Cartagena Through Márquez's Eyes ✍️🌧️

Stepping out of the café into the October rain, I found myself in the city that inspired García Márquez - my first stop in Cartagena. Just as Love in the Time of Cholera never truly moved me, the truth is Márquez never actually wrote at this pilgrimage-worthy café. All worldly hearsay is but fleeting clouds ☁️ - only what we feel ourselves is real. As a child reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I didn't understand Latin America's bloody history: The massacred indigenous peoples 🩸 European colonization ⚔️ The racial melting pot 🧑🏽🧑🏻🧑🏿 The brief Cold War-era boom 💥 And subsequent economic collapse 💸 Now when I reread it, the tears won't stop. The Buendía family's rise and fall mirrors Colombia's own struggling history - All distilled into that single moment: "It's raining in Macondo." 🌧️ The October drizzle falls gently today - On both Macondo and Cartagena. But none of this truly matters. The solitude of adulthood means we must navigate our own sorrows and joys 🚣♀️ And in that, there's a rare kind of freedom. #MeaningOfLife #DigitalNomad #Cartagena #Marquez #MagicalRealism