>>2471288>They made up for it with good mannersIt's true, Colombians do have good manners. But they are in fact a put-on. Colombia's not like the US, where you can pull up to a store and be disrespectful to the employees saying all kinds of crazy shit. People WILL throw hands if they feel slighted, and the police will take their side, if they even bother to show up at all. This was especially true in the Pablo Escobar days. If you disrespected the wrong guy, it was GAME OVER broski. So they are raised to be polite to the point of unctuousness.
That goes for women too. Sadly, it's all too common for women to be murdered because they didn't want to go out with some guy. They also don't want the whole barrio talking shit about them. Because there are no jobs, grannies really have nothing better to do than to look out the window, watching what the young people in the neighborhood are doing. Colombians love to gossip.
In a poor, dangerous, corrupt place like Colombia, family and friend networks are very important to get ahead and even just to stay alive. So they're polite to eeeeeverybody. A taxi driver pulled out a baton out of nowhere and was about to beat me just because I slammed his door too loudly. Colombians have light, European-style cars. It's the only place I've seen Renaults outside of Europe. The doors are like half as heavy as American ones so you need to close them like they're made of glass.
>I noticed a reluctance to meet a white English speaker.White men have a terrible reputation among Colombians. We're seen as dirty, rude, sexpats, whoremongers, degenerates. They're worried you're there to pump and dump them (and to be fair, you probably are). They only ever see us on vacation, so they think we're all alcoholics and druggies. It's not even just Americans. Colombians love to joke that French people never shower.
It's to the point where if you find a girl who seems to seek the company of foreign men, you really have to question her motives.
