Bogotá, Colombia: 6/10

My assessment may not be quite fair, since I spent the three weeks with my very old-fashioned auntie who only speaks Chinese & heavily accented Spanish, so it's not as though we were out tearing up the town. In any case, my impression is that a great deal of Bogotá is dirty, poor & conducive to crime. There are also some very nice areas with lovely restaurants as well (see separate post), & everything is tons cheaper than in the States. Auntie doesn't have a car so we spent a lot of time in cabs. We'd ride somewhere for twenty minutes & the fare would be, say, 8000 pesos, which is a little over $3.50. In NYC that is the base fare when you get in the cab at certain times! The exchange rate took some getting used to - it's supposed to be 2320 pesos to $1, but the effective rate is about 2200, & price tags of $100,000 never quite stopped being a shock (they use the symbol $, I don't know why).

Auntie is very upset about her soon-to-be ex-husband, which will be her first breakup ever. They were together for almost thirty years, so you can imagine how traumatic it is for her. I spent most of my time cheering her up & telling her about my dating experience in an attempt to bring her up to speed with the rest of the world. The poor woman is so sheltered in that respect. Also, I worked on my Chinese & Spanish - my family barely spoke Chinese while I was growing up, so this was a great opportunity to expand my vocabulary from mainly food-ordering words. It was kind of bewildering because I went from comfortably speaking English all the time to being forced to think of words in two languages I'm not very familiar with. Good for me though. I met a cousin I didn't know I had, too. My maternal grandfather apparently had three kids with his first wife before making five with my grandmother, & this cousin is the son of one of those first kids. It's really weird because he's almost as old as my parents, & his children are exactly my siblings' ages. I feel like they should be my cousins instead of second cousins or whatever. Anyway, I love kids so it was fun playing with them & getting them to like me.

I have to express my admiration for the Colombian bus & train system. I wasn't allowed to go on it, as a pretty young foreigner, but it looks really organized & modern. The buses are called TransMilenios - they have their own lane on the highways as well as pedestrian bridges. They seem to run on a pretty frequent schedule too. The trains come aboveground at each stop & then disappear back under the highway in between. Someone did a wonderful job designing the whole system. I wish that could work here in NYC - trudging up & down the stairs to the subway takes a lot of energy. & the buses cause so much traffic.

The people of Bogotá seem fairly friendly, although sometimes I wished the men would back off a little. Overall nothing bad happened, though. No one tried to steal my purse, my pinky with its new emerald ring is still attached to my hand (despite dire predictions of amputation if I wore my rings), & other than strange men trying to talk to me I was not bothered in any way. It's a funny story behind the ring - Auntie is very superstitious, & insisted that I needed to protect my "fortune" by wearing it. I have a ring at home I could wear but she insisted I needed a new one, & who am I to argue with more jewelry. :) We got a small emerald since that's the major gemstone in Colombia, & it's very delicate & pretty. Auntie also bought me an outfit & if she'd had her way I would have come home with the contents of at least one mall as well. She's really sweet - I got bored at times, but I did my best to be there for her & help her not think about how much of a pig her husband is being. I won't go into detail, but he's done everything awful short of murder, & my aunt slaved away for thirty years making his life as smooth & pleasant as possible while working & taking care of their kids. A little depressing to contemplate.

Bogotá seems to be a little slow in adopting some aspects of modern technology, which is most glaringly obvious in the cars. I did not see one single car, new or old, with automatic windows the whole time, & we took anywhere from one to five cabs a day, so I had a more than sufficient sample to observe. I can't think of a single reason roll-down windows would be popular compared to power ones so I found it very puzzling. Most cars are stick shift as well, which is also a head-scratcher since traffic is really awful most of the time. My understanding is that automatic was developed to cut down on gas consumption & driver effort in those situations. Gas is only slightly cheaper than in the States, even though Colombia is much closer to Venezuela.

We went sightseeing in the country one Sunday. It's really rural right outside the city, with cows & everything. Actually you can find them in the city too, but not so much. It's bizarre to drive by cows grazing peacefully on the shoulder, I'll tell you that. Anyway we went to this Catedral de Sal, which apparently is one of the new manmade wonders of the world. I wasn't impressed by a bunch of giant crosses & prie-dieus carved out of salt in a giant salt mine, but then I'm an atheist & I've never liked the simpering style which seems to be de rigeur for angels. But it was certainly a massive mine & a great many people spent a lot of time hollowing it out in slightly interesting ways.

Bogotá drivers are absolutely frightening. I can't count how many times I gasped in horror, sure that we would crash. People think nothing of cutting each other off & darting in & out of tiny spaces, which would probably earn a shooting in America. I guess they're just much braver - I was scared to death a great deal of the time though. & what is up with the bathrooms generally having no toilet paper? I don't know how mens' rooms work but we ladies need paper! I would say 50% of the places did not provide. It was really puzzling, & don't say bidet because there weren't any either. I suppose they expect women to have fully stocked purses.

I probably would have liked Bogotá better under other circumstances, & I will say that the weather is pretty mild & it is a rather pretty city in aerial view, with lots of history.