Building a Nest

The beloved balcony is one of our favorite places to drink coffee, cogitate, visit,
check-in, spy on the gay bathhouse across the street, or just watch the world pass by.

Part Three of Running Away to Colombia

We arrived in Bucaramanga on June 23, 2025, with four suitcases, a one-month reservation in an Airbnb, and no certainty that we had yet found our forever home in Colombia. Our only commitment was to give this midsized Colombian city a chance to seduce us to stay.

I had been here twice before, on my preliminary explorations of this very diverse country—more often than I had visited most other Colombian cities, except Medellín and Bogotá. Michael had not.

That distinction mattered. Colombia had already begun working on me long before we sold the house and left Kansas City. I already had memories and friendships. I had spent weeks walking several kilometers daily, exploring Bucaramanga neighborhoods, with an eye for a new home. I already had some favorite barrios pinned and notated in my Google Maps app, and enough experience to believe that Bucaramanga might suit us better than some other, better-known destinations in this Andean country. It had a vibe not unlike the city we were leaving. It could even wear the label “flyover country,” a common perception of Kansas City.

But the deal maker, for me, was that I had made some very close friends here. Yes, I had made friends in other cities, but these friends were special. I had met their families. We had travelled together. They insisted that they wanted me to move here and to be part of their lives. That was something I had not felt from other Colombian friends.

Michael, who had not yet met these friends in person, lacked my enthusiasm, my assurance, and my confidence, so he borrowed some of those things from me. He loved Medellín. For him, this was still largely just an idea to be explored. A crazy and scary idea. His trust in me is something that now scares me a little and leaves me responsible not only for myself, but for my partner in life.

We had arrived in Medellín a week earlier and stayed in Laureles taking care of dental work. After more than a year of exploring Colombia, Medellín felt familiar almost immediately. We knew the most popular areas, Laureles, Envigado, Sabaneta, and El Poblado well enough to have opinions. El Poblado was beautiful in places, but it remained low on my list of places where I actually wanted to live. It felt too polished, too expensive, too self-conscious, and too full of foreigners searching for the Colombia they had already imagined. It was where the international rich kids went to play. Need I say more?

Bucaramanga was going to be the first trial. The experiment. It was a city not too big, not too small. Quieter and not so easy to get to. Like Kansas City, it had an international airport, as long as you wanted to fly to Cancún—or Greenland. From here, the only international flight is to Panama City, an international route that avoids Bogotá and later proved to be a very attractive connection for us from Kansas City. I wish we had discovered it sooner.

Our driver, José, took us to our new destination from Medellín. Nearly eight hours of driving on modern, divided highways, much of it through the broad valley between Colombia’s major Andean ranges. Mountain views hovered in the distance, without the dramatic and often dangerous hairpin curves we had come to associate with cross-country travel in Colombia. Verdant river-valley scenes unfolded around farms and pueblos. It was an all-day trip, long enough for the three of us to become, temporarily, intimate strangers. The closed quarters and José’s typical Colombian friendliness and curiosity offered the perfect opportunity for the kind of intimacy that allowed me to nurture and tease out the affectionate, even sensual rapport that happens so easily with heterosexual men in Colombia. An American observing us might have struggled to understand that. We stopped for lunch along the way. Upon arriving in Bucaramanga, before reaching the apartment, José took us to his favorite Mexican restaurant in Floridablanca.

Then he delivered us to the building that was supposed to be our home for one month.

The porter was expecting us. He was not expecting all that luggage.

José was directed to drive from the street, directly into the lobby area, where we unloaded, hugged, tipped him, and watched him disappear, but not before exchanging WhatsApp contacts for future reference. Our apartment was on the third floor, with an elevator, which seemed like a minor convenience then, due to the luggage, but would later become much more important.

Neither of us had ever lived in a high-rise apartment before. In the United States, we had always lived in detached houses, with yards and some protective distance between ourselves and the street. Our Airbnb travels through Colombia had taught us that upper floors offered breathtaking views, while lower floors offered something different: intimacy with the neighborhood. From the third floor, we would not merely look across Bucaramanga. We would watch it pass beneath us.

For the moment, we had arrived.

Finding the right Airbnb to land in for our first month had not been easy. Bucaramanga offered plenty of high-rise apartments, but many of the listings felt sterile, interchangeable and overpriced. This wasn’t Medellín or Cartagena, but you wouldn’t know that from some of the listings. Even Bogotá had more intriguing options for better prices. There were overpriced units decorated for people who wanted to live inside a hotel advertisement. There were fincas with charm but no practical relationship to the life we needed and not conveniently located for what I was looking for. There were apartments in neighborhoods that might have been pleasant but would have left Michael isolated or dependent on me for every ordinary errand.

