Que bonita esta la vida! And we are off to Colombia..

Hello again armchair travellers! Pretty sure this is going to be a two parter entry as I have been working for a few hours already this morning getting some pictures uploaded for you people and am not sure how long I can write today before I don´t know what the heck I am talking about anymore!

When we last left off, I think I just arrived in Colombia and spent US independance day in a Colombian museum, hehe. Slightly better than how I spent Colombian independence, which was July 20. In putting my pics up, I see that I have maybe one of me in Colomiba, so the pic you see here is of me and one of my fellow volunteers at Jatun Sacha, Grady, at Mitad del Mundo in Ecuador. It is a cute pic, and since cute pics of me are so rare...here it is!

OK, so back to the story at hand: Colombia is fantastic, and I am so glad I went. Apparently though, the week before I headed to Colombia, the FARC killed some 2 dozen hostages they had been holding for a number of years. I found out about it right before I went, but for obvious reasons (being that the folks read this) I didn´t mention it until my return, lest the parents freak out and be worried about me. On July 5, the nation of Colombia had massive demonstrations against kidnapping and as far as I know at this point, no one has been kidnapped in some time....so hopefully they are on a path of turning it all around.

Colombia is an interesting place to travel as a woman alone, and there is a slight chance that I am now married to a Colombian cab driver, due to my inability to master the language. I can confidently report that I am not carrying anyone´s baby though, so that is a good thing at least!

Due to my completely indecisive nature, I spent a week in Bogota, just figuring out where the heck to go, since there were so many choices! The pictures are of course going to be out of order as well, seeing as how my strong point is not computer literacy. Shannon will be very excited to see that for the first time in a long time, I managed to post the pics to the web all by myself! I did take some 6 hours, but that is another story that I am not going to cry myself to sleep with just yet.

So anyway, in Bogota I managed to visit the city´s tallest building, the Coltopatri, with great views of the city. No pics of course because it was my first day there and I was a little noid about taking such a long walk with my camera. I also went to a street market, where all manner of things were being sold: remote controls of unknown origin, albums of 1960´s salsa music, used batteries, and perhaps an unwanted child or two. In other worlds, just like your average flea market in New York.

Also in Bogota, I saw the house of Simon Bolivar, and you will get to see a lovely Colombian woman posing by the independence stuff in his garden. After that I rode up the teleiferico on a Sunday which was a piss poor decision, as it is half price and all the Colombians go to the church services up the hill in Monserrate, and it was damn hot waiting in line for an hour to go up and another hour to come back down! Up there is only the aforementioned church and some food stalls. All in all not a bad trip, but not worth the 2 hours of transport!

I also went to the Botero museum, the gold musuem (a waste as far as I am concerned unless you are REALLY into gold), and up to Zipiqueira and the salt cathederal. I went with a girl I met at the hostal, and it is a 2 hour trip up there and then you decend some 180 meters into the salt mines where they have carved out this huge cathederal, which they say holds 10,000 people! We did this in July 5, which turned out to be the day of the anti-kidnapping protest, and when we got out of the bus, there were tons of people running around with white flags and honking thier horns. Very interesting, especially since we didn´t know at that point what the heck was going on!

South America in general appears to have made a continental decision regarding the choice to not put signs about anything anywhere, so the bus driver´s directions of ¨just turn left and keep going all the way up the hill¨ were somewhat misleading. We hiked about halfway up the hill, noticed it was starting to look a little shady, and then finally asked a woman who directed us all the way back down the hill to take another left and go that way. We got a cab.

I had seen a street advertisement in Bogota about a Cuban salsa orchestra that was playing at one of the big theaters and that was an amazing show! We spent 40,000 pesos on it ($20) but it was totally worth it. It was filled with Colombians who loved the band and they had dancers on a bandstand behind the orchestra and everything and it was fantastic. After that we did the club crawl in the Zona Rosa, an upscale neighbordhood of Bogota-good night but exhuasting.

OK, better run for now as I am going to meet a friend for coffee. I´ll finish this up later or tomorrow before Mary arrives and put the pics on then!

Saludos!