Day 15 - Monserrate y el Museo de Oro

On Tuesday June 23rd, w

hen I went to the lobby to leave with the group for the day, Sally and Clare were there. They are two Lee students that just graduated and who are going to be teaching English in Colombia for a year. We left to go to Monserrate, a mountain in which you can see the entire city from. We went up the mountain in a slanted train. At the top of the mountain, there was a cathedral that many people go to for mass (and sometimes they go up the mountain step by step, praying on their knees!) There were some tourist shops up there and there I had coca tea, which was really good which is saying a lot since I'm not a big tea person.

It was really cold up there. Bogotá is already around 8,000 feet and we went up a mountain, so we were at a pretty high altitude. We went back down the mountain in a cable car. Afterwards, we went to lunch at a burger place where I sat with Sally, Clare, and Juan David. Juan David is the son of the principal at the school that Sally will be teaching at. He accompanied them to our hotel and stayed with us for the activities. After lunch, we headed over to el Museo de Oro, a museum that had mainly gold artificacts made by the indigenous people that inhabited Colombia. I hung out with Sally and Juan David all throughout the musuem, and I guess we were there longer than anyone else, since when we exited the museum, the majority of the other students were waiting for us, along with Clare, since Clare needed to be with Sally and Juan David to get back to where she was staying. They had all had time to explore the tourist shops outside the museum and finish their shopping all before we were done at the museum. It was then decided that I needed to part way from Clare, Sally, and Juan David because if I continued to hang out with them, I would have probably had to take a taxi to my hotel alone, (which I've done in Barranquilla before, and could've easily done in Bogotá). I was sad cause I wanted to continue hanging out with them, especially since the rest of the group was tired of shopping and exploring by then and wanted to go back to the hotel. For dinner, some friends and I orders some pizzas from Domino's, which seemed to be a lot better than Domino's in the U.S. Later in that night, many of us played a game that Guilherme brought, called Lagretto, which is basically like Nertz, but with its own set of cards. I went to bed pretty late which wasn't the best idea since I still needed to pack, take a shower, and have enough time to order breakfast, and be ready to leave by 10am.

#museodeoro #monserrate #coca #bogota #cablecar