Killmers In Colombia - The initial post!

Bogota

Greetings everyone and welcome to the first post on our new blog. The purpose of this blog is to share thoughts, ideas, reflections and ponderings about our time in Colombia with some education and general life experiences thrown in. We leave for Colombia in less than 48 hours. Many people have asked us specific questions about our new job or our new country and the answer is - we have no idea. We have never been to South America. Everything we know we learned from

Bogota at night

the Internet or Anthony Bourdain and Parts Unknown  Everything we know about the school we have learned from the Internet or handouts from the school itself. We have been inspired by our daughter to set aside one day each week to add to our Blog - no matter what. We won't guarantee a weekly update but we are sure going to try! Here is what we know:

Colombia is the happiest country in the world, at least according to the Huffington Post and the WIN/Gallup International Association.

The weather in Bogota today has a high of 18 (that's 68 degrees for our Fahrenheit friends) and a low temperature of 8 (46 F). And it is almost the same every day, summer, winter, spring or fall! The only difference is rainy or sunny. Bogota is almost on the equator but it is at 2620 m (8650 ft) above sea level so that keeps the temperatures mild.

Most people know about Colombian coffee and the drug wars in the 80s and 90s. However, Colombia is the second biggest exporter of flowers and emeralds. Also drugs and crime have plummeted since the 90s, down over 90% so it is now much safer than Chicago - at least statistically.

Our new school - CNG

Karen and I will be teaching at another international school called Colegio Nueva Granada   Karen will be the grade 9 counselor, rising with them each year until they graduate. I hope she likes them! :) I will be teaching Statistics and statistics and more statistics. At least it keeps the number of preps low - and I do really love teaching stats.

There we are!

We know we have a furnished apartment. We know a lot of embassy students go to our school. We know Bogota is on the same longitude line as New York City. That means for half of the year (summer), they are on Central time and half the year (winter) they are on Eastern time (they don't do daylight savings). And that is about all we know. Thus, a lot of good material for future blog posts as we figure things out. We will try to include lots of pictures and we welcome questions of any kind. So - I think that wraps up the first post. Coming up next week, actual pictures and experiences from Colombia. Adios USA, hola Colombia!