Bogotá, Colombia in (mostly) pictures

Normally, I prefer traveling by bus, but we did a little research online and found out that no buses go between Panama and Colombia. The route is "highly not recommended" because most people that attempt it are never seen again due to hostile native tribes, inhospitable jungle conditions and drug thugs. A lot of people take a 5 day boat cruise, but at $400, it was a little over our budget. Thus, we took a cheap and painless two hour flight (only $80 each!)

Bogotá has been wonderful to us. In no particular order, these are some of the things we´ve loved the most. (Be kind if there are mistakes. I'm on a Mac with a French keyboard that is set to British English so it autocorrects me to British spellings. Also the z and y are switched places on the keyboard, which is a lot more inconvenient than you might think.)

The sheer size of this city of 8 million

One of the first things we were told we had to do here was climb the hill to Monserrate. Bogota sits at 8000 feet, but it is actually in a valley with much higher mountains surrounding it. On one of these hills some crazy person decided to build a church. We set out early in the morning and hiked up the thousands of steps to the top. In total the climb took about an hour or more and we gained another 1000 feet in elevation at least. Of course, the views from the top were breathtaking and the church itself was really stunning so that made it worth it.

This picture still only shows a part of Bogota. The city stretches out as far as the eye can see for 180 degrees. Cars looked like ants from up here.

The church was beautiful

 This is part of the original walls. Plaques thanking god for various things.

On the way down we decided to take a lift instead of walking. The hill was so steep that it was really an amazing feat of engineering.

They also have a train you can ride down. This is one of the original ones. The track is so steep that the seats are set back at an angle.

Cheap and seemingly endless food

This phenomenon is best exemplified by an experience we had a few days ago. We sat down to eat at a small restaurant. They didn´t have menus, so we ordered the one thing we had heard of before, "ajiaco con carne". We didn´t actually know what it was, so we only ordered one in case it was terrible. After a few minutes the waiter came out with a huge bowl of vegetable soup. We remembered that we had ordered it "con carne" (with beef), but it was really tasty so we didn´t mind. About 5 minutes later the waiter came out with a plate which had a small steak, three boiled potatoes, three stripes of patacones (fried plantanes) and a side avocado and tomato salad. Half way through finishing the unexpected extra plate of food, the waiter brought out a small cup of super tasty homemade limeade. The two of us were stuffed and the whole meal cost $3.50.

Unrelated to the above story, this is Mega Burger. The burger cost $2 and the hot dog was $1.50. Besides the meat, they had grilled onions and mushrooms, tomatoes, lettuce, ham, cheese, chicken, and potato chips. It cancelled out the exercise we got climbing up Montserrate.

The museums and churches

Bogota is well-known for its many museums and churches. While we were there we saw the Mueso de Oro (Gold Museum) the Museo Nacional (National Museum) and the Museo de la Moneda (The museum portion of their national Mint). We learned a ton of Colombian history and saw some gorgeous architecture.

A church

We knew the Gold Museum would have a lot of gold, but we were pretty amazed  by how much they actually had.

Seriously.

Four floors of this. (Most displays had plaques that explained the significance.)

Botero is a Colombian artist who donated the majority of his personal collection to Colombian museums. He is famous for drawing everything really fat.

I really liked the Mint Museum. We learned a ton about Colombia's economy. Also we learned that the largest bill they have in print is equal to about $25 USD. It helped explain why people are so reluctant to break those bills for us (highly inconvenient since that is what we usually get from ATMs)

The graffiti
Another cool part of Bogota was the street graffiti. Truly amazing murals were scattered throughout the city. Here are some of the ones we found.

Chicha

Ugh, chica. Chica is a native Colombian drink that you can't find most places, but in Bogota there are some bars that serve it. It is a fermented corn liquor that tastes terrible, but tons of Colombian kids our age were drinking it. Presumably they pretended to like it because for $2 you could get an entire gourd filled with the stuff. The first time we tried it we got strawberry flavor which was a horrible mistake. It tasted like Pepto Bismol. Before we left, we tried it again getting the traditional flavor (which we didn't realize was an option the first time.) The traditional was significantly better than the strawberry, but still pretty terrible. Some people added beer to theirs, and that helped a little. Sorry, no pictures because we were the only non-Colombians in the bar and we didn't want to look like idiots.

Tonight we take a midnight flight from Bogotá to Medellin, the second largest city in Colombia which is supposedly gorgeous and famous for its good weather (they say "siempre primavera" for eternally springtime.)