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"Let the women argue...."

I'm going to tell you a true story.

I spent a year in Colombia, living as I did in its "Department" (state) of Caldas, having an apartment in the city of Manizales and spending a lot more of my time in the immediate vicinity.

I visited Bogota about three times and on one occasion I was walking with a friend of mine and we came upon a fight in the street in front of a local cafe between two men. We couldn't tell what the fight was about and, soon after we came on the scene, three policemen showed up. We stood and watched while they began to question the two men fighting and the bystanders.

It turns out that the two men got into an argument over two participants in the upcoming Miss Colombia pageant. One of the men was from the Colombian Department of Bucaramanga and another was from the Department of Antioquia. And a side note here, Antioquian women are generally considered the finest in Colombia and their men are always ready to tell you about it, yes; they have an attitude, and for good reason I might add! LOL! But one of the men said something derogatory about the beauty queen representing the other's home turf and, you guessed it, they had to take it out into the street.

What was really hilarious about the whole scene was that when the policeman who led the interrogations got the story, he immediately insisted that it was Miss Bogota who was finer than either Miss Bucaramanga or Miss Antioquia. And he must have said something I didn't hear because immediately both of the men who had been fighting began to resist being restrained, wanting to go after the policeman who was talking up Miss Bogota. The bystanders generally favored Miss Bogota and began shouting their feelings as such at both men and giving the policeman some encouragement to argue Miss Bogota's case. But then some other passers-by heard what was going on, and it turns out that they were from Antioquia and decided they had to come to the assistance of the man who stood up for their beauty queen. A much larger scuffle ensued in which the newly-arrived passers-by were getting into it with the local Bogotanos and there just were not enough policemen on hand to keep things quiet. At which point the original policeman who conducted the interrogations pulled out his pistol and pointed it straight up in the air, and everything quieted down. But the local Bogotanos still insisted that the argument had been settled in their favor as they dispersed.

It's not the women you have to worry about Bob. It's the men.

I promise you, this is a true story.