I wanted Cabecera or Sotomayor, the major tourist zones, to introduce Michael to the city that I had come to believe offered the best of what we wanted and needed from Colombia. I wanted us to be near restaurants, stores, parks, and doctors, with easy walking—the kind of neighborhood where Michael could step outside without feeling he had been dropped into the middle of nowhere.

One listing kept drawing me back.

It had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a wonderful balcony (with a planter!), and a monthly rate we could afford. In hindsight, maybe the price should have given me more pause. The photos were not glamorous. The furniture looked old. The kitchen looked older. Yet the apartment had space, light, and something I could not quite name.

It also had a framed image of Jesus wearing the crown of thorns above one of the beds. Yikes!

That nearly ended the discussion in my head. Indeed, I ignored the listing more than once, even though I had added it as a “favorite” when it first appeared, primarily because it was so affordable.

But when I saw that photograph, I instantly invented the owners. Religious. Conservative. Traditional. And not afraid to flaunt it. The sort of family who might be okay with renting to two older gringos but become uncomfortable once they realized those gringos were a couple. Being judgmental is a bad habit that has cost me in more ways than one, and I still haven´t managed to kick it completely. Forgive me Lord, for I have sinned.

The apartment listing kept pulling me back anyway. Nothing else came close to checking so many of the boxes I had in my head.

By the time we arrived, the Jesus picture was gone. In its place, or at least nearby, was a painting of an attractive woman, backside bared, perched on a seat overlooking the ocean. When we later met the owner, Doña Gloria, she joked that she had posed for it.

The apartment itself, however, did not make a favorable first impression.

It smelled terrible.

The doors and windows had apparently been closed for weeks. The air was stale, heavy, and vaguely funereal. My first thought was that it smelled as though an old woman had died there.

The first thing we did was open every door and window, practically gasping for fresh air.

Almost immediately, the apartment revealed one of its great strengths: extraordinary cross-ventilation. Air moved through the rooms, the heat lifted, and much of the smell began to dissipate.

The mattresses were another matter.

They were awful. At least 20 years old, if not 30 or more. The apartment had three bedrooms, but none of the beds appeared suitable for actual sleep. We tried anyway. By the next morning, we had insect bites. Mosquitoes were the most charitable explanation, though at the time we were not entirely sure. We cleaned, fumigated, inspected, and began composing the protest case we might present to Airbnb.

I was deeply discouraged. But I did not want to start the search again for another place to move to.

We had sold nearly everything we owned. We had packed our remaining life into four suitcases. We had left the United States not for a vacation but to begin the final major chapter of our lives.

And now we were standing in a smelly apartment with terrible mattresses and unidentified insects.

Then, while sitting there and looking around, I had a thought familiar from decades of home renovations, failed projects, and improbable rescues.

This place has good bones.

The kitchen was outdated. The closets smelled. The furniture ancient. The lighting was ugly. But the rooms were generous. The balcony was wonderful. The location was right. Air moved through the apartment. There was enough space for us to live separately and together, which is one of the secrets to surviving forty-five years together with another human being.

Instead of filing a complaint, I sent the owner a message through Airbnb.

The apartment needed work, I told her. Considerable work. But if it might be available as a long-term rental, we could be interested.

The response came from the host.

Their grandmother, the owner, was away at her farm. She would return the following week and yes, she wanted to meet with us to discuss our proposal.

That was how we met Doña Gloria.

She was elderly, dignified, intelligent, and an attorney. The apartment had come into her care after the death of her sister and remained tied up in the slow machinery of Colombian probate. Airbnb had been a temporary solution while the legal process continued.

Gloria was delighted by the possibility of a one-year tenancy.

The negotiations involved Bob translating, María participating, and all of us attempting to understand one another across language, culture, and different assumptions about what a rental agreement should contain.

At some point, Gloria looked at me and said she trusted me because of something she saw in my eyes.

That remains one of the stranger and more generous things anyone has ever said during a real-estate negotiation.

We signed a lease.

Then Gloria did something almost no American landlord would have done.

She gave us permission.

We could move the old furniture out and buy our own. We could paint. We could remodel. We could make minor physical changes. We could have guests. We could take in a roommate. We could have pets. She placed remarkably few restrictions on us beyond the obvious expectation that we not destroy the apartment.

