Bogota, Colombia

Sorry for the late post; we're alive and well. We just finished our four day trek to Machu Picchu. Great pictures to come for that post later.

Hanging out in Plaza De Bolivar. [Photo cred: Steph]

So being the frugal travels we were trying to be, we booked a bus ticket from Cartagena to Bogota. The twenty hour over night bus turned out to be a twenty seven hour bus ride. Whoops. A regret we learned to live with. One of the things that you take for granted while traveling is toilet paper, something desired on bus rides like this. Since then we've stored some in our day bag. Anyway, we made it to Bogota and found it to be much larger and city like than we expected. Walking the busy streets during the day it reminded Steph a little bit of New York. Almost everything we wanted to see was pretty much walking distance. We walked through Plaza De Bolivar, dedicated to Simon Bolivar, the man who helped free Colombia from the Spanish. This square was spread out with four different types of architecture for every side. This one I'm standing in front of is the Mayor's office which is a French style Alcaldia.

Steph in the middle of the plaza.

I caught steph staring at the statue in the middle of the square while it started to drizzle on us. It was riddled with graffiti. Actually everywhere we walked you would see stenciled graffiti or tagging of some sort. I don't think it was real banksy graffiti but someone was borrowing his icon of the rioter throwing a grenade of flowers. FYI, Banksy is a is English graffiti street artist with a flare for politics. In fact, here's an example of some street art we saw on our way to the plaza.

Street art on Av Jimenez, artist unknown;

This painting is actually just a small snippet of an entire wall. But for some reason i liked the black and white punk rocker. It's kinda interesting to see street art taking up an entire building wall. I mean like three stories tall and it's untouched by other artists. You'll see people's walls tagged with random pieces of art, some even overlapping old art. But this one was thought out and had organization to it, and seemed somewhat accepted.

Looking at Picaso

Street art was not the only art we appreciated that day. We stopped by the Donacion Botero where they displayed probably ten rooms of Fernando Botero's art. Only a few other rooms were dedicated to other artists like this Picaso. You can see the pictures of his work later when i post all my pictures or you can just google him. You'll recognize his work since all the people he depicts are quite large or "fat" as he says.

Dipping bread in to hot chocolate at the Puerta Falsa

We were walking from Plaza de Bolivar to the Botero museum and of course I spot out of the corner of my eye some delectable sweets. Curious I was, I looked at the name and realized it was the place that Stephanie had already chosen for dinner. La Pureta Falsa. There were two things here we came here to try; first was the hot chocolate, second was the tamales. It was a small cute little shop with only stool bars lining the right side of the wall and an upstairs that completed the cafe atmosphere. The window display was filled with these banana leave wrapped goods and other confectionery desserts. After drinking half of the hot chocolate we realized the guy next to us and others were dropping their cheese inside the hot coco. I tried it, not sure if I was a huge fan. But damn was the tamale delicious and amazingly cheap! we ordered a second one.

We liked Bogota so much that we almost forgot we survived a twenty seven hour bus ride to it.