Bogota, Colombia

Dec 5, 2004

The check in agents at Avianca evidently get quite a kick out of sticking all the Americans and Europeans in the one row on the plane where the seats don't recline. But the flight was only an hour and they serve whiskey and beer.

Bogota is beautiful, the first city that feels civilized since leaving the United States. The people are incredibly friendly and happy, and the city is clean and well laid out, perched in a valley about 9000 feet up. The weather is cool, and this is a welcome change after the relentless humidity of Central America. Mark said it is much cleaner than Amsterdam. We went to the Cathedral of Salt this morning, which is a Cathedral (hence the name) in an old salt mine. It goes down into the ground about a mile, and is enormous. Last night it was described to us as one of the eight wonders of the world, today it was one of the seven wonders of the world, so it definitely improves every day.

Our host family is somehow related to me. They are nice, overbearing
people who do a lot of very funny things. We went out for one of the local delicacies, and got it to go. As we were going up to the elevator from the garage, the elevator got stuck, and the father of the family and his son started banging against the metal door and pushing on the alarm over and over again. This was in an elevator that holds 6 and there were 6 of us. So we were pretty tightly packed together. After about ten minutes of this awful racket, I noticed the phone with which you can summon aid and called it to their attention.

While the father was talking on it, Mark looked at me and said I owed him twenty turtles. If the security guard for the apartment building hadn't gotten us out minutes later, I'm sure it would have been more because as soon as he finished describing our problem and put the phone back on the hook the father resumed banging on the door and his son started pushing the alarm bell again.

The local delicacy was a baby pig stuffed with rice and baked. There was plenty of pig skin and Mark and I were offered it first. We tried a little and it was like eating pork chewing gum. So we let the two children fight over it. And they did.