She gave two aging gay men from Missouri almost complete freedom to remake her sister’s home.

We used nearly all of it.

Bob and María lived next door, and their presence became one of the great accidental encounters of our arrival. They had previously lived in our apartment and knew every cabinet, repair, defect, and bit of history attached to it.

Bob was of Puerto Rican heritage, fluent in English and Spanish, and taught English. María was Venezuelan. Between them, they understood the apartment, the neighborhood, Colombian bureaucracy, and the many practical systems that remain invisible until a foreigner needs one.

They advised us about banks, insurance, documents, household problems, and the thousand small questions involved in beginning again in another country. They recommended restaurants nearby, as well as some to avoid. Their healthcare advice was not always as reliable as we assumed at the time, but in those early months they were invaluable.

Several months later, family circumstances dictated that Bob move back to the United States. María returned to live in Venezuela until they could reunite at some time in the future. Their departure would change the rhythm of the third floor, but by then they had already helped make our arrival possible.

The first task was cleaning.

Suli and Javi, who had earned the right to claim that they were the main reason I wanted to choose Bucaramanga as a new home, spent days helping us empty cabinets, scrub bathrooms, clean behind the refrigerator, attack the closets, and remove years of grime from places no Airbnb photograph had shown.

Then we painted.

I used AI to help develop a color palette, supposedly inspired by Colombia. We adjusted it, argued over it, lived with it, and changed our minds as we are wont to do on any remodel project.

The apartment contained an oddly shaped room off the hallway connecting the bedrooms and public bathroom, a space that did not seem to know what it wanted to be. It had once held a television and sofa. I called it the alcove. I just counted seven distinct wall surfaces, plus a huge corner column defining this room as I write this!

The alcove has become my office and studio, the not-so-small, not-so-private territory from which I can write, think, edit, talk too much, and occasionally hide.

We bought inexpensive flat-pack storage units, desks, shelves, and practical furniture. It was the kind of cheap shit I hate because it won’t last a year without looking ragged and damaged, just from daring to set a coffee cup on it. We replaced all three mattresses—two full and one twin—but kept the existing bed frames. The old wooden closets continued to hold the musty smell of another era despite our efforts to bury the odor by painting them.

The living room proved more challenging, while also turning out to be the most rewarding room in the house.

We bought an enormous television. I’m a master at justifying spending money, if I think there is a return. The curve on television pricing made it easier for me to justify the big screen. One year in, I have few regrets. While I am not a huge consumer of television, Michael spends hours every day watching something on it. When guests visit, we have entertained with movies and eclectic television series (Murderbot, anyone?) We have hosted World Cup parties and Colombian fútbol games that rival any sports bar.

We found leather swivel chairs that were far more expensive than most of the chipboard furniture we had bought. I walked away and kept looking, only to swallow my tongue and dig deep to make the investment in them. I told myself that the furniture would outlast me.

Then, at another quality furniture store less than a block or two away, we found the sofa sleeper that isn’t really a sofa, but that’s what it’s called here. Think recliner lounge, maybe.

Michael did not love it at first.

It was oversized, boxy, not really attractive, but dang… it was comfortable and versatile. Chair, recliner, sleeper, all in one. And I could see making room for it in the salón.

I asked Jackson and Juan to carry the damn thing up the street and into the apartment. I believe I have a video somewhere of them hauling it along the sidewalk, maneuvering around pedestrians and doorways, while I supervised in the useful manner of an older man who had arranged not to pay a delivery fee.

It was a memorable bit of serendipity, and very Colombian.

The sofa became the most coveted seat in the apartment.

Even Michael came to love it. Guests claimed it. People stretched out on it, watched movies, slept, talked, ate pizza, and gave and received massages on it. The furniture that had initially raised the most doubts became the object everyone wanted to sit on, recline on, or lie on.

We removed the hideous chandeliers and installed six low-profile ceiling fans with lights. We stored Gloria’s fixtures so they could be replaced if and when we moved. The fans improved the light and kept air moving through the apartment, though the ceilings were low enough that taller visitors occasionally encountered a blade with their heads. Ouch!

We did what Michael and I had done over and over again throughout our relationship: we transformed a neglected and underperforming property into a beautiful and comfortable home. Having a nice home is probably one of the most important things in any relationship. But that familiar process itself—the dance of renovation we performed to transform an ugly Airbnb into a warm and loving space—was what we both needed to give us a sense of belonging to Colombia and to Bucaramanga. How could we not feel at home after putting so much effort and love into helping an ugly, neglected space become the elegant home she had been all along?

