First Colombian Manicure

As today is Open House and I will be meeting my students´ parents for the fist time (good thing I am blogging instead of prepping for it as I speak), I decided to treat myself to a mani-pedi. All in all it was not too strange, and was definitely cheap. A manicure and pedicure cost $10.000 (about $5-6 USD), although I could have gotten the promotion for only $7.000 and I´m still not sure what the difference would have been. There are no spa chairs here, no rolling warm soapy water, just a bucket with room temperature water in it. I told the woman from the start that I didn’t speak much Spanish, yet she kept asking all kinds of questions, and while my Spanish isn’t that terrible, I certainly don´t have the manicure vocabulary down. I think she caught on and I apologized, telling her that normally my Spanish is better, but it had been a long day teaching and my head “no funcionada”. When it came time for the color I could see there wasn’t too much to choose from. Another girl brought over a pink and a purple for me. I chose a reddish color and asked them if they liked it. She responded very bluntly, “¿Para Usted? No.” And they told me that the new colors they brought over were beautiful on white (blanca) skin and so I went with their advice and took the darker, slightly more tame purple, which turned out to be iridescent. While normally I would not where this color, especially when meeting parents for the first time, I´m banking on the fact that the parents will be impressed I even got a manicure and either think “she´s already so in touch with Colombian fashion” or “poor stupid gringa” and feel sorry for me. Either way, I will definitely treat myself to another manicure in the future, but might be more picky with the color they use.