Around this time of the year in Medellin, a handful of retards find it very amusing to blow up financial institutions to “fight the power” or something like that.
As it turns out, I happen to live in an apartment building that has the first couple of floors as offices, and on the first floor, there’s a bank. Right in front of us there’s another building with another bank on the first floor, where a friend of the family lives.
Last night, two small bombs (called Petardos) where detonated on my building and the one in front of it.
When things like this occur, you can learn a lot about yourself and those around you. For instance, I learned that my mother’s fight-or-flight response is super quick. As soon as the first bomb went off she was checking the apartment for structural damage and telling me to get ready to leave. And she was trying very hard not to freak out.
On the other hand, my fight-or-flight response is super SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. Although I was so startled that my heart nearly exploded out of my ribcage, I was terribly calm. It was weird. I was thinking I had to grab the cat, put on a coat, and grab my documents whilst my mother screamed “MOVE IT!”.
So when we arrived at the first floor, which had zero visibility from all the smoke, the second bomb went off. That was the one on the building in front of us.
Needless to say, there was a fair bit of damage. The entrance to my building had all the glass shattered and a few panels from the ceiling fell down, but the guard was alright. Our apartment had no damage thanks to my mother’s freaky obsession with having all windows open all the time. However, the second entrance of the building and the bank kind of ended up like a hole in concrete.
Same goes for the other building. Lots of shattered glass, lots of scared people, and nasty structural damage. Our friend’s apartment didn’t do so well. One of her walls cracked and glass broke. She did freak out.
All in all, no deaths. Good times.
I learned a lot about my mother last night, most of it I won’t discuss here. What I can mention here is that regardless of how she tries to justify it, my mother is vastly more morbid than I am. She had me go to the first floor with her 3 times because she REALLY wanted to see what had been done to the building. She later said she wanted to make sure the building wasn’t going to collapse, but I saw that little spark of curiosity in her eyes that made me think “Yep, she’s worse than me”.
So the damage is done. There’s a whole lot of constructors and people of related professions assessing the damage. And the rest of us are going about our lives as if nothing happened. After all, what else can we do?