My mom thought I lived in a jungle.

Not near one. In one.

She had the full picture in her head: a hut, some vines, maybe a monkey stealing my Wi-Fi while I checked email off a leaf. Which, to be fair, is a creative image. The only problem is I live in a high-rise in a city of roughly 10 million people. I have fiber internet. It’s faster than what a lot of Americans have back home. There’s a mall near me, a grocery store, restaurants, pharmacies, and enough traffic to make a grown man renegotiate his relationship with patience.

And my mom is not dumb.

She’s just American.

Which means, like a lot of Americans, what she “knew” about Colombia mostly came from a TV show, a headline from 20 years ago, and the general assumption that anything south of Texas is either jungle, danger, or both.

So let’s fix that.

Not aggressively. Gently. Because if I’m honest, when I first landed in Bogotá in 2017, I had some of the same half-formed ideas too. You only know what you know — until you don’t.

Yes, Colombia has jungle. A lot of it, actually.

It also has modern cities, business districts, financial centers, shopping malls, luxury neighborhoods, mountain towns, beach cities, working-class barrios, colonial centers, ski-jacket weather, and some of the worst traffic you’ll ever see in your natural life.

That’s the part Americans miss. They hear “Colombia” and imagine one giant green blur with a canoe in the middle of it. In reality, this is a country with dense urban life, serious infrastructure, and cities that function like cities — not like movie sets for outsiders.

The wildest animal I regularly deal with is usually a guy on a scooter going the wrong way down a one-way street with complete confidence.

A lot of Americans still think Colombia operates under some kind of permanent cartel management structure, like there’s a shadow boss approving lunch plans from a smoky office somewhere.

That version of Colombia is decades out of date.

Yes, the cartel era was real. Yes, the country lived through violent, horrific chapters. But the version most Americans hold in their heads is frozen in the 1980s and 1990s. Pablo Escobar has been dead for more than 30 years. Colombians are exhausted by being asked to explain a past they did not create and are still unfairly made to carry.

I’ve lived here for years, and the most criminal thing I encounter regularly is what they charge for imported peanut butter.

That should absolutely be investigated.

This is one of those ideas that sounds informed but usually isn’t.

Is Colombia completely risk-free? Of course not. It’s a real country full of real cities with good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods, and the same basic rule that applies in New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, or anywhere else: use your head.

That’s not unique to Colombia. That’s city life.

You pay attention. You don’t wander around distracted. You learn the local rhythms. You ask which neighborhoods are for you and which are not. You don’t flash your life story in public.

That’s not fear. That’s urban adulthood.

The American mistake is acting like Colombia invented street smarts while pretending U.S. cities are all farmer’s markets and emotional safety.

This distinction matters.

Yes, there is poverty here. Serious poverty. I’m not pretending otherwise.

But there is also enormous wealth. There are neighborhoods with penthouses, luxury towers, private clubs, high-end clinics, and cars that cost more than many Americans’ first homes. There are families with money that would quietly melt the assumptions of people back home who still think Colombia is one giant charity case.

Colombia is not a poor country in the simple cartoon version people imagine. It is a deeply unequal country. And if that sounds familiar, that’s because Americans already understand inequality — they just usually prefer to describe it differently when it’s happening at home.

This one completely breaks American brains.

They hear “equator” and assume I’m sweating through tank tops all year near a palm tree.

Meanwhile, I’m in Bogotá wearing socks, a sweater, and occasionally asking myself why I own a space heater this close to the equator.

Colombia’s geography is altitude-driven, not just latitude-driven. Bogotá sits high in the Andes. So do many other places people actually live. That means cool weather, mild temperatures, jackets, rain, and the kind of climate that has more in common with spring than with the tropical fever dream Americans imagine.

Yes, some parts of Colombia are hot. Cartagena is hot. Barranquilla is hot. Santa Marta is hot.

But Colombia is not one temperature. It’s a vertical country. Altitude changes everything.

Americans tend to worry about language in a very American way, which is to say, dramatically.

The truth is, in many nicer neighborhoods, hotels, businesses, and younger professional circles, you’ll find more English than people expect. Enough to get by? Often, yes.

But that’s not really the point.

Learn Spanish anyway.

Not because someone is going to arrest you if you don’t. Because it changes your life. It changes what the country gives back to you. It changes whether you’re a participant or just a polite outsider pointing at menu items for five years.

Colombia doesn’t need to become more English for you. You can become more Spanish for it. That’s the better trade.

Americans love to act nervous about foreign food while eating laboratory-designed snacks that glow in the dark and list 19 ingredients nobody can pronounce.

Meanwhile, Colombia has fresh fruit everywhere, real bread, real meat, fresh soups, good coffee, and a produce situation that makes a lot of U.S. supermarkets look emotionally defeated.

There are fruits here most Americans have never heard of. Some taste incredible. Some taste like a tomato that changed careers halfway through life. But they are real, fresh, and part of actual food culture.

And that’s the larger point: a lot of Americans think “different” means “worse” when what they usually mean is “not prepackaged in my usual font.”

This is one of the most persistent travel-brain myths.

People arrive acting like every faucet in Colombia is a dare.

In Bogotá, the tap water is excellent. I drink it. I make coffee with it. I brush my teeth with it. I have not mutated.

Now, this is where nuance matters. Colombia is a country, not a single plumbing system. Different towns have different realities. Rural areas are not the same as major cities. But the broad American assumption that all water in Colombia is suspicious by default is just lazy carryover from a generalized “developing country” script that doesn’t survive contact with reality.

Sometimes the water is fine. Better than fine, actually.

This one surprised me more than I expected it would.

A lot of Americans assume the whole world is basically waiting in line for a shot at American life. And yes, some Colombians absolutely do want that. That’s real.

But a lot of others don’t.

Because they already have a life here. Family nearby. Friends they’ve known forever. Healthcare they can afford. Help at home. Community. Familiarity. A version of life that feels human-scaled and socially connected in ways many Americans have quietly lost.

The idea that everyone should trade that in for a studio apartment, high insurance premiums, and a long commute in a city they don’t even like is a very American form of self-regard.

A lot of Colombians are not dreaming of escape. They’re just living.

This is the big one all the others hide underneath.

When Americans call Colombia “third world,” they usually mean some mix of primitive, chaotic, broken, behind, or not-quite-real.

But let’s look at actual life.

I can walk to most of what I need. I can see a doctor quickly. I can get fresh food easily. My building has someone at the entrance who knows who belongs there. Families still live near one another on purpose. Daily life is social in a way that much of the U.S. no longer is.

So what exactly is the measure here?

Big box stores?

Detached homes?

Car dependence?

Medical debt?

The right chain restaurants?

At some point, you have to stop asking whether a place matches an old American ranking system and start asking whether it actually works for human beings.

Because if a place is affordable, connected, socially alive, medically accessible, and easier to live in than what you left, maybe the outdated label says more about the person using it than the country being judged.

This one isn’t malicious. It’s just lazy.

Different country. Different accent. Different food. Different history. Different culture. Different internal logic.

Americans often flatten Latin America into one giant interchangeable idea, and that’s part of the larger problem. Colombia is not a category. It’s a country.

That matters.

I’m not smarter than my mom.

I just got on a plane.

That’s really the whole trick.

Most of what Americans believe about Colombia isn’t based on bad intentions. It’s based on distance, outdated references, and a complete lack of firsthand context. I had some of those same blind spots once too.

You only know what you know — until one day you don’t.

And once you’ve been here long enough, the jungle stops being the country and starts being the part of the map you never bothered to actually look at.