No Niños

I finally made it to the Jardín Botánico were I was planning to practice my plant vocab and was rather disappointed to find the place completely overrun with children. Now I don't mean to be a grinch, and I probably should've expected a botanical garden to be mainly a place of niños, but still, nothing ruins a nice stroll through the park like the banshee screams of a thousand tiny goblins tearing up the flora with their snotty little claws.

It was a drizzly day anyway so after I got a solid picture or two I left for the cine-dome at Maloka to catch a 3D movie. It was also overrun with children, and they were no less rambunctious than the ones at the gardens, so I left early with a headache for the most kid-unfriendly place imaginable: the liberal thespian troupe Teatro Libre's Colombian stage adaptation of Dostoevsky's classic The Brothers Karamazov. Booyah. It was in Spanish so I understood less than 10% of the dialogue but at least there were NO NIÑOS.

Olga!

This is Olga, she's a really sweet girl and a gifted rock climber from a tiny town in the middle of nowhere like half a day from Moscow by train. She came to study in New York while going to college in Russia and liked it so much she decided to drop out and stay in the United States. Her parents were not exactly thrilled when they found out their 20 year old daughter wasn't coming home, and I can't imagine what they thought when they found out she was moving to Colombia with her boyfriend Carlos. She's going to visit them next week for the first time since she left two years ago. I'm really impressed with her, having the cojones (ko-HO-neiss, that's Spanish for balls) to leave home forever at that age. Plus she's fluent in English and Spanish.

Parque Bolívar

I tried to go to the Botanical Gardens here but didn't make it in time and decided to check out El Parque Bolívar instead. It's a popular hangout spot for locals because it's got lots of recreational facilities and is also heavily policed. They aren't in focus because I was pretending to be photographing this statue but you can actually see one of the many groups of soldiers standing around next to the roller skating track.

Who new roller skating was still cool in some places? There were even a dozen or so kids in sneakers training with a coach off the court. They looked really silly while practicing but they were actually really good once they got on the track in their crazy spandex suits, all pulling off the dizzy stuff you see pro figure skaters do on TV.

Oh, and for some reason there was an Avianca airplane. Never quite figured that one out.

Carlos!

Carlos is the son of the family I'm staying with here in Bogotá, and he's super friendly. He's a graphic designer like Mangue but he works on documentaries for the family business. Although his English grammer isn't as stellar as his girlfriend Olga's, he's fluent, which makes things easier for me. He studied in New York, which is how he met both Olga and his wife, an American college student who filed for marriage with him so he could gain citizenship. I think we're going to play Spanish Scrabble---a nontraditional vocab learning technique---and Carlos is going to pwn. According to Nicolás his vocabulary is gigantic, not that it'll be necessary to whip out any five dollar words to beat me.

A Fuente-Free City

If Medellín is the land of fountains, then Bogotá is the land of stagnant pools of murk. I don't know what brilliant engineer forgot to install plumbing in these things, but they're all over downtown. The water is brownish, frequently with garbage floating in it, and sometimes it smells. Don't get me wrong though, there are things I like better about Bogotá too. For example the public transporation here blows Medellín right out of its clean, flowing, non-stinky water.

Cerro De Monserrate

There's a famous church called Monseratte at the top of a big cerro (that means hill) overlooking Bogotá. It's a mecca for Catholic pilgrims on Sundays but it seems to be a mecca for tourists the rest of the time---I actually spotted a quite number of other gringos. It is reached by yet another cable car but they call it a teleférico though instead of a metrocable like the one in Medellín. Incidentally, the metrocable is used to reach a library at the top of either a colima or a loma, I can't remember which (it's the Andes, they have a lot of words for hill).

The building is about 2500 ft above the city and the view is spectacular. It's also surrounded by cheerful flower gardens, which have less cheerful statues of Christ in various stages of crucifixion. That's the church's theme, El Señor Caído, the Fallen Christ. Someone translated it as the falling man which for some reason made me think of It's Raining Men by The Weather Girls.

Crowded Calles

The traffic seems to be even worse here than it was in Medellín. You really have to watch where you're walking because that whole pedestrians get the right of way thing just doesn't seem to exist here. At least in India they're so used to people, carts, and cows in the streets that drivers maneuver around you. Here it seems like if you don't get out of the way you will get mowed down. None of that power walking nonsense, people flat out run while crossing these streets.

