I’ve lived in Colombia for more than five years, and the thing that surprises me most still isn’t the food.

It isn’t the people.

It isn’t the weather.

It isn’t even the traffic, which is really saying something.

It’s the electricity.

Because in the United States, we spend a truly impressive amount of money making sure electricity does not kill you.

We protect the cautious.

We protect the distracted.

We protect the guy holding a hair dryer too close to a sink while making deeply questionable life choices.

We especially protect that guy.

In Colombia, the general philosophy feels a little different.

Not reckless, exactly.

Not careless, exactly.

Just... less emotionally invested in idiot-proofing the entire built environment.

And the wild part is, nobody seems particularly upset about this.

So if you’re moving to Colombia, visiting for longer than a few weeks, or just curious what daily life feels like when a country has the same voltage as the U.S. but a very different relationship to electrical safety, here are ten things you probably don’t know until you actually live here.

This is the first trick Colombia pulls on you.

You arrive, look at the outlets, and immediately feel at ease.

Same plug types.

Same 110 volts.

Same type A and B outlets.

Same basic electrical language you grew up with in the U.S.

Your laptop works.

Your phone charger works.

You don’t need a converter.

You don’t need an adapter.

You don’t have to think about it.

And that is unusually comforting, especially because so much of South America operates on 220 volts.

Colombia, for reasons no one has ever explained to me in a satisfying way, stayed in the American electrical family.

So the first impression is:

“Oh good, this is familiar.”

And that is exactly how the country gets you.

Because once you feel safe, you stop asking the next questions.

In the United States, breaker boxes look like they were designed by a nervous committee.

There is a breaker for the microwave.

A breaker for the bathroom.

A breaker for the garage.

A breaker for one upstairs outlet that seems to power a lamp no one remembers buying.

In Colombia, the philosophy is much more minimalist.

I’ve seen apartments with nine breakers total.

Nine.

For a whole apartment.

You don’t get the level of electrical micromanagement Americans are used to. You get categories.

Kitchen.

Bedrooms.

The rest.

“The rest” is a real category.

And once you understand that, you start realizing Colombian electrical logic is less about isolating every possible issue and more about saying, “Well, if something goes wrong, you’ll know roughly which third of your life it affected.”

It’s not elegant in the American sense.

But it does have a kind of practical honesty to it.

If you grew up in the U.S., you have seen GFCI outlets your whole life even if you never knew the name.

Those are the outlets with the little test and reset buttons.

They live in bathrooms, kitchens, patios, garages — all the places where water and electricity might start making bad decisions together.

In the U.S., these are not optional.

They are code.

In Colombia?

Not really a thing.

You will find ordinary outlets next to sinks.

Ordinary outlets in bathrooms.

Ordinary outlets in places where an American building inspector would need to sit down and breathe into a paper bag.

And nobody here seems especially dramatized by this.

That’s when you start understanding a deeper cultural difference.

In the U.S., the system assumes you may be foolish and deserves redesigning around that reality.

In Colombia, the system assumes you are an adult and that your continued survival is, to some extent, a collaborative effort.

Let’s talk about the ducha eléctrica.

Because this is the thing that breaks the American brain most cleanly.

In a lot of Colombian homes and apartments, especially older ones, there is no separate water heater in the way Americans imagine one. No big tank. No utility closet. No basement machine quietly doing its job.

Instead, the shower head heats the water itself.

Yes, really.

The water passes through an electrically heated shower unit mounted right there above your head, often with visible wiring close enough to the water to make an American instinctively start drafting legal paperwork in their mind.

In the U.S., this device would be called something like “evidence.”

In Colombia, it’s just the shower.

And here’s the deeply annoying part for the American observer:

it mostly works fine.

People use them.

People survive.

Life goes on.

This is where the U.S. and Colombia really separate philosophically.

America sees this and says, “How do we eliminate the possibility of stupidity?”

Colombia sees this and says, “Please do not be stupid.”

Those are not the same system.

One of the first things many foreigners notice in Colombian cities is the cable situation.

There are wires everywhere.

Power lines.

Phone lines.

Internet lines.

Cable lines.

Dead lines.

Mystery lines that probably haven’t done anything useful since 2011 but are still spiritually present.

And the reason is beautifully simple:

when new service gets installed, a new cable gets run.

When the service stops, the cable often gets cut and abandoned, not carefully removed.

So over time, poles accumulate the archaeological record of every telecom decision ever made in that neighborhood.

It creates a kind of electrical jungle canopy over city streets.

