Mojado

1 hour writing, 7 hours researching/reading, 0.5 hour meeting, 0.5 hour emailing, page count = 145

Holy crap, did it rain here today! I got soaked on the way to the bus, but was at least able to buy an umbrella so i can avoid it tomorrow. Usually it just rains for an hour in the afternoon, but it went on much longer today.

Plastic surgery has become an obsession down here. I'm at the apartment of a friend of my cousin's, and the novela is on: it's all the same actors I remember from 4 years ago, but collagen-lipped and botoxed to death. "Lipoescultura," they call it.

Anyway: another day, another gold mine of data. I met with the head of the Police Museum downtown, and he gave me the run of the library. So I'm figuring I'll find some good stuff about the national police, but will need to find state police stuff in Antioquia. Imagine my surprise when one of the very helpful agents working in the library points out that they have a complete set of service records...for the municipal police...of Medellin...from 1940 to 1954. Jackpot! Ah, the thrill of discovery. Once again, I got an actual chill from seeing the potential of this data. Just leafing through the pictures is evocative, then to get into the specifics of each agent's service record...just fascinating. There are about 6,000 records in total, so I worked on a sampling plan to get enough to be able to extrapolate, but not to have to spend the rest of the year coding the service records. There are agents from before the start of La Violencia, from the high period (1948-53), from during the military dictatorship...it's just perfect.

In terms of writing, last night after posting I went through the manuscript again re-incorporating the three chapters I sent to my committee on Monday. It turns out I had made a few more pages of cuts that day, so today's page count reflects the real total.

For lunch, I had a really good ajiaco, which is a classic local dish. It's comfort food for a rainy day, a long-simmered chicken-and-potato soup. This place did it really well, with tender chicken, a rich, starchy broth, a nice little cob of thick-kerneled corn, and the traditional accompaniments, creme fraiche and capers (more like caperberries). Yum. They also had really really good fried yuca with guacamole. And the best part: the juices. That's the #1 food thing I miss from Colombia: every place has a wide selection of fresh tropical fruit juices, which you can get with water or with milk. I'm getting the hang of which ones go better with water and which go better with milk. Today I had lulo with water, which is kind of a sour orange flavor, perfect to cut through the rich soup and yuca. It's been a long day, but I'm looking forward to getting back to those service records tomorrow.