We did much of this physical work without thinking about our physical limitations.

I know my back hurt. I was probably taking Tylenol like a fiend. The list of things I could no longer do and tasks I assigned to younger bodies was growing. Incrementally, so easier to dismiss. We were moving more slowly. Working fewer hours a day. There was no reason to hurry, which is a very good thing in Colombia. Pain remained part of the weather rather than the subject of the day.

We moved furniture. We shopped. We painted. We bent over. We reached up. We walked. We climbed. We rearranged. We carried purchases home. We made decisions standing up.

There was no moment when I thought, My body is about to reorganize our lives.

I simply worked around the back pain I’ve come to know so much of my life.

That period now seems almost athletic by comparison with what came later.

We were also building our new life outside the apartment.

Soon after arriving, we went to Gay Pride and marched with Javi and Suli. We celebrated my birthday during that first month. We walked all over the city. I showed Michael neighborhoods I remembered and noted from previous visits, including Provenza, which I had struggled later to name. I remembered one or two particularly charming blocks there, though I never found enough to make the neighborhood compete with Cabecera in my imagination.

Another of Bucaramanga’s great promises had been not merely the city itself but Santander.

The department was full of pueblos, mountain roads, canyons, churches, plazas, and places that seemed close enough to turn into weekend excursions. I imagined us pueblo-hopping: discovering towns, eating in small restaurants, wandering through plazas, and collecting favorite places.

We did not do nearly as much of that as I had intended. Something else always seemed to call us away.

We did go to El Carmen to visit the area where Javi and Suly grew up. We saw enough to know that the promise was real. But most of those trips remained plans for later.

At the time, later seemed abundant.

That is one of the luxuries of a new life. The future still appears to contain everything you have not yet managed to do.

The apartment quickly stopped feeling like a rental.

The balcony helped.

It overlooked a street crowded with movement. There were restaurants, a beauty salon, a gift shop, medical offices, people waiting in lines, delivery motorcycles, taxis, pedestrians, workers, residents, and visitors. Somewhere within that ordinary commercial life and within our line of vision from the balcony was also a discreet gay bathhouse, because Colombia has always had room for a little contradiction.

The exclusive Hotel Dan Carlton was visible nearby.

Thousands of people may have passed beneath us on a busy day. I am deaf, so the noise reached me differently than it reached Michael and visitors. What others might have experienced as traffic or commotion became, for me, visible life.

Sundays and holidays, lots of holidays, were calm and quiet breaks.

I began rebuilding the balcony planter.

The original planting was acceptable. That was precisely the problem. I removed everything in it, refreshed the potting medium and began again. Over several days, with help from AI and local plant shops, I chose plants that suited the light, the climate, the architecture, and my own resistance to leaving well enough alone.

The balcony had already become our morning room. The new plants transformed it and presented a fresh message to the street and the apartments across the way: Look at us!

Michael and I drank coffee there. We watched the street scene, starting at pre-dawn. We checked in with one another. We talked about money, plans, friends, sex, health, furniture, mistakes, and whatever was on our minds, including what we thought we were doing with the remainder of our lives.

Neighbors we had never formally met began waving to us from apartments across the street. The local restaurant welcomed our not-infrequent orders of caldo con res for breakfast. Delivered to our door.

Those small gestures mattered.

We were no longer anonymous foreigners occupying a temporary balcony. We had become the two old gringos with the plants, a sometimes seemingly endless stream of visitors, and the habit of watching the neighborhood wake up with our cups of coffee.

I had not initially welcomed the idea of porters. Having someone open a door for me felt embarrassingly regal, and having a desk that registered every arrival and departure felt like living with Gladys Kravitz stationed in the lobby. I worried about privacy and disliked the suggestion that we needed to be waited upon.

Then small gestures began changing the relationship. We dropped off an extra empanada on our way in, a candy bar, a Coca-Cola, sometimes a beer. Most Colombian and long-time residents apparently did not do that, so the porters noticed that the gringos did. Names replaced uniforms. Conversations replaced nods.

In time, they learned when to question someone who just showed up for a visit, whether invited or not, when to warn us, when to protect our privacy, and when to wink and turn away. They worried that we were too trusting and told us when they thought someone might be taking advantage of us. Their concern was genuine. One by one, the people who guarded the entrance became our friends—and part of what made the building feel like home.

