My view

As promised, photos of the view from my room on the fifteenth story of Torre B of Torres de Fenicia.

Pre-storm view of city's highrises

Post-storm view of the west

Night view of La Candelaria

Getting busy in Bogotá

Less than straightforward explanation of a bus route (note: picture stolen from Bogotown blog)

I finally have friends! Even though they are friends of a friend of a friend, I now call them my own, resulting in a quadrupling of the number of people that I know in Bogotá. It makes me feel quite warm inside – a feeling that I hope deepens as classes start at Los Andes on Tuesday. I’ve enjoyed the new company, beginning to dabble in Bogota’s nightlife and not doing all my city exploring by myself. My apartment has become more social as well with the arrival of the other student, Gabriel, who is much more talkative than the caleño, Daniel.

But the good news doesn’t stop there. I’ve met twice with former Rotary Peace Scholar Juan Esteban, who spent two years at UNC/Duke and afterwards returned to Bogotá to work at the Universidad del Externado. He is doing research on dialogue between ex-guerrillas and paramilitaries as well as demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants into society. I am going to help out with some of his research and also participate in a study group that he plans on forming in February.

I also have wasted no time in starting salsa classes, with the goal of learning salsa caleña, a style characterized by incredibly fast footwork. It’s not easy to find in the States, but Colombia has become famous for it. To get an idea of what its like when danced socially, you can check out a video here.

I like Bogotá more with each day that passes. It has hundreds of cafes, of which I’ve visited a dozen. They do not always excel in quality of coffee – though Café Don Pedro, which roasts its own coffee on site, is a definite exception – but do extremely well in terms of ambiance. Bogotá is also said to have more bookstores than any other city in Latin American, which I definitely believe. All in all, the city is a happening, busy, cultured place that I’ll be able to continue exploring throughout my entire year here.

Photo tour: La Candelaria

La Candelaria, the historical district of Bogotá founded in 1538, begins a few blocks from my apartment. It is home to a number of cultural attractions (museums, churches, the most visited public library in Latin America), the most important Colombian government buildings, multiple universities, bookstores, cheap housing, hostels, and countless cafes. The area has a bohemian feel to it and offers an interesting mix of colonial architecture and graffiti.

Not the best pictures in the world and definitely lacking shots of many important sites, but better than nothing…

Obama and Colombia

Lottery ticket in Colombia

I attempted to watch Obama’s inauguration speech online today, only to fight with millions of others for bandwidth: the video froze, the audio jumped forward, and the speech was difficult to follow in its entirety. YouTube has since saved me from my frustrations. It’s raining quite hard here in Bogotá, so to pass the time I offer some (non-scientific) thoughts on Obama’s popularity in Colombia.

Some staunch supporters of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe favored McCain in the November elections. Uribe has been Bush’s best buddy in Latin America, a region that has been overwhelmingly unsupportive of the outgoing administration. Uribistas have expressed concern for the future of Plan Colombia, which brings more than half a billion in U.S. military aid to the country each year, and are upset with Democrats’ refusal to ratify a free trade agreement between the two nations. Uribe himself has enjoyed high levels of support from Colombians, mainly due to an improving security situation in many parts of the country. (The picture is not as rosy as Uribe likes to paint it however. A discussion of his policies will come in a future post.)

Nevertheless, Colombians still favored Obama over McCain, even if at a lower margin than the rest of Latin America. For most Colombians, like their fellow Latin Americans, Obama has generated guarded optimism—excitement for Bush’s departure, hope for a change in the meddlesome nature of U.S. foreign policy, and solidarity with Obama’s background, mixed with long-held frustration over the lack of attention paid to region and, worse yet, memories of authoritarian regimes backed (and sometimes, in part, created) by the U.S. government. Everyone from your average José and columnists in Colombia’s leading newspapers question the degree of change Obama will bring to the Casa Blanca.

That’s not to say Obamamania hasn’t had its place, especially among the 20 percent of the country that is Afro-Colombian. In the fall, lottery tickets were issued featuring Obama’s face. The town of Turbaco organized a symbolic election on November 4, in which Obama beat McCain 1128 to 47. Some businesses in Cali gave employees a day off work to celebrate Obama’s election victory. Today the town of Puerto Tejada held a symbolic inauguration in its main plaza to mirror the festivities in Washington.

Video (in Spanish) on celebrations in Puerto Tejada

Interest in today’s events has been extremely high, yet another reminder of the degree to which U.S. policy affects the rest of the world. My university held a viewing of the inauguration with a discussion to follow, and Obama’s speech could be found on all public television channels. Newspapers are filled with analysis of both Obama’s speech and the future nature of the U.S. government.

Today was a great day, but I will wait, like many Colombians, to see the true degree of change Obama will bring to U.S. foreign policy. How he approaches Colombia will be a good indicator, though let's keep our eyes on Cuba and hope the U.S. government finally gets rid of its failed policy toward the island.

Settling in to Bogotá

With classes yet to begin and knowing few people in Bogotá, I’ve spent much of my first six days in Bogotá in solitary ways: dealing with long lines and longer waits at the Administrative Department of Security to get my foreign ID; trying to figure out Bogotá’s often confusing public transportation system; reading up on the Colombian conflict in hopes of not seeming too out of it compared to my Colombian classmates; and, in general, exploring what will be my home for the next year. It’s too soon for me to drawn any grand, overarching conclusions about Bogotá, but I can say that I like the city a lot thus far. Everyone tells me that Bogotá’s greatness lies under the surface, so we’ll see what I discover in the next few months.

