Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

Still basking in the afterglow of Cartagena and waiting on some photos to be delivered before I post my travelogue I thought a brief history would be in order. As the principal port and hub of Spain's gold plundering and exporting business, Cartagena has all the grace and old world colonial charm that one would expect. It's also heavily fortified (the Pirates of the Carribean, even without Johnny Depp, were a continuing problem) and oppressively Catholic (not that there's anything wrong with that).

There are many beautiful cathedrals resplendent with sacred works of art and gold artifacts but one also gets a sense that the Inquistion didn't happen that long ago. Surprisingly, a sizeable and centuries old Jewish community is still going strong, having settled there (among other places) after getting booted out of Spain for not converting. In fact it was the ones who stayed behind and converted that were most often the victims of torture as their sincerity and devoutness were regularly called into question.

The people of Colombia are fit and attractive....in fact it's rare to see a local who is overweight. This was so different from what I'm used to seeing in North America that I started to wonder if there was some sort of strange connection between their particularly orthodox brand of Catholicism and their taut, well muscled bodies. While we, the increasingly secular gringos of "El Norte" try to find our way we still avoid returning en masse to our houses of worship and instead look for more palatable substitutes....places where we can socialize, find structure, and suffer through trials and tribulations in the name of the greater good. Look no further than your local gym or YMCA. It's no accident that the mantra of the fitness gurus seems ripped from the pages of Catholic dogma: "No pain, no gain" is merely our catchy version of the more austere; "Without pain there can be no gain" which 1st appeared in medieval transcripts and is used in it's original Latin in the ad below. They had one of these babies at the gym in my hotel (Cartagena Hilton if you must know) and after a couple of hours I was looking pretty "ripped"!

I can only conclude that there's something to all this religious fervor....Mel Gibson in his prime was pretty buff and that albino self-flagellator in The Da Vinci Code had quite the 6 pack. That the Vatican is finally seeing fit to share it's instruments of exercise with us is no small blessing. This is just the kind of motivation many of us need to keep those resolutions we made not too long ago.