan.

Then the cops dropped us off and explained things too our hostel owner and asked us to go dancing with them that night, which we accepted. Our hostel owner was not especially pleased that we didnt have anyway to pay her and we had lost our key in the robbery... so she sawed off the lock on our door with a hacksaw blade, after I had broken another key off inside our lock, trying to get it open, oops. Then we settled in for our lovely feast of peanut butter and the least rotten pieces of fruit we had purchased earlier.

Luckily when the cops came to pick us up they asked if we had had dinner, to which we replied we had no money to get dinner (and you can only use a credit card in 2 restaurants in the whole town...and they were closed) so then they took us out to dinner for what looked like some deep fried e. coli with a side of chicken. We were both planning on being sick afterwards but not willing to pass up a free meal. Here you also get a plastic glove to eat chicken with, which was funny.

Then we went looking for somewhere to go out dancing but literally every place in town was closed because it was Wednesday night after 10pm (everything closed literally by 6 on week nights) so no dancing. Instead the police picked up some beer and we drank it on the way to one of their houses...police can do whatever they like. We were expecting bachelor pads because they insisted that they weren't married, they lived alone...but that apparently meant they lived with their parents. So we went to one of their parents homes at midnight- yikes- but his mom did say we could stay there as long as we needed if we couldnt get money to pay for our hostel- she was lovely. We decided against that despite the generous marriage proposals we got from the police- they told us they normally had multiple girl friends but for us, they would be one woman kind of guys- charming. All in all though we had a great night and we got back to the hostel exhausted but ready to make things happen in the morning- i.e. get the heck out of Popayan.