Day 13 - Arriving in Bogotá

On Sunday June 21st, I woke up at 4:30 after a night of hardly any sleep, feeling even sicker than before and dreading a flight but I was not willing to miss out on Bogotá, Medellín, and Santa Marta. Dolly (another student who lives across the street from me) and I left in a taxi at 5:30 to get to the airport a little before 6:00. Ever since my family called me a taxi for Saturday night with the man that they always use when the need a taxi, I have been calling him every time I need a taxi. He's a friend of the family and has always charged be reasonable/cheap rates whereas other taxi drivers like to mark up their prices for "gringos" or foreigners, of which I am both. He goes by the nickname Pipo and it's really convenient cause he knows exactly where I live. To get to the airport, he only charged me $20,000 when some of the other students got charged $28,000. The flight to Bogota was with VivaColombia which is really cheap as long as you're flying domestic. There are no assigned seats, only zones - kind of like SouthWest. To get to the plane, we walked outside. Before we went outside, we were handed little VivaColombia cards. I later realized that this was done so that people from outside couldn't walk onto the plane and get a free flight. When I was walking up the stairs to the plane, my water bottle fell from my backpack to the ground. I considered going back to get it but that would mean having to walk down the stairs past all of the people that were on the stairs waiting to get on the plane, which would also mean that I would be the last one on the plane and therefore the last to choose a seat. Then I realized that the water bottle had completely broken so it wouldn't really even be worth it anyway. I felt bad for just leaving it there but there was really nothing that I could do. I was only mad that I lost the stickers that I had attached to it. The flight was only about 45 minutes. The really cool thing was that you're allowed to bring liquids through security. There's no limit on how much which is really nice. We ended up arriving next almost an hour early! When we got to the hotel, we couldn't check in yet cause they weren't expecting us so early. They had free breakfast at the hotel which took a long time cause about 16 of us all showed up at the same time, all very very hungry. We decided to go downtown to pass some time as we waited to be able to check in.

We went past the presidents palace. To walk past it, we had to get our bags checked by soldier with big guns. We couldn't walk on the sidewalk that was closest to the president's palace. We stopped at a really old church that was also a nunnery that has now been converted into a museum. It was really beautiful and since it was Sunday, the tickets were free. There were little chairs with little openings in the wall where people would have done confession. Then, we went into a really skinny and really dark alley-like place that was where the priests would stay on the other side of the wall during confession. Then finally, we entered back into the church from the back, where there was a crisscrossed fence that used to separate the nuns from the rest of the church. Then we went to Bolivar Square, where there were lots of merchants selling fruit, food, and other things. There was also a lot of people with llamas that were allowing people to take pictures with them, for a few. I was completely freaking out and totally dished out the $6,000 to get to sit on the llama. The funny thing is that llamas aren't even native to Colombia. The only thing was that I was looking pretty rough with no makeup, no sleep, and having felt really sick but nonetheless, it was one of my favorite parts of the trip haha. When I was petting the llama, it kept trying to bite my jacket.

Here's a selfie with that llama:

The climate in Bogotá was absolutely perfect. After that, we took a quick look inside the La Catedral Priamda de Bogotá. Then were so many historic buildings but there was graffiti absolutely everywhere, even on the really old buildings, which was kind of annoying. However, there was some cool looking art/graffiti on some buildings and fences that weren't historic. We then headed over to another part of town, where there were buildings that were much more modern. Some other students who had gotten sick decided to just go straight to the hotel, which was really tempting, but I was so hungry and we were about to eat lunch. There was a park in which there was a giant screen tv that had the Colombia vs. Perú fútbil game. There were thousands of people in the crowd, all yelling and cheering. We ended up going to a chain restaurant called Crepes and Waffles. My friend Nikki wanted to get something both salty and sweet so we ordered one of each and split them both. The salty one was a crepe with meat, spinach, and cheese. I wasn't sure of the translation of it was but someone said they thought it was veal. It tasted like pork to me and I wasn't as big fan of it, but the rest was absolutely delicious. The sweet one was a crepe with chocolate and Arequipa (dulce de leche) sauce, whipped cream, walnuts, and coffee ice cream.

Afterwards, I headed back to the hotel and took a much needed nap. For dinner, three other students and I decided to go to an Italian restaurant because we were a bit tired of Colombian food, which doesn't vary too much. It was really good. At the end, we were given free mint chocolate chip ice cream in honor of Father's Day.

(I´ll add more photos soon!)

#llama #capitolbuilding #crepes