The streets are far from lawless though. In fact, some rules are stricter. All cars are required to have first aid kits and fire extinguishers, and there are checkpoints pulling random cars every night. We got stopped tonight on the way to bring Nicolas home and they did a full search, ran the registration, and checked all our IDs. It wasn't a problem though, it only took about two minutes and afterwards everyone kept saying how glad they are that these checkpoints exist. Apparently they catch a lot of bad guys this way, and police corruption isn't a problem.

El Libertador

I took a trip to La Quinta de Bolívar, the summer home and garden of Colombia's version of George Washington, Simón Bolívar. Here is an extremely brief history of the man. He was born in Venezuela during Spanish colonial rule and was educated in Spain, where he married his wife, who immediately died of yellow fever.

When Napoleon put his brother on the Spanish throne, Bolívar joined the resistance juntas, was dubbed El Libertador, and penned the catchily named Decreto de Guerra a Muerte (Decree of War to the Death). However the Spanish monarchy reclaimed the throne and reconquered their territories.

Bolívar fled to the Caribbean to recoup but returned with a veangence supplemented by British troops and liberated basically the entire northwest of the continent in a fiery blaze of awesomely glorious victory. He then became president of his newly formed Gran Colombia (Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela) which summarily collapsed. He declared himself dictator but after three uprisings and an assassination attempt he was exiled to die poor and alone. Oh, and at some point he founded Bolivia.

Fin.

Good Boy, Matador

It's kind of hard to make out in this hastily taken nighttime photo but there's actually a private K9 unit in that Homecenter parking garage. Homecenter is serious about keeping it's home improvement retail merchandise safe, these pups sniff every car that comes in. But all kidding aside, it is nice having such a strong police force, even if at times it seems a bit ridiculous.

Palace of Justice

The El Palacio De Justicia is a gigantic building which houses the Supreme Court of Colombia and it has a rather gruesome history. The first one was built several blocks from the current location in the 20s but was torched 27 years later during El Bogotazo. El Bogotazo a series of riots in response to a political assassination that marked the beginning of a period known as La Violencia, which was basically a decade of incredibly disgusting violence: rape, torture, mutilation, you name it.

It was rebuilt in the Plaza de Bolivar and in 1985 it was seized by a band of guerrillas demanding that President Belisario Betancur come and stand trial. The military responded agressively after the President's refusal and the conflict left 120 dead, including all 35 guerrillas and 11 of 25 Supreme Court Justices. The building burned down as well, suspiciously taking with it all the extradition case files for major drug mafia leaders, although no links have been substantiated between the organizations. It's sort of eerie visiting the place now, there's no trace of the violence, but it happened.

Language Is So Dope!

I noticed some Spanish moss hanging from the rocks and asked Carlos what it was called. He didn't know but one of the other climbers said "barba del viejo," which means old man's beard, and jokingly warned me not to try to use it as a climbing hold. Is that not the coolest name ever? Way cooler than Spanish moss, that's for sure, especially since barba del viejo is neither moss nor in Spain.

Oh, I picked up another cool new expression as well. Sometimes when rock climbing certain muscles get tired and start to quiver a lot the way your leg does when you tap it really fast. There isn't an expression for this in English that I know of but in Spanish it's apparently called motocicleta, which literally means motorbike. I found this out when someone shouted 'para tu moto' which actually translates to 'stop your bike.'

More Rocks

I went on a day trip to go rock climbing with Carlos, Olga, and three of their climbing pals. There's a really popular place an hour outside Bogotá called Suesca, but I think the area might be primarily for mining. I heard there was a concrete factory nearby and we were climbing what looked like granite. Plus we walked along railroad tracks to get to the site and I saw chunks of rock scattered along them the way you see chunks of coal on Virginia tracks.

Anyway, it was my first time rock climbing outdoors and I had a good time, although I wish my Spanish had been better (the karaoke-alcohol effect wore off pretty quickly). I'm not so hot with imperatives and prepositions, and if you've ever been rock climbing you know how people like to shout advice at you. Move your foot left! Grab that upper hold! Switch your feet!

This is actually a picture of Julio, one of the other climbers. He was doing really well on probably the hardest route we had while I took this picture. Then he took a fall and almost hit the ground. Then someone almost grabbed a gigantic spider hiding behind a hold. Then we saw somebody being carried away on a stretcher. Then I decided to stop climbing.

Museo

Bogotá has some really nice museums. I spent an afternoon walking around La Candelaria visiting about a thousand of them and was quite impressed to see how many famous artists some of them have. Here's a Picasso called Hombre Sentado Con Pipa, one of several I found alongside works by other big names like Degas and Matisse. And of course there was plenty of Botero. In fact, if you've been reading this blog for a while you might recognize this Botero piece from a previous entry.