5 Days in Medellin, Colombia (Dec 2013-Jan 2014)

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Day One - 27 December 2013 – Friday – Flight from Aruba, Caribbean to Medellin, Colombia. We awoke a few times in the night, a little worried that we might miss our early morning flight. We got up just before 5am (had to wake a receptionist), checked out and drove to the airport. We checked in for our flight and then returned the rental car. We had to wait for someone to show up for work (supposed to arrive at 6am, got there around 6:30. A manager-type man was in the office early but he wouldn’t check the car back in. ‘Just leave it,’ he said). That is Aruba. Short flight to Curacao, twenty minutes. Then the flight to Medellin, less than two hours. Local bus into town. Glimpses of the mountains surrounding the city in the valley. Garden centers and nice houses and signs for more housing development. City of 2.5 million people. Local taxi to the hotel after a scrum at the bus stop. Taxi driver would not quote price, pointed at meter, and then didn’t use it and argued with us the whole way to the taxi, once threatening to stop and let us out at the side of the road! Taxi drivers are the same th.e world over – ignorant and obnoxious and poor, aggressive drivers. They only want to rip you off as quick as possible. Nice cute hotel, Casa Hotel Asturias. Rooms small: large bed and little walk space around it. Caught up on sleep and then walked around the neighbourhood to familiarize ourselves with it. We found the metro stop outside the stadium and skateboard park. We had a sample of the local aquadiente from a local girl who welcomed us to Colombia and wanted to practice her English. She is the first English speaker we have met. We made photocopies of our passports at a computer kiosk. We visited a couple of grocery stores and had our dinner in the cafe section of one of them. Early to bed.

Medellin is the second largest city in Colombia. In the 1980s and 1990s it was the most dangerous city in the world, where murder and kidnapping were commonplace. It was the home and powerbase of the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. At the height of his power, it was estimated that his personal worth in 1989 was in excess of 3 billion US Dollars and his cartel controlled 80 per cent of the international cocaine market. In 1991 and 1992 there were over 52,000 murders in the country. He maintained his reign by building hospitals and schools, multi-sports complexes, and churches which gained favour with the Catholic hierarchy in Colombia. He also distributed money directly to the poor. After his death in 1993 during a shoot-out with Colombian police, his drug cartel fragmented and the government increased its efforts against the remaining drug lords. Nowadays, Medellin presents itself as a model of peace and reconciliation. It has a thriving economy. And it even has an International Jazz Frestival. In 2013 it was awarded a prize for Innovative City of the Year by the Wall Street Journal. Paisas, the residents of the city, are proud of their transition and are exceptionally friendly and helpful to visitors from abroad; many parts of the city are now safe during the day or night. The city is home to a half-dozen universities and therefore there is the vibrancy and energy associated with youth exploding with excitement for life.


Day 2 - 28 December 2013 – Saturday - Medellin, Colombia

At Casa Hotel Asturias in Laurels area of Medellin. Breakfast at hotel: a funky scrambled egg and two slices of toast with hot chocolate that was really hot milk with a little chocolate flavour. We walked to the Stadio metro station and managed to get a ten trip ticket for 18,000 Colombian Pesos (about 4 USD). We took the metro into the San Antonio stop in the city centre, less than 10 minutes. We walked a bit around the area. We visited Cineros square just south of the metro terminus which had 300 sculptures that looked like syringes (we later discovered that they were needles). The area around the metro station is filled with stores selling all kinds of goods from caps and clothes to runners and shoes. Many many stores and many many people. We walked up to the Plaza Botero which boasts 23 large, bronze Botero sculptures. There are many people hawking miniature sculptures and fedoras on the square. We visited the Museum Antioquia that contains 119 of Botero’s paintings as well as paintings of modern masters that he has purchased over the years. While his work also include landscapes and still lifes, Botero is primarily known as an abstract-figurative artist in which he depicts people and figures in large, ‘exaggerated, voluminous’ proportions. Though he now lives in Paris, aged 81, and spends only one month a year in Colombia, he considers himself the "most Colombian artist living". We first saw an exhibition of his paintings in Rome a few years ago. They were his Abu Ghraib series that were based on the infamous reports of United State forces’ abuse of prisoners at the prison in Iraq. This was a very moving and disturbing exhibition; unquestionably one of the most powerful and moving and emotional and upsetting exhibitions we have ever attended. He had produced 85 paintings and 100 drawings and was quoted as saying he had ‘painted out the poison’ over a 14 month period before returning to his more standard themes of family life. Botero has said he will not sell any of the Abu Ghraib painting but would instead donate them to museums.

Botero is a man not unused to violence and its portrayal. He has also painted a number of works on the death of Pablo Escobar that are quite chilling in their depiction and which we saw at the museum here in Medellin. We are looking forward to visiting the Botero Museum in Bogata next week.

Nearby to the museum and plaza, there were some ‘voluminous’ women who looked like prostitutes hanging out outside the Our Lady of La Candelaria Basilica. We walked more around the city, taking in the energy of Colombians living their daily lives, while also looking for bank or ATM to get some more cash and a post office to send a letter. We saw no other people who looked like visitors or tourists on our walk. We found two ATMs in the famous Hotel Nutibari but couldn’t get any money from them. We asked at reception and a very pleasant receptionist with some English sent us to a commercial center nearby where there were more ATMs from different banks and we managed to get some cash from one of them. We never found any stamps: the post offices were closed and the newsagent didn’t have any stamps left in stock. We asked one girl in a shop where to get stamps and showed her the letter we wished to send but she looked at it as though she had never seen a letter before. We had a pastry and beer at a small shop in the fruit and vegetable market street (Medellin’s Moore Street). It cost very little. As we were walking back to the metro stop, instead of walking back along the other side of the fruit and veg street, we walked down a parallel street that was mostly whorehouses with the prostitutes on the street and the sitting on the stairways. It was very hot so we headed back to our hotel around 4pm and after a short nap went in search of dinner. There are a good variety of restaurants in the Laureles area and we ate at one called Peru Mix. I had a chicken with cheese sandwich that was very nice, with a Coke. We went to the grocery and bought some more water and a couple of pieces of fruit and yoghurts for breakfast tomorrow.

