Day 17 - City Tour of Medellin

On Thursday June 25th, we left at 10am to take a bus tour of the city.. There were lots of areas in which the lanes were separated by little mosaic mountain like art pieces instead of a normal divider. This was done to discourage people from trying to cross the busy streets but it's also pretty to look at.

While driving through the city, I noticed someone with a shirt that said "you don't deserve wifi," which I just thought was really funny. I wonder is she understood what her shirt said! Haha.Our first stop was a plaza in which the majority of Botero's sculptures are located. There are around 29, I believe and they were shown in different exhibits in different countries. Botero decided to donate the sculptures to his hometown, Medellín. However, so as to not anger the Capitol city, one sculpture was sent there. Our tour guide told us that his point wasn't to depict fat people, but to play with volume. Often times, the eyes, lips, nose, body parts, etc. are made smaller to emphasize the size of the rest. Similarly, in his paintings, the lighter colors are in the center and the darker colors are outside the center to further emphasized what the volume of the object depicted appear larger. There was also a cathedral that was checkered and striped.

While walking to that plaza, I'm pretty sure we passed some prostitutes. In the red light district, prostitution is legal. I also got hit on by those female hookers, which was a first for me haha and it was pretty uncomfortable. Later, we went to a botanical garden. Dr. Steffanell bought the girls earrings there, which was really nice of him. Then we headed over to another area where there were little baby pools and fountains that people could play in. The children are supposed to wear everyday clothes to avoid sexual exploitation. (Also, according a Hispanic friend, if there wasn't that rule, most of the kids would probably be running around naked.) Next to the water park was an area where there were bean bag chairs and relaxing music which was open to the public.

We walked past a building where there are tons of different musical instruments where the public can come in to play the instruments in one of the rooms of the building. This is so that those who are musically gifted can have the ability to play instruments that they don't have enough money to be able to buy. The tour was over around 1:45, and we were on our own for lunch. Some others and I decided we wanted some Mexican food. We found a Mexican Reataurant called Cinco de Mayo that was decorated with Mexican items everywhere, but for some reason we didn't stop there because there was another restaurant specifically that some of the girls had wanted to try. So, we walked over there only to find that they were going to be closed until 4:00. Then we retraced our steps a bit, found another Mexican restaurant which also wasn't going to be open until 4:00. Finally, we decided to just go back to the first restaurant we had seen, Cinco de Mayo. We noticed that their specials didn't seem to include Mexican food but rather french fries, Russian salad, soup, and some Colombian food. However, we went ahead and sat down, pushing some tables together so 7 of us could fit. The man told us the menu items of the day, which were the same things that were written on the specials board. We asked if they had a menu, but all they had were the specials. We soon also found out that they didn't have typical Mexican food like burritos or tacos or anything Mexican, really, which was very odd for a restaurant called Cinco de Mayo that was decorated in distinctly Mexican decor all throughout. Someone mentioned that they had gone to a TexMex place the night before that was really good, so we headed there. The food was really really good!

We had to be back at the hotel to listen to our last lecture, one that was given by the Pastor of the Colegio Americano in the city that Clare will be teaching at. He talked to us about the problems in Colombia with las FARC and what the Presbyterian church's (which was the second church to come to Colombia after the Roman Catholic Church) role in the matter. He told us a personal story of how since he went to seminary in Latin America during the time that liberation theology was a trend, he was a suspect for having socialist tendencies. As a result, he had to go into hiding in the mountains. He, personally, never ran into any problems after that. There was a community where he lived of 27 families that acted as basically one big family. Children would eat food in one house, sleep in another, etc. It was a close knit community that shared a lot between themselves, though not socialist/communist. It was just a community of friendly neighbors that was interpreted in the wrong way by the wrong people. One son of one of the 27 families ended up joining the guerrilla movement and another son of another one of the 27 families joined the paramilitaries, which was en contra the guerrilla movement. The first son's movement ended up killing the second son's mother and vice versa, though the mothers themselves were not guilty of anything wrong. The rest of the men in that 27 family community were killed and the rest of the women and children were told they had to go someplace else if they wanted they lives. However, there were also blockades that prevented anyone from leaving the city. At the time, Diego, the man that spoke to us had been working as an ambulance driver. Ambulances just so happened to be the only vehicles that were passed the blockade. Diego was able to hide a mother and her two daughters in the ambulance (one daughter underneath the stretcher bed, and the other waddled up in a pile of sheets) and in doing so, risked his own life. They were able to leave the town safely. (There were some other aspects of the story that I didn't quite catch as it was all in Spanish and was very complex) After the talk, I roamed the city a bit with some friends. We ran into a tango performance in the city since for several days there's a tango fair in Medellín. We didn't get to see the tango be only got to see a man singing opera right before it finished altogether. That night I pretty much decided that I'm going to go to Bogotá after the trip with Lee is over, instead of staying in Barranquilla.

#botero #mosaicmountains #medellin