Last stop before home
Trip Start
Jan 17, 2008
1
186
Trip End
Jun 30, 2009
Bogota,
Colombia
Friday, June 26, 2009
Bogota is a very big city, one of the biggest in South America, around where we stayed in the Candeleria area, is very beautiful with all the old style colonial buildings, the first place we found to eat was an Israeli restuarant, specialising in oriental-hebrew cuisine, Daniella had a falafel and I had a kebab, both were very good, we wanted to go back and try the chinese, however whenever we went back for more it was always closed. We did a lot of sightseeing in Bogota, a bit of a change of chilling by the beach, it made a welcome change. We were very lucky to coincide our visit, with an Andy Warhol exhibition that is visiting South America, we saw all his famous paintings, Mao, Marilyn Monroe and the Campbells soup tins. All very interesting and good to see, afterwards we went to to the Botero and saw lots more paintings, Picassos, Monets, Renoirs, and the best thing was both these museums were free! Afterwards I felt a bit arted out, as you can understand! In the evening, we decided to head up the Colpatria tower, Colombias highest building at 190 metres. There were great views over the city at night, all the lights as far as you could see.
We continued our cultural vein the following day, we visited the Modern Art museum, and then discovered there was a Japanese film festival playing next door, so we saw a film called flowers of fire, it was a bit weird but very good. As soon as we came out there were loarge crowds of people standing along the roadside, it turned out to be Colombias gay pride parade, and there was 1 float , and lots of extravagantly dressed transvestites leading the parade, we both looked at each other in confusion, as we both had thought Colombia too conservative for this type of thing, but the crowds were loving it and everybody seemed to be having a good time!!
The area around the Candeleria is pretty dead, bogotans tend to head to the Zona Rosa (pink zone) where there are lots of restaurants and bars. It is quite posh, and they are not cheap , but we chose this as the place for our final dinner splurge, we chose WOK, an Asian restaurant, with some great sushi and tempura prawns, it was a really good way to bring our trip to its end.
Today we fly home from Bogota Airport to London Stansted Airport (via Madrid Airport and with a five hour stopover there), so our 18 month trip is nearly over.
