Invitation from Colombia

Early in the year 2000, my husband was very happy about getting invitations from friends who live in Bogota, Colombia. One friend is Dr. Acupuncture who has a clinic and the second friend is Tae Kwando.

The master who has the Academy of Tae Kwando, a third friend is his university classmate and an ambassador of Columbia from the Republic of Korea.

Without a doubt, he was preparing a trip, yet, I worried because, at that time, Columbia was not settled in politics and drug cartel was more rich than the government itself.

However, we left Pearson Airport to fly down to Texas, and from there we had to take an airplane to go to Bogota, Columbia.

When we arrived there, his Tae Kwando friend came to the airport's special guest room to pick us up.

As soon as we saw him, we felt very relieved from the stress of arriving remote area without speaking their language.

Once there, everything was fine and we visited the Korean Embassy to meet his Ambassador friend later we went to the residence to have dinner and the residence building had really nice beautiful garden.

During the dinner, some of the people from the Korean Columbia Association invited us to their cottage which is more than a couple of hour's drive, much below sea level than Bogota. The reason the Association owned the cottage is the gift from Ex-President, Chung Hee Park who visited Columbia donated funds to buy the cottage since Bogota is located much higher sea level than any other city, and pregnant women have a higher tendency to have miscarriages.

At that time when I heard that story, I felt how thoughtful and warm-hearted the president is.

Anyhow, the next day we drove down there and spent the whole day swimming, barbecuing, and eating Korean foods, Those were very memorable events, I am not sure if still Association owned cottage now.

After that, we visited a gold museum, Dry Salt Mountain, riding the cable car to go up to the mountain.

We even played at a private golf course which was the only one in Bogota.

After coming back from the trip, I paid attention to writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez who is Columbian and educated there, yet, he lived in Mexico City, Mexico until he died there in 2014. Because of his different political opinions of his own borne and educated country's government policy.

Garcia Marquez is speaking about all the people who are marginal in history, not have a voice, that he gives a voice to all Latin America. In one of the most famous of his books, " One Hundred Years of Solitude" he wrote about miraculous and enchanting events and characters, love and madness, wars, politics, dreams, and death.

And everything he had written was heard or known before he was 8 years old.

He was influenced by his grandfather and grandmother who raised him when he was little. His parents wanted him to be a lawyer.

He pretended to study to be a lawyer, yet, most of the time, except when sleeping, eating, or talking to friends, he was reading books.

To make ends meet, he worked community newspaper company as a reporter and wrote short stories until he was 40 years old.

Influenced by Ernest Hemingway and Fyodor Dostoevsky, his writing style is simple. Furthermore, he was a correspondent for a newspaper company in Paris, Spain to get European experience. Yet, after publishing One Hundred Years of Solitude he became somebody international literature world, he rode the Latin America boom since at that time Latin America was booming as well.

Most of the writers wrote about "Love", yet he wrote about different ways of love "Love in the Time of Cholera" was made into a movie in 2007. In the book, the young man and young woman become the first lovers, without one word to each other, only he sitting down on the bench, when she passed by that road, sometimes at night he serenaded her with his flute under the balcony.

Yet, the young woman chooses to marry a wealthy Doctor, and the young man waits more than 51 years, after when her husband dies from try to catch the birds that come into their house, and fall down from the ladder, on the day of her husband's funeral, he declares his love to her in public, and they become late aged a lover.

When he accepted Nobel Prize the year of 1982, in his speech "We, the inventors of tales, feel entitled to believe anything.

After one hundred years of solitude will at last and forever have a second opportunity on earth.

He gives a voice to all those who died, and all those who are not born yet, mostly he gives a voice to Latin America.

the second week of November,