HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY: Seeing some museums
BUMMER OF THE DAY: It was a really wet morning
WORD OF THE DAY: Serial Romeo (personal joke with Agatha)
What a great night’s sleep. The room itself was cold, but the bed as there was no heating in the rooms, but there were 3 blankets on the bed, the bed was comfy and I was able to check Facebook from it was well. Does it get any better than that?
It was a free day in Bogota and Mark said he would take us all into town to show us around and give us some bearings and then we could go off and do what we wanted for the rest of the day. It really hadn’t stopped raining all night and after a great breakfast we all loaded into 3 taxis for the 30 minute drive to the old town. It really was wet and the roads had retained a lot of the water and just like any other country when it rains there was a lot of traffic on the roads, but this could be normal with a city that gets a lot of rainfall over the year due to its altitude and being the world’s 4th highest capital.
Bogotá is the capital, and largest city, of Colombia. It is the most populous city in the country, with 6,840,116 inhabitants as of 2005 and one of the biggest of Latin America. It figures amongst the thirty largest cities of the world and it is the third-highest capital city in South America (after La Paz and Quito) at 2,625 meters above sea level. With its many universities and libraries, Bogotá has become known as "The Athens of South America". Bogotá owns the largest moorland of the world, which is located in the Sumapaz Locality. The area of modern Bogotá was first populated by groups of indigenous people that migrated from Mesoamerica. Among these groups were the Muiscas who settled in what is now mainly Cundinamarca and Boyacá. With the arrival of the Spanish colonizers the area became a major settlement, founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and later capital of the Spanish provinces and the seat of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. With independence Bogotá became capital of the Gran Colombia and later the capital of the Republic of Colombia.
Bogotá has a subtropical highland climate with the average temperature of 14.0 °C, varying from 3 to 20 °C during the course of the day. Dry and rainy seasons alternate throughout the year. The driest months are December, January, July and August. The warmest month is March, bringing a maximum of 19.7 °C. The coolest nights occur in January, with an average of 5.4 °C in the city; temperatures can fall below freezing in the nearby towns causing frosts and fog in early morning, with the lowest recorded temperature within the city being −7.2 °C in February 2007. The official highest recorded temperature is 24.9°C reached in January 1992 and March 1995. While temperatures are relatively consistent throughout the year, weather conditions can change dramatically during the course of a single day. Climatic conditions are irregular and variable due to the El Niño and La Niña climatic phenomena which occur in and around the Pacific basin and are responsible for pronounced climatic changes. This makes the city's weather unpredictable; sunny mornings can turn out into a severe-storm afternoon.
Street arrangement of Bogotá based on the Cartesian coordinate system. North is to the right. The urban layout in the center of the city is based on the focal point of a square or plaza, typical of Spanish-founded settlements, but the layout gradually becomes more modern in outlying neighborhoods. The current types of roads are classified as calles (streets), which run perpendicular to the Cordillera, with street numbers increasing towards the north, and also towards the south (with the suffix "Sur") from Calle 0. Carreras run parallel to the hills, with numbering increasing as one travels east or west of Carrera 1. The numbering system for street addresses recently changed, and numbers are assigned according to street rank from main avenues to smaller avenues and local streets.
Bogotá has gone to great lengths to change its crime rate and its image with increasing success after being considered in the mid-90s to be one of the most violent cities in the world. In 1993 there were 4,352 intentional homicides at a rate of 81 per 100,000 people; in 2007, Bogotá suffered 1,401 murders at a rate of 19 per 100,000 inhabitants. This success was the result of a participatory and integrated security policy, "Communidad Segura", that was first adopted in 1995 and continues to be enforced. According to a 2011 article in The New York Times 'street muggings and thefts on public transportation have surged since 2007', leading certain commentators to declare a crisis of security in the city. According to several polls around 72% of the inhabitants say they have been victims of violent crime in 2010 and 2011.
After getting dropped at the entrance to the Gold Museum and with the weather as abysmal as it was, we decided we would come back the that museum, go with Mark to see parts of the old town and then come back to that. It really was a museum day, and I generally am not a museum going kind of person, but to see something of the city I decided I would go with the flow as I was here now anyways. We did have a plan to see the city by foot and then go to the City’s tallest building to get a view of the city, but the weather was just not going to co-operate so we had to get a backup in plan.
The city is so big, it has 20 different zones, but the old town was just beautiful. Walking to the main plaza looking at the buildings you could have been anywhere in Europe. The buildings that made up this square were the Nariño Palace, The Presidential residence, Palace of Justice, Colombian National Capitol and the Liévano Palace which houses the office of the Mayor of Bogotá. As we were standing there the street was closed off with motorbike police and with flashing lights and about 6 black BMW’s they zoomed past us with what we think that the President was in one of them and as quick as they had passed the street opened up and traffic carried on as usual. Now that’s the way to get someone important through the city.