And after a while, you stop noticing it.

Which may be the most Colombian thing of all.

Now let’s move away from the potential Darwin Award side of the conversation and into one of the areas where Colombia may actually have the better idea.

Clothes dryers are rare.

Not impossible.

Not mythical.

Just uncommon.

A lot of apartments run on 110 volts and are not really designed around the kind of dedicated high-demand dryer setup Americans take for granted. So instead, people use drying racks, balconies, laundry areas, and plain old air.

At first, Americans see this as inconvenience.

Then, after enough time, many of us start realizing it’s actually kind of smart.

Your clothes last longer.

Your electricity use stays lower.

Your monthly bill stays calmer.

And you begin to accept that maybe not every item of clothing needs to be aggressively machine-blasted into submission.

It’s one of those small lifestyle shifts that starts as “This is weird,” and ends as “Actually, maybe we were the weird ones.”

Here’s where Colombia becomes genuinely impressive.

A huge portion of the country’s electricity comes from hydroelectric power.

That means the energy mix is relatively clean, relatively renewable, and in many cases cheaper than what people are used to in much of North America.

Colombia has mountains, rainfall, and rivers in abundance, and the country leaned into that geography.

That’s the good news.

The other side of that is that hydroelectric systems depend on water levels behaving themselves.

When major drought or El Niño conditions hit, everybody suddenly remembers just how dependent the system is on rain.

So on a normal day, you’re living on one of the cleaner electricity grids in the region.

On a bad climate cycle, everyone gets a little more humble.

That’s a very Colombian pattern, actually:

the system works very well,

right up until nature decides to remind everyone who’s really in charge.

This one caught my attention because it says something deeper about how the country handles public services.

When you open an electric bill in Colombia, you may see a line for alumbrado público — public lighting.

Street lights.

As a line item.

In the U.S., that cost is buried inside the giant invisible blob we call “taxes,” and nobody ever thinks about it.

In Colombia, the city basically says:

“You wanted the street lit. It got lit. That costs money.”

There’s something weirdly refreshing about that.

Not because anyone wakes up thrilled to pay for street lights.

But because the bill tells the truth about what is being funded.

It’s less magical.

More explicit.

And in a strange way, more adult.

This is one of the most interesting parts of Colombian utilities, and one that many Americans find surprising the first time they understand it.

Remember the estrato system — the socioeconomic rating from 1 to 6?

That system doesn’t just label neighborhoods.

It affects utility pricing.

Lower-strata households receive subsidies.

Higher-strata households pay surcharges.

And that means wealthier neighborhoods help cover part of the cost of basic services for poorer neighborhoods.

In the U.S., this kind of redistribution tends to happen through tax systems so large and abstract that most people can’t follow the logic even if they wanted to.

In Colombia, it’s visible.

It’s on the bill.

It’s not hiding.

For a lot of Americans, that feels unusually direct.

For Colombia, it’s just the system.

And honestly, there’s something elegant about that.

It’s not pretending inequality doesn’t exist.

It’s building some of the correction directly into daily life.

This may be my favorite contradiction in the whole system.

You live in a country using hydroelectric power at scale, with a surprisingly thoughtful utility subsidy structure, electric shower heads that feel like survival exams, and some very modern digital banking tools.

And then once a month, a person physically brings your electric bill on paper.

On foot.

To the building.

And the doorman receives it like this is a perfectly normal interaction in the year 2026.

In the U.S., utility bills went digital so long ago that paper billing feels like a historical reenactment.

In Colombia, the paper bill still has a pulse.

And I kind of love that.

Because it perfectly captures the country’s broader style:

part highly functional,

part old-world,

part improvisational,

part smarter than it looks,

part more dangerous than Americans would legally tolerate,

and somehow still working.

Here’s the thing.

I’m not writing this to say Colombia’s electrical system is better than America’s.

And I’m not writing it to say it’s worse.

I’m writing it to say it reflects a completely different underlying assumption.

In the U.S., the built environment is designed around protection from the dumbest possible version of yourself.

In Colombia, the built environment more often assumes you are a competent adult who understands basic consequences.

That creates a system that feels looser, stranger, occasionally more dangerous, occasionally more efficient, and often much less obsessed with legal insulation.

And after more than five years here, I can say this honestly:

I’ve never been electrocuted.

My building has not caught fire.

My bill is low.

My clothes air dry.

And I now live in a country where the showerhead may be doing more than one job at a time.

So maybe Colombia is onto something.

Or maybe I’ve just been lucky.

Both can absolutely be true.