I am living in an apartment a block and a half away from Los Andes, in the center of the city, close to the maze of streets that make up the bohemian, historical center of the Bogotá, La Candelaria. The view from my fifteenth floor rooms is unbelievable, for sure the best I will ever have in a city, unless I change career paths and dedicated myself to the pursuit of money and a bachelor pad in a New York City high rise. (I’d love to post pictures, but my camera battery charger sits in Iowa right now, so it might be a few more weeks.)

I rent the room from an older woman, who house three students a semester. One, from Cali, has arrived, but has spent the last couple days at a friends place playing video games. The other gets here this weekend. Both are undergrads, meaning they are quite young—17 and 18 in this case. Maybe they won’t become lifelong friends, but I’m sure we’ll get along.

The señora, Rosalba, is sweet, worries about me, though gets a kick out of the way I’ve taken to the streets, buses, and taxis on my own. Her son, Javier, age 30, originally believed by me to be 24 or 25, lives in the apartment also and has been extremely friendly and helpful. For Linn-Mar graduates and Spanish movie fans – aka I’m only talking to a few of you – Javier looks like the love child of Gabriel Garcia Bernal and Chris Hicks.

My monthly payment includes food (and laundry), which is great. She’s good about explaining the various dishes to me and must think the United States a fruitless country, as my common response to anything about fruit is, We don’t have this one in the States either. (In many cases, English names for the fruits don’t even exist.) The one problem is that, apart from the large lunch, the food is not quite enough to satisfy my insatiable appetite. I’m trying to send a message in the first week to that effect, eating every last scrap of food on my plate, as quickly as possible, always accepting seconds—but, for six dollars a day for three meals, I guess I cannot complain.

All and all, the first few days in Bogotá have been good, though I’ve many focused on settling in. Exciting stories (as one person asked: Where are the drugs, promiscuity, and criminals with big illegal weapons? I wanna hear about you narrowly escaping the throngs of imminent death distracting the goonies with your wit and clever riddles while your lovely sidekick girlfriend kicks them in the groin.), I promise will come. With pictures.

Cali, Cartagena, and Armenia

My arrival to Colombia was marked by delayed and rerouted flights, the loss of all of my luggage, and dozen of phone calls to different airlines in the United States, Panama, and Colombia to find someone who felt like providing information about my bags’ whereabouts. Luckily these memories quickly faded, replaced by the new ones created during my last two weeks of travel. It has been a whirlwind, but well worth the fifty-six hours spent in a bus.

Salsa concert, Estadio Deportivo Cali

My first stop was Cali, which lived up to its name as the capital of salsa. I arrived thinking the characterization was an exaggeration, but was proved wrong as I listened to salsa in buses and taxis, on the street, early in the morning, late at night, everywhere at every time. The salsa highlight, without a doubt, was a twelve-hour concert featuring the salsa artists I mentioned in my last post and many more. Paula and I also went to a bullfight, a part of the Feria de Cali not recognized as a national heritage event this year, a first in Colombian history. Despite this victory for animal rights activists, thousands of (wealthier) caleños turned out for the event, many of them displaying the work of Cali’s finest plastic surgeons—a cultural lesson in itself. The lives of two of the six bulls were spared as a result of their stellar performance, and we left happy knowing that survival of the fittest was well at work. Away from the Feria, I enjoyed meeting a number of Paula’s family members, sampling as many foods and juices as possible, and bringing in 2009 watching the burning of años viejos, effigies of old men lit on fire to symbolically erase the bad experiences of the past year.

Corrida de toros, Cali

With 2008 behind us, Paula and I left Cali and continued on to Cartagena. Cartagena was a principal port through which the Spanish empire exported the richest it robbed from South America. The old part of the city is surrounded by a large wall and is further protected by a variety of forts. These aspects as well as the prominence of those of African descent make Cartagena similar to Havana in many ways. In recent years, Cartagena has exploded and is the country’s primary tourist destination, for Colombians and foreigners alike. It excels in the culinary arts—one of my favorite meals, shrimp cooked in a passion fruit sauce—though the service was notably poor, a surprise given the hospital nature of all Colombians I’ve met so far.

View from Cafe del Mar, on top of the wall surrounding Cartagena

One of my best experiences in Cartagena was going to Playa Blanca, a beach far from the city, away from crowds and unadventurous tourists. To get there, Paula and I paid to ride a cargo boat that left from the local fish market, as the beach is extremely difficult to get to by land. The beach was incredible relaxing—made more so by the massage I received from one of the beach’s many wandering masseuses. I’ll definitely return later this year, this time with plans to stay a couple nights on the beach, where you can rent a hammock for a few dollars.

Playa Blanca, near Cartagena

The last stop on my journey to Bogotá was Armenia, where I got to know the other side of Paula’s family. I liked them all a lot, especially two of Paula’s cousins. Luckily, Paula made it through the last couple days without me trading her in for either one of them. I got to know less of Armenia than Cartagena and Cali, but enjoyed my time there nonetheless.

Paula and cousins at a quince we attended in Armenia

I arrived to Bogotá on Saturday and began exploring yesterday, meeting up with UNC alum, my roommate from Cuba, and the finest Fulbright in Colombia, Anthony Dest. He is also in the program at the Universidad de Los Andes, so I’m sure he’ll be popping up in the blog often. In any case, more on Bogotá very soon...

(A note for my worried family members: I’ve had no problems with safety in Colombia, and the only violence I have experienced has been a bite on the hand from someone’s pet monkey. While Colombia may not be Iowa, there’s no need to worry about me.)