Places can be like people in a lot of ways. One of the ways in which I find this true is in the way of first impressions. In all these different destinations, you end up with a sense of vibe in each place. It is like when Dane Cook said that sometimes you meet someone and you just know they are a bag of douche. Right away. Other times, you really like the person and you don't know why, but you leave wishing that you had more time to spend with them.
In a past blog...I don't remember which, I talked about some of my enduring favorite places around the globe. Oh yeah, it was the one where I went back to bury my heart in Cusco...so Cusco and Wellington and Oporto and Prague where a few at the top of the list. Well, as of today, I am going to make a way-to-early-to-tell statement and say that Bogotá may have just joined those juggernauts on the big global list. No kidding. But I'm crazy.
I left Quito this morning in the cold sunshine of the High Sierra...and I wasn't terribly sad about it. I was ready to move on. After about an hour and a half of watching the green and brown mountainous undulations far below, the plane began to descend into a place that looked more like France than South America. Green and brown checkered plots of agricultural land spread out between the mountains and below the layers of puffy white clouds. Could this be the drug-ridden, ultra dangerous, infamous traficante-ruled Colombia I had always imagined? No. It was something else completely. Dirt roads leading to farms and streams meandering down from the heights, and the heights themselves; majestic but comfortable. Strange my brain kept saying. And then abruptly, the green farmland turned to shanty towns...first shanty towns with only dirt roads and broken down busses and other vehicles littering the way. Then the shantytowns started to have pavement around them...then the shanties turned into small houses and then they got bigger and the cars got nicer and then there were trees growing and then brick buildings and parks and soccer plains...and then the plane banked and I could see the center of the city, cradled in the arms of the huge mountain that rules over all this stuff. Wow...what a place. My heart was beating fast, which is not the norm anymore...but something was different here. We landed and I got the fifth degree going through customs. Maybe it's the beard. Could I really just be here for tourist reasons? Sebastian the immigracion officer was skeptical. But he ended up stamping my warped and dangerously close to the no-good-anymore line passport, and waved Amigo Mateo on by. I checked the big bag into the baggage storage in the aeropuerto (no homeland security problem with this in south america yet...thank god 'cause it's a great thing to be able to do...) and I caught a cab into the city. My hostel is in a place called La Candelaria, which is basically the old town, or ciudad vieja. The guy dropped me a few blocks from my place because they were digging up the street I was staying on. Walking that distance had me realizing that Colombia is different from the other places I've been. It is noisy like other places...colorful...aromatic...a bit chaotic...all these things are the same...but somehow it is different. A bit edgy, but an edgy that I like...
So I get to the door of the place and this old lady opens the inner door, which is separated from the outer door by a good twenty feet...and she gives me the fifth degree too!!! What is my name?...no my full name...where did I come from?...no not originally, today!...finally she let me in and it was like entering some South American spiritual/meditation sanctuary...plants and flowers filling three different courtyards...laundry lazily bobbing on the line in the fresh breeze. Two latina beauties dozing in brightly colored hammocks...and a smile on that face of the old lady that could melt the ice on any jaded bastard's heart. The lady showed me around and then gave me the schpeel on Bogotá. I smiled when I walked into my room and saw the fireplace and smelled the soot and fresh coals. On my bed was a stack of folded blankets. I thought it looked like a lot. She told me that if I needed more blankets I could have them. Yikes.
I went for a stroll a few minutes later and got to know the city in my normal way. I call my method, "Getting Lost." It works well to get your bearings, and you meet some interesting people along the way. Every time. Yeah, so here it might not be the best idea. But I had my compass/internal warning system set to the "potential rocket launcher attack" setting (Anyone remember Harrison Ford in the Bogotá scene from Clear And Present Danger?) so I felt alright about it. I found the main plaza, Plaza Bolívar, which is really a nice place. I remember seeing a foto of that plaza years ago and thinking, 'I wonder why more people don't go see this place?' Now that I am here, I think it is even more beautiful than I imagined it would be. Seriously, you should have seen this place tonight...full of birds and people dressed for the chill of early evening. The women in scarves and woolen hats with their long black hair blowing up with the wind...the men with their mountain hats and set faces and cigarettes. The sky was like a renaissance sky...like the God-sky you see in old italian paintings and technicolor promos. The pillars of the court buildings stood stern and white and the giant wooden doors of the massive old churches were being drawn closed for the night. It was something. As I climbed back up the narrow streets towards my hostel, ahead of me were rows and rows of pastel-painted houses and beyond them the giant mountain above, crowned with churning cumulous clouds...behind me across the valley the sunlight had turned the haze to an orange and rose color that lay like lace on the steeples of the many churches.
What is this place? Despite the many camouflaged men carrying big and automatic weapons, despite the robberies taking place in back alleys nearby at this very moment, despite the stigma of the North American 'War On Drugs', I knew that I had stumbled on a good place. Like when you know when you have met a good person, you can also know when you have found a good place. I could get robbed tomorrow and that may change my mind...but I doubt it. Like a man under the charms of a beautiful woman, I think I would just forgive her...forgive my new city love...of Bogotá.
On a different and more humorous note...Jake and I witnessed a number of embarrassing "Americans In Action Abroad" moments while chilling in Quito a few days back. I have bitched about this before...but it is so incredible to watch in action, I just have to talk about it again. The most notable of the cases that we saw was with this American woman who was basically verbally barraging a British woman who had made the mistake of letting the American woman sit down at her table in a small cafe. The American woman's daughter was living in the Galapagos and she was not going back to the US anytime soon so the mom and dad where getting used to the idea of visiting the daughter in Ecuador. They had taken a few language lessons and this lady obviously thought that she could speak spanish really well. She couldn't. It was actually terrible, and the 'at least she is trying' argument was completely being cancelled out by her attitude of superiority and condescencion. But the poor British lady couldn't get a word in at all. The American was telling her every little thing that the British lady 'had to do' in the Galapagos. I hate when people say this, "You're gonna wanna get to the blah-blah-blah..." It's the 'wanna' word that gets me. Telling people what they want to do is not so cool. I realize that at it's core it's just an aspect of speech, but coming from the American mouth it doesn't seem that way and it is just not cool. Often our enthusiasm and tendency to try to dominate conversation just adds to our imperialist reputation...and that is algo feo out in the big world. Anyhow, after a while of listening to this embarrasing exchange, we got the hell out of there, glad to never have to hear that lady's voice again. Well, the next day at the airport while I was waiting for my flight to Bogota, guess who's voice I heard!!! Yep, her. And she ended up sitting near me on the plane and disturbing some French people until they pretended to be asleep. The plane to Bogota was connecting to one that was headed to LA...she would fit in well there.
It's one of my pet peeves when people adopt that dumb and weak little voice to say, "Small world..." or, "It sure is a small world..." They sort of chirp it out and then laugh a weak little laugh as though they've just summed up the majority of things on the planet. But sometimes, I have to admit, it does seem small. I realize that we gringos move in relatively small and closed circuits down here, but damn, why her? Why that lady? I have had that happen numerous times on this trip alone. It was better when it was Maria Los Angeles...I didn't mind running in to her twice.
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