Colombia

I went to Colombia this past week so that's the reason for the delayed blog post. I was visiting friends of my mom who had studied at Penn State with her. On Monday we went to a fair with indigenous crafts from across South America. The goods they were selling were different from the usual stuff they have in Ecuador so that was interesting. Bogota itself is huge. I had kind of felt like Quito was pretty big being 1.5 million people, but Bogota has 8 million. The public transportation is pretty awful and there are always traffic jams. At night we went to a park where they had set up lights and Christmas decorations. It was more impressive than it sounds although very Americanized.

On Tuesday I visited the old historic center of Bogota. It was pretty impressive. There were loads of churches. We walked by the president's house and visited several museums including the Museum of Gold which was pretty cool. There were loads of old artifacts and the like. On Wednesday we drove to the department of Boyaca. For those not familiar with South American colonial history, there was an important battle in Boyaca which ended up being the decisive battle where Colombia gained its independence from Spain. The battlefield was pretty neat and there was a cool monument for Simon Bolivar. Simon Bolivar is "el Liberador" or the liberator and is practically worshiped all over South America. After visiting the battlefield we drove to Villa de Leyva which is an old colonial town. All the architecture is colonial and the streets were all cobblestone which I thought was pretty awesome. From there we visited some ponds that were incredibly blue and we also visited a fossil museum with a huge aquatic dinosaur skeleton. For lunch we stopped at an ostrich farm so I ate ostrich. It wasn't all that great. It was more similar to beef than chicken and very chewy.

On Thursday we drove back towards Bogota and visited a sacred lake called Guatavita. Apparently it was the original El Dorado, but there are so many places that claim to be the original El Dorado that you need to take that claim with a grain of salt. The lake was cool though. It was on top of a mountain and surrounded by more mountains. After Guatavita we went to La Catedral de Sal, which is a cathedral carved into a salt mine. I really liked it. It was huge and built with a series of tunnels. Everything was carved out of the salt rocks.

The last day I climbed a mountain called Monserrate which had a view of Bogota. The city was covered in a layer of visible pollution. After that I visited the Quinta de Bolivar which was a mansion where Simon Bolivar lived for a bit. It had a nice garden as well. Apparently Bolivar was really short. He was only about 5'4. I walked through Bogota's main university before leaving for Quito again. The university was pretty big and had a pretty nice campus. There was lots of graffiti everywhere. It was mostly pro-communist stuff. The students named the main square Plaza Che.

In other news, Stephan is coming to Ecuador tonight. We'll be heading to Peru on Thursday so I probably won't update this until I'm back in the states in January.

Catedral de Sal

Guatavita

Villa de Leyva

Battlefield of Boyaca

The Colombian President's house