More than a month after moving in, one of the porters asked whether we had ever been on the roof.

We had not. We didn’t even know such a place existed.

He gave us access, and we discovered an enormous tiled rooftop terrace with panoramic views of Bucaramanga and the surrounding mountains.

The city opened around us on three sides.

The rooftop became yet another gathering place, another place to take visitors, another backdrop for photographs. Guests came upstairs and posed with the mountains behind them. Bucaramanga looked expansive, beautiful, and completely accessible to us.

The apartment itself became a gathering place.

Friends visited us from Cali, Armenia, Pereira, Medellín, Ibagué, and other cities. Sometimes for two or three days. Sometimes for weeks. Bucaramanga friends came regularly. People stayed, ate, talked, watched television, played cards, and occupied the sofa. They helped us move furniture, clean the bathrooms or prepare meals.

We ordered pizza. We watched movies. We hosted the kind of informal evenings that do not seem significant while they are happening and later become the substance of memory.

We celebrated Michael’s seventy-fifth birthday there on Thanksgiving Day. Iván, Linda, and Alegría—the new neighbors who had replaced Bob and María next door—joined Junior, Juan, Javi, and Suly. Iván arrived with his guitar, and the apartment filled with music and Colombian singalongs. The celebration did not need to be grand to matter. It was Michael’s first birthday in the new life we had chosen: friends gathered around him, food appeared, photographs were taken, and the apartment held them all. The smile on Michael’s face tells the story better than I can. For a man who had arrived with no experience of Bucaramanga and no assurance that he would ever feel at home there, the occasion meant more than a cake or a number of candles could explain.

Earlier that same day, we had celebrated Gringo Thanksgiving at a nearby gringo-owned restaurant.

Thanksgiving is a peculiar holiday to recreate in another country. It is part nostalgia, part ritual, part insistence that the people around you are now family enough to share it.

We were not attempting to pretend we were still in Kansas City. We were creating a holiday in Bucaramanga using the people and possibilities available to us. The meal was less about reproducing America perfectly than about discovering that belonging could travel. I made pumpkin pie for the potluck.

Michael’s seventy-fifth birthday and Thanksgiving, sharing the same day, became part of the nest.

So did the electric shower head that to this day amazes me with its efficiency, if not magical massage properties. The trick to hotter water is to use less water. How instructive is that?

So did the endless delivery confusion: Was the driver downstairs, outside, at another building, or calling the deaf man who had explicitly requested a text?

So did the porters, the nearby stores, the Ubers, the neighbors, the plants, the furniture, and the gradual accumulation of ordinary knowledge.

We learned where to buy things.

We learned whom to ask.

We learned which streets were easy, which hills were not, which restaurant would deliver, and how long “ya voy” might actually mean.

We learned how the building breathed, how the sunlight crossed the rooms, and which windows to open when the apartment became warm. Which windows to close when it rained.

The apartment became ours not because we owned it, but because our routines began to fit inside it.

We even received first right to buy the apartment if we ever wanted to.

At the time, that possibility felt less like a financial calculation than a compliment. We had come for one month. We had signed for a year. Now we could imagine permanence.

During those first six months, Colombia stopped feeling like an exotic experiment and began feeling like home. We stopped moving through it as tourists and began living in it as residents—foreign residents, certainly, but residents nonetheless.

With almost zero exceptions that I can think of (graffiti exhorting “Gringo Go Home” excepted), Colombia accepted us. It welcomed us, embraced us, and seemed to love us as generously as we loved it.

We had not moved here in search of luxury. We had wanted something simpler and more difficult to explain: call it bandwidth, for lack of a better term, I suppose.

We wanted enough room in the budget and in our lives to eat well, take Ubers, see doctors if we had to, hire help sometimes, go to the dentist, get pedicures and manicures, make friends, buy plants, celebrate birthdays, get a massage, and occasionally improve something simply because it would make us happier.

In the United States, those ordinary comforts had begun to feel like extravagance.

In Bucaramanga, they fit.

Everything seemed to be working.

We had found the apartment.

We had found Gloria.

We had found friends.

Michael was adjusting. I was delighted. The rooms were full. The balcony was growing. The neighbors waved. The mountains waited above the rooftops. Santander remained full of pueblos we would surely visit later.

We believed we had made the right choice.

For a while, it seemed obvious that we had.

Stay tuned for Part 4, coming soon.