Bogota



Bogota



Bogota is wet.  Very, very wet!  We were warned by one of the new Dragoman group, who had arrived from Bogota, that it rains every afternoon starting at about 1pm. Well the timing isn’t quite right, but it has rained everyday at least once, normally twice, and when it rains it really rains.  We decided to chance a dash to find lunch the first day and got completely soaked.  After that we have opted to find shelter at the first signs.



Candelaria Bogota



We’ve had a number of practical things to sort out, so with that and avoiding the rain, we haven’t seen as many of the tourist sights in Bogota as we might have done, but we saw a bit more of how the city lives.   The shopping area is very modern, with plenty of places to eat and drink.  Nearby are some of the bigger and better residential properties, ranging from apartment blocks to large detached homes.  The latter had some fairly impressive security, which I guess is an essential part of life for the wealthy here.

 Candelaria, where we were staying, is the old part of town and has the state buildings and museums.  There was also a school quite close to us and sometimes in the mornings we would hear them having a singsong.  They must have been quite young as we heard them singing a Spanish version of Old MacDonald Had a Farm, but the one that amused us was a rather ineffective and stilted attempt at Whatever by Oasis.



Gold, Bogota



We visited the gold museum which has an impressive collection of old gold artifacts and explains the processes used to make them.   We also had a look in the emerald trade centre, but the most interesting thing there was that there was always a group of men outside, some of them with folded bits of paper in which they were carrying emeralds that presumably they had mined and were taking to sell.  The strangest thing of course was that I went to somewhere that sold gold and somewhere that sold emeralds, two of my favourite things, and I didn’t buy a thing.

Bogota



We wandered around the old town on Thursday and made our way to the Plaza Bolivar with its churches and government buildings, and walked into a large protest of some sort.  The police were out with their riot shields, guarding all of the important buildings, but it mostly seemed to be quite peaceful. 

Protests in the square



We did see a number of buildings with paint splattered on them, so assume that there were a few paint bombs thrown around at some point, but we didn’t get caught up in any of it.  Being Bogota, it started to rain quite hard again, so we left them all to it, though we noticed that some of the protesters were taking shelter too.



Christmas tree in Bogota



Overall Bogota was an interesting city to visit and it had some good parts, but it is just too wet.