What’s with all the balloons?
There’s this fantastic obsession with balloons in Colombia that I love, but can’t fully understand.
Every birthday I go to, or celebration I see around the city, there’s always an absurd number of balloons involved.
You’ll see them taped to walls, floating from the ceiling, tied to pillars, stuck to doors, decorating tables and chairs. Just occupying every available surface.
What has always surprised me is that the number of balloons has absolutely no relation to the size of the party or how long it lasts. It might be only a half hour with just your parents, two friends and that bored slightly alcoholic uncle sleeping in a corner, but the meticulous decorations of balloons is always a must.
The one that really matters, the one no birthday, anniversary, baptism, wedding, graduation or bachelor party can go without, is the balloon arch. There must be at least 60 to near 100 balloons there easily.
I’ve seen those arches being transported to some party by motorbikes during heavy traffic and I’ve seen them lying by the side of the road, like a sad memory of a past celebration, balloons bursting in the Caribbean sun, swaying in the breeze as if debating whether to throw themselves into traffic and have the wind knocked out of them for good.
I really should think of opening a balloon business here. Call it The Blow Job. Maybe get me a hot-air balloon while I’m at it, to really impress the locals.
One of my earliest memories is of a hot-air balloon.
I must have been five or six years old, and I was sitting on the floor in front of the TV in New Delhi watching Star Wars -I know, who lets their five year-old watch Star Wars? Well it was the 80’s, so that means if I was watching TV, I wasn’t in the streets buying cigarettes for my dad or burning my fingers with my toy chemistry set-, when suddenly I began to hear a loud deafening roar surrounding the house. Next thing I remember I ran outside to see two or three hot-air balloons drifting past our house.
Get Alfredo García’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Just one of the many strange things one saw living in India during the 80’s… or today, I guess.
I wasn’t taken on trips much because of my young age. No Calcuta, Tibet, Kashmir, or Varanasi for me, but I would learn about those places from my father’s video recordings or my mother’s photographs. And one of those places was the Ganges river.
The river fascinated me. It wasn’t just its immense size, but the idea that the same water played a part in so many moments of a person’s life. People came to the Ganges to bathe, to pray, to celebrate births, and to honor the dead.
“The more important the person is”, my father told me when talking about the open-air cremations celebrated along the river Ganges, “the taller the pyre he or she will be incinerated on”.
I’ve never cared much for public exposure, and my body has never responded particularly well to open flames, so I’ve always insisted on being buried.
But I do wonder how big my woodpile would be if I did kiss the world goodbye Gandhi style. The more the merrier, right?
Which, I suppose, is the whole point of all those balloons in Colombia. Unlike a funeral pyre, which marks a final farewell, the extravagant displays of balloons at every celebration seem to symbolize life and love for the people who make the occasion worth celebrating.
And if that’s really what balloons represent here, then it’s a beautiful custom I’m more than willing to embrace and even adopt for my next birthday. I just have to figure out whether they sell them by the dozen or by the hectare.
__________________________________________________________
If this essay felt like a pleasant waste of time, consider this an invitation to make the same mistake again.
