As he tells it, former Chicoan Brian Ward was a single man in search of love. So why not find it in Bogotá, Colombia? His life there is, as he puts it, “the true adventure story about a 37-year-old socially-awkward man who decided that the best way he could deal with a life sentence of microwavable burritos and 10-hour Facebook marathons was to look online for a girlfriend in Colombia and then to hop on a flight to Colombia’s capital in pursuit of a woman he has never met.”
He
chronicled those experiences in his blog (singleabroad.wordpress.com) which has
become the basis of his new book, “48,000,000 Colombians Can’t Be Wrong:
Finding Love In The Land Of Shakira, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fernando Botero
And Sofia Vergara” ($9.99 in paperback, self-published, available through
Amazon).
Before
he went to Colombia, he decided to use an online dating site to line up some
prospects there. “Once I got registered, a standard question I was asked by the
female members on ColombianCupid.com was, ‘What is your job?’ I always made a point
of answering this question the following way, ‘I paint fences for a living.’ No
matter what your employment status is, the best strategy is to never to make
yourself sound rich or important. This is a highly effective way to reduce the
number women emailing you who are just looking for a sugar daddy.”
One
of those contacts became his girlfriend in Bogotá, and that’s just the start of
the story. Along the way the author finds lodging at a hostel in the La
Candelaria section of the capital, where “walking the streets of Bogotá at
night is hazardous, mainly because of the enormous amount of potholes, uneven
sidewalks and missing manhole covers.”
He
earns some money by being an extra in TV shows and movies, getting fifty
dollars for a 3-second walk-on as a cop. “It is a job,” he says, “that is
easily done (and probably preferably done) while drunk.”
He
not only finds a gig teaching English, and writing for a newspaper--but
marriage as well.
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