Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia writing about Medellin, Antioquia, Colombia
This might be a new record for late posts. Over two months ago, from 11 de noviembre 2016 to 14 de noviembre 2016, I went on a trip to Medellin with Kelsey, Andrea, and Kismeth.
11 de noviembre
Bucaramanga, Santander and Medellin, Antioquia, Colombia
Luckily for me (and everyone else), I wasn't sick for this trip! We had an evening flight, pretty uneventful, and took quite a long cab ride to where we were staying: The Black Sheep Hostel. The hostel was pretty nice - we had a private 4-bed room (2nd weekend in a row I slept on the bottom of a bunk bed!), shared bathroom with the room next door, common spaces (with lots of hammocks!), and drinks (including beer) and snacks you could get from the front desk and have added onto your tab. They also had a bunch of activities, but the ones we were interested in filled up too quickly. The neighborhood we stayed in was El Poblado, which was close to the metro and a short walk to all the nightlife.
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| Plus they had a HUGE bunch of fresh bananas you could pick and snack on whenever you wanted! |
That first night after we arrived and freshened up, we decided we didn't want to waste any time and we headed out to Parque Lleras, the home of Zona Rosa, hub of the Medellin nightlife. We wandered about and took in the scenery (lots of street art!) and hopped into and out of a few bars. We even found a bar that played American club music (rap, hip hop, etc), and we payed a cover to get in and everything, but it turned out to be packed full of high schoolers and felt like a school dance, so we got our free shot included in the cover and left.
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| Such a cool atmosphere! |
As we were walking around, we found a place that served FALAFEL! It was so exciting. Bucaramanga doesn't really have food from most of anywhere else in the world, and it had been quite a while (probably since June or July) since I had eaten Middle-Eastern food. Falafel Time was Subway-style, where you got to choose what to add on your sandwich, and damn was it good.
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| Just look at it. Doesn't it make your mouth water? |
Towards the end of our night we found a pretty cool discoteca called La Ruana de Juana, finally the atmosphere we were looking for. We had some fun dancing, until this waiter started practically chasing us around the club because we hadn't bought any drinks. After a while of dancing and dodging, we made our way back to our hostel to sleep.
12 de noviembre
Medellin, Antioquia, Colombia
On Saturday, we woke up and headed to Al Alma Café for brunch. Brunch! Brunch is such an American thing and so not a Colombian thing. It was SO GOOD. I got an eggs benedict, which was tasty, but the real star of the show was Kismeth's french toast.
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| Yum |
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| Heavenly. |
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| Medellin Metro Map. Our hostel was near the Poblado stop. |
The coolest thing about the metro to me was that they had a teleférico (cable car) as part of their daily commuter system! Medellin is in the mountains, and cable cars just make much more sense to ascend a mountain. We took the train to the cable car and rode it up as far as it went.
Public transportation at its finest.
Joke's on us.
It's a national park. With hiking and horses and zip-lining and lots of cool stuff that you should be dressed differently for. Oh, and it's raining. We were so not prepared.
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| We should've done some research! |
Parque Arvi seemed really neat though, just know what you're getting into. There's several parks within the main park, and each has TONS of outdoorsy activities. I'd like to go back with hiking boots and pants and a jacket. (It's pretty chilly up at the top of the mountain.) We walked around a bit, and then explored a little craft/farmer's market, shopping and snacking.
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| Oh deer. |
After we had our fill, we headed back down the mountain, admiring the view and laughing at our misfortunes. And what a view it was! Everything looks so beautiful from up there.
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| Far o'er the misty mountains cold... |
I've never really been in such a mountainous city before, so the concept was pretty fascinating to me. From below, the city just looked like stacks on stacks on stacks of buildings.
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| So many! |
We took the metro back to our hostel, where we freshened up and rested a bit before our next adventure. Kismeth had made a friend on another trip she had made a few weeks prior - a Canadian that teaches Physics in Medellin. Sam invited us over for dinner, and we made some pasta and garlic bread (though it turned out his oven didn't work and he had never noticed, so we had to improvise on the stove top). We had some pretty deep conversations about philosophy and politics and more over our dinner and wine. He was a pretty cool dude.
After dinner we headed back to Parque Lleras to meet up some of Sam's friends at a club, but Andrea and I didn't feel like paying cover to party that night, so the two of us slowly meandered back to the hostel and chilled in the hammocks on the roof. We were originally going to try to make some hostel friends and play a game or something, but no one was really around, so we just chatted about life, our journey to/in Colombia so far, and our lives back home. Andrea asks some hard-hitting heavy-thinking questions, which leads to some really deep conversations. It was a really nice evening.
13 de noviembre
Medellin, Antioquia, Colombia
On Sunday, we decided to try and do some research after our mishap yesterday. I looked at Trip Advisor at where we should eat and what we should do. We decided D'Andre Gourmet sounded pretty tasty, so we headed up that way. Unfortunately, we walked all the way there to find that it was closed. Trip Advisor did not warn us of this. We were near Parque Lleras, so we decided to amble around and find somewhere to eat.
We found a place that seemed cool, and we were hungry, and they advertised Mimosa Party, so we had a seat at Botanika Lounge. The waitress initially told us that if we ordered an entree, we received unlimited mimosas, so we got super excited. Then another waitress told us that was incorrect, and told us the actual price of the unlimited mimosas, and we decided to just have coffee instead. It was an interesting place.
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| I ordered the ginger hash browns. They were extremely gingery. |
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| Kelsey's eggs had a bunch of flowers on them. |
After we were nearly done eating, the waitress brought us a round ofggggy mimosas on the house and apologized for the earlier confusion. They were damn good, and if we had ordered the unlimited mimosas after all, we probably would not have gotten much done that day.