From here Mark walked us to the Fernando Botero Museum. It was free entry, it was raining so it was a sound option at the time and I am so glad that I went in. Fernando Botero Angulo (born April 19, 1932) is a Colombian figurative artist. His works feature a figurative style, called by some "Boterismo", which gives them an unmistakable identity. Botero depicts women, men, daily life, historical events and characters, milestones of art, still-life, animals and the natural world in general, with exaggerated and disproportionate volumetry, accompanied by fine details of scathing criticism, irony, humor, and ingenuity. He came to national prominence when he won the first prize at the Salón de Artistas Colombianos in 1958. Working most of the year in Paris, in the last three decades he has achieved international recognition for his paintings, drawings and sculpture, with exhibitions across the world. His works are housed in the heart of Bogota; Museo Botero (Botero Museum) showcases the works of this national treasure. The museum displays an electric array of paintings which reveal qualities of skill, humor, satire and whimsicality the artist was gifted with. Fernando Botero's series on "fat people", the paintings of which are funny and quite unusual. Furthermore, you can also see fine collections by other artists such as Picasso, Renoir, Dali, Matisse, Monet, Degas and Chagall. We spent around an hour walking the rooms of his art and was pleasantly surprised to see works from Monet, Picasso and Chagall also in display. We were allowed to take photos in here without a flash and the security was pretty tight with electronic alarms if you got too close to any of the pictures and security in each room. I can’t remember the last time I was in a museum.
From here we all split into smaller groups. The gals wanted to go and have a look at the café section of the old town as the rain had stopped but Matt, Agatha and I decided to head straight to the Gold Museum and then that would be my dose of museums done for the rest of the trip. With a stop at a money changer for Agatha and a stamp stop that turned into a free cup of Colombian coffee we made it to the Gold Museum just after midday. There were a lot of police and important people with walkie talkies out the front, but we walked in no worries and purchased our entry ticket of 3000 pesos (1.70AUD) and headed to the second floor of the museum. On the first floor is the museum's main entrance, the shop and a restaurant, The Gold Museum Restaurant and Café. The Gold Museum, Spanish: El Museo del Oro, is a museum that displays an extraordinary selection of its pre-Hispanic gold work collection - the biggest in the world - in its exhibition rooms on the second and third floors. Together with other pottery, stone,shell, wood and textile archaeological objects, these items, made of what to indigenous cultures was a sacred metal, testify to the life and thought of different societies which inhabited what is now known as Colombia before contact was made with Europe.
In 1939 the Bank of the Republic began helping to protect the archaeological patrimony of Colombia. There is an object known as Poporo Quimbaya which was one of the first in a collection and has now been on exhibition for 65 years. The museum houses the famous Muisca's golden raft found in Pasca in 1969, that represents the El Dorado ceremony. The heir to the chieftaincy assumed power with a great offering to the gods. In this representation he is seen standing at the center of a raft, surrounded by the principal chieftains, all of them adorned with gold and feathers. After a decade of works, the museum was expanded and renovated in October 2008. With the renovation, the museum organized the permanent exhibition in five rooms with archaeological objects and an interactive room. It also added an auditorium, some temporary exhibitions rooms, a cafe, a restaurant and a souvenir store. The museum has a collection of 55,000 pieces. 6,000 pieces are on display in their expanded building. There are bilingual descriptions of almost all exhibits.
On the second floor the exposition begins, the Main Room is called People and Gold in prehispanic Colombia. Through its glass cases it displays the goldsmith work of the different cultures which inhabited Colombia before the Spanish people arrived. The exposition continues on the third floor, with The Flying Chamanic and The Offering. The first shows the process of Chaman's Ceremony with its different gold pieces, the second is divided into three parts; the Offering Room, the Offering Boat and the Lake. At the end of the exposition there's a Profunditation Room with artistic videos about the most important gold pieces of the museum. It was a great museum and super busy with groups and school groups but after an hour in there I really had had enough and was getting a little weary. So I had had a successful morning in the city and I saw TWO museums and I was pretty chuffed.
It was lunch time, we were famished and after walking the streets for around 15 minutes we found a chicken restaurant that looked like it served more locals than gringo’s. I don’t know why being in a chicken place that I ordered a steak, but I did, which it was okay but I sat there and watched the roast chickens spin around over the open fire. They looked so good, so I decided to get a half chicken to take-away and that I would eat that for dinner tonight so it would save me having to go out for dinner later, especially if the weather was still crap.
I decided to head back to the hotel on my own, so Matt and Agatha made sure I got into a cab safely and I started my 30 minute journey back. I was thinking at this time about missing foreigners, what if the cab was heading somewhere else, as the cabbie kept looking at the hotels business card and the address a few times. As the streets are all numbered and the zones, I could figure out we were travelling in the right direction and right at the end of the journey I recognized 2 landmarks and felt better that I wasn’t going to get taken for a ride. The meter said 12100 pesos but he only charged me 9000 so with a tip of 1000 pesos and a sigh of relief I was back safely. I mean I was in Bogota, in Colombia after all, I think I was entitled to feel a little intimidated.
So the afternoon was spent watching some TV and nerding it up on the computer. It was great to just chillax and have some time to myself. Sharon was still in town with Marina and Steph and I was able to catch up on another blog and chat on Facebook with a few friends.
It was shame that the weather was so crap for most of the day, but some of the crew did end up doing the cable car as it cleared up later in the day, but I just couldn’t stay out past 2pm but I am happy with what I did do for the one free day we had in the Colombian capital. How many people do you know have been to Bogota?
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