Day 3 - 29 December 2013 – Sunday – Medellin, Colombia

Today we took the metro and cable car up to Parque Arvi. Parque Arvi was once part of the vast highland tropical forest that flanked the eastern slopes of the 1761 acre Aburra Valley. We were lucky, in that on the last Sunday of each month there is an arts and crafts market at the cable car terminus featuring exhibitors from 59 different villages of the Santa Elena region. In the cable car up we befriended a Colombian family. The cable car travels over the barrios, the formerly very dangerous housing area where small brick houses are built up the banks of the mountain. The views over the city which exists in a large bowl is spectacular. We had a sausage and empanada from the market for lunch – both very good. We walked what we thought was a circular route but after about 30 minutes downhill we asked a security man how much further until the road returned to the cable car area and was told we would have to retrace our walk because it didn’t. It seems like what most people do is take the cable car up to the park, then walk down the roadway to one of the various eating establishments or the picnic areas, some of which featured long lines of people waiting to get it, and then get a bus back to Medellin. We figured this out as we were returning to the cable terminus. We rode the cable car down and disembarked at the Santo Domingo neighbourhood where the Spanish Library Park (Parque Biblioteca Espana) is located. The government of Spain contributed to the funding of the project. The library’s was designed by Giancarlo Massanti, a Columbian architect with Italian heritage, and won a ‘Best Architecture’ Award in 2008. Its three buildings are meant to resemble black stones, although two of them are covered by netting as maintenance work is being carried out of them. The inside of the main library building is bright and airy, with an open floor-to-ceiling area along the walls and floors for books and computers in a centre core. The rattle of children playing in the lower floors rose delightfully upward: this is a library instilling the joy of reading.

This library is one of the ten new libraries constructed over the past 5 years as part of Medellin's redevelopment efforts. The area where it is located, the barrio of Santo Domingo, was once considered the most dangerous place in Latin America and 10 years ago the residents were not allowed out onto the streets after 5pm as they were patrolled at night by urban militias. The other libraries are located in other similarly disadvantaged areas.

Day 4 - 30 December 2013 – Monday – Medellin, Colombia

Metro to Zona Rosa area and Parc Lleras. Many boutiques and restaurants and nightclubs and discoteques for tourists, including two Irish bars. We were searching for a jazz club in the area, called Tinto Tintero, but never found it. We did find about 6 shops where sewing machines were making or repairing clothes. We met an antiques dealer, Jorge, outside his shop. He has a black pug, 10 years old, called Blanquito (little white). Jorge, and Blanquito, were very friendly; Jorge was very talkative and full of recommendations for local restaurants and coffee shops, as well as safety tips for Medellin (about the same for any major city – stay out of the dodgy areas at night!). At the end of our conversation he gave us his business card and said to call him anytime if we needed assistance. We had lunch at one of the restaurants he recommended, a local place serving traditional Colombia food, which was very nice. Joan had the Menu del Dia that consisted of bean soup, a plate of rice, plantain, pork knuckle, and a sweet berry desert, all served at the same time. I was not quite so adventurous – I had cooked chorizo and rice. We had a coffee in a Juan Valdez cafe (a Colombian Starbuck’s but with much better coffee) and overheard a disgusting conversation between 6 middle-aged and elderly American males discussing the various prostitutes they had consorted with.

After lunch we walked up El Poblado street that contained many modern high rise apartment blocks and shopping malls, the largest of which, called the Santa Fe Mall, the largest retail centre in Colombia with over 450 stores and 2 million square feet of space, als contained two ice skating rinks. It reminded us of the ‘over-the-top’ malls of Dubai. These two adjacent areas, Zona Rosa and El Poblado, are the most westernized and ‘prime tourist’ areas of Medellin and we were happy to get back on the metro and return to Laureles where we see very few westerners.

Day 5 - 1 January 2014 – Wednesday – Medellin, Colombia

Just a few minutes after we left our hotel we met Paco the neighbourhood pug. We had a chat with his owner, who had a little English. As we chatted another pug, also named Paco, joined our group with his owner, an elderly woman who had lived many years in the US and had perfect English. We chatted about pugs and Medellin and Colombia and our wanderings. As we parted the first woman pointed at her building, told us she was in apartment 701, and if we needed any assistance to contact her. Every day a local person or family welcomes and adopts us!

Today we walked to the Pueblito Paseo, a hilltop replica of a typical Antioquia town that consists of a cobble-stone square and fountain, church and rectory, the mayor’s office and barber shop and a one-room school house. It sits on the top of the Nutibara Hill and offers a 360 degree view of Medellin. Nutibara Hill is 81.5 acres of extensive green-spaces and vegetation, footpaths (some leading down to nowhere), several small plazas and lookouts, and restaurants. There is also an open-air Theater that looks like it had seen better days. We were hoping to have our lunch there but Joan’s didn’t get ‘the feeling’ at any of them so we bought a bag of plantain crisps instead and headed back down on one of the footpaths the led nowhere and we had to traverse the hill to return to the main exit. The walking was very slow and slippery.

We returned to the Laureles area for a late lunch then back to the hotel for a snooze and to pack and prepare ourselves for our 10 hour bus journey to Bogata tomorrow!

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