After brunch, we grabbed a taxi to the center of the city. We had seen some of it from the train the previous day and there were some cool-looking things we wanted to check out.
We walked out into a big square and were about to choose a street to walk down and observe, when a HUGE crack of thunder struck out right above us and the heavens opened up in a downpour. We ran back underneath the roof of the expressway where all the street vendors were hiding their wares from the rain. We looked at some of their wares, and I haggled a man selling Colombian jerseys down to $30.000 from $50.000, but then I remembered I was out of cash (plus I realized the jersey had buttons and I didn't like the buttons). Still felt accomplished.
When the rain died down to more of a drizzle, we hazarded out and took some photos of the Palacio de la Cultura and the sculptures in the Botero Plaza on our way to the Museo de Antioquia.
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| What a gorgeous building. We didn't get to go inside, but I'd like to someday. |
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| Butts. |
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| Guardian cat to the museum. |
When we got to the museum, we found that there was a special price if you were part of a group. Unfortunately, you needed more than 5 people to qualify and we were only 4. So, we grabbed a few lone rangers to make our "group" and everyone came out happy. One of our new group members stuck with us to tour the museum. He was a German named Joshy who was volunteering for a year at a finca an hour or two out of Medellin that took in underprivileged youths and helped them to develop skills and get on their feet to become productive young members of society. He was pretty cool.
The main attraction at the museum was the Fernando Botero exhibit. Botero is best known for his voluptuous figures in his paintings and sculptures. We learned from the exhibit that his uncle enrolled him in bullfighting school at 12 years old, and though he didn't end up pursuing bullfighting as a career, the environment inspired his first works of art. He traveled to Europe and studied the Italian and Spanish masters, especially the Renaissance painters. The Abstract Expressionists of New York taught him his loose, visible brushstrokes. He donated many of his works to the museum of his hometown, Medellin. I was surprised to learn that he is still alive, as I usually think of famous painters as being long dead from centuries ago (which I know is usually not the case; I had the same kind of realization when I realized Picasso only died not too long ago).
Botero's got a very particular style, and though he's got a bunch of historical figures in his paintings (Jesus, Marie Antoinette, King Louis XVI, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Escobar), he's also got a lot of weird risque figures as well. The one thing they all have in common is that they are very round (but not fat, Botero claims that his figures are simply voluminous, not fat).
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| Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI, in all their voluminous glory |
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| This picture has so much going on. I'm not even sure what's exactly happening here. |
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| Even his still life is voluminous |
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| The Death of Pablo Escobar, 1999 |
After the Botero exhibit, we wandered around a few of the other exhibits until the museum closed. There was some interesting stuff, mostly pretty modern. We also had a nice view of the plaza below.
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| Hey, it stopped raining! |
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| A study of Botero's hand |
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| This was one of my favorites in the whole museum |
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| Ain't that the truth! |
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| What a fascinating collage of the baby Jesus. |
After the museum closed and kicked us out, we looked again on Trip Advisor to find something to do that was open on a Sunday afternoon/evening. We found El Pueblito Paisa, which we remembered Sam mentioning the night before, so we decided to grab a cab and head over. Pueblito Paisa is a fake little town in the style of an old Spanish settlement in Antioquia at the turn of the century. Think Renaissance Faire. It's touristy and kitschy, but I like that kind of stuff. We had heard it has a great panoramic view of the city, and we wanted to have a good view of our last Medellin sunset.
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| "The Little Town" |
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| Marvelous Mountainous Medellin! |
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| Night view of the market and the Pueblito |
All weekend Kismeth had been wanting to try the traditional Antioquian dish Bandeja Paisa, and she finally got to at the Pueblito! Bandeja means plate or platter, and Paisa is someone from the region Medellin is a part of. This dish is full of comfort food from the region - rice, beans, chorizo, chicharron, egg, avocado, arepa, ground meat, blood sausage, and plantain, all sharing the plate together. It was so much food and looked good, but I wasn't hungry enough to order my own. I did have a bite though, and it was yummy!
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| Bandeja Paisa |
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| We didn't find the big 360° panorama mirador for our sunset, but we did find it after the sun went down. |
To end our last day in Medellin, we wanted to get some food we couldn't get in Bucaramanga, so we traveled over to an Indian/Middle Eastern restaurant, Tabun. The food there was so tasty, and no matter what you order, you are treated to an appetizer spread of naan with several dips and salads. We stuffed ourselves full!
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| Dayum. |
We rolled ourselves out of the restaurant, and on our way home decided to pop in to get something else we couldn't easily get in Bucaramanga - good craft beer. We sat down at Bogota Beer Company for a drink, and we got really excited at the selection of fancy craft beers! (In Bucaramanga, you have your choice of Aguila Light, Poker, or if you want to kick it up a notch, Club Colombia in types of dorada, roja, or negra. As comparison, Aguila Light and Poker are like your Bud Lites, and Club Colombia is probably equivalent to Miller.)
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| LOOK AT ALL THESE CHOICES |
We read the whole menu and picked out our tasty treats, only to hear from the waiter that they were out of most of the choices. We selected our beers from the few that they actually had in stock, and were still pretty happy! I may have snuck out with a glass...that Lulo pushed off a table and broke a week or two later.
We headed home for a few hours of nap at our hostel, full of food, beer, and memories. We then woke up as many were just getting home from the bars to take the long cab ride back to the airport to catch our out-before-the-sun flight home to Bucaramanga.
