Happy 2011! (Two Weeks Later)

New Years Eve has always been a holiday that never quite lived up to the hype. Everyone wants it to be a great night you will never forget, but the majority of my New Years plans have been rather lame.

This year I didn't want to get my hopes up, but I did have some fun plans in the works. :) My friend Lisa, who I met studying abroad in college, planned a trip to Colombia to visit me and another friend. She arrived on the 28th of December and we met up in Bogota on the 31st. I loved being able to see her and spend some quality time together because although we have kept in contact since traveling in Spain during 2007, nothing is quite the same as seeing a person all day, everyday.

Lisa's friend, Liz, lives in Bogota and planned an awesome night for us at a party of some of her friends. A good mix of expats and Colombians, the party was full of delicious food, drinks and fun people. Also, I really liked celebrating 2011 at someone's house without the need to spend lots of money on a bar cover charge or drinks.

Lisa and I ready for 2011!

New Years hats :)

First picture of 2011!

The start of the new year still didn't feel very important as the clock struck midnight but I have been thinking more about it in the first few weeks of 2011 and I think it's going to be a great year. I have some good goals for myself this year and I am excited to see where they all lead! More details to follow, but for now...bring it on 2011 :)

Bogota Otra Vez

Annnnnd I'm back from my second trip to Bogota in 3 months! This time we went because Maggie and my friend Catie were participating in a yoga workshop during the day on Saturday and Sunday, so Scott and I tagged along to play tourists. :) After this trip I am even more in love with the city! The cool climate, amazing restaurants and delicious pubs are just fantastic. Also, the city is so cultural yet so friendly. LOVE. Here are some memories from the trip...as documented by my camera. :) Enjoy!

Saturday

Vive Colombia photos from campaign in the park to inspire national pride.

Gold Museum...so much gold in one place.

Looking out from the museum to the main plaza...look at me being artsy with the photo through the letter O. What up.

Gold masks in the museum.

Giant floor map! I love maps so this was cause for great excitement! Please note Scott and I were documenting our current location :)

Fernando Botero Museum...this guy was crazy! All he painted & sculpted were chubby figures! Haha :)

His (chubby) version of the Mona Lisa.

Main plaza in Bogota getting set up for Christmas!

Main plaza and me!

Mmm...Irish Pub :) Mozzarella sticks, homemade fries, club wrap & more...

View of Bogota at sunset from a pedestrian bridge of the Transmilenio (the mass transit system)

Sunday

We tried to find the Park of Simon Bolivar...and ended up in the Park of the Newlyweds.

More artsy photos of the park.

Whoops! :)

Beer sampler of the four main beers by the Bogota Brewing Company. I have now been to 4 out of the 9 locations. :) In order from darkest to lightest, Chapinero Porter, Montserrate Roja, Cajica Miel, and Candaleria Clasica.

Monday

$3000 pesos later and we are at the top of the Colpatria Tower, the tallest building in Colombia, for stunning views of Bogota.

Carrera 7 (7th Street) in Bogota. Monday was a holiday so if you look closely you can see that one side of the street is completely shut down for Ciclovia, when bikers/rollerbladers/walkers/joggers take over.

On top of the world of Bogota!

Another Three Day Weekend - Another Plane Ride

Officially we have one full week of school in the month of November...and it already happened. The next few weeks are going to be a rush to fit everything into the semester - I need to get to work writing that Algebra 1 first semester final at some point... :/

With all these three day weekends I have been certainly maximizing my time, with my travel to NYC and all. :) This weekend I off to Bogota with the same crew from Semana de Receso minus Kelsi. My roommate, Maggie, and our friend Catie are attending a weekend long yoga workshop in Bogota. I do not feel like I have been practicing yoga long enough to attend, so instead Scott and I are going to play tourists for the weekend.

When we were in Bogota last time we didn't get a lot of time to explore the city or go to some of the cool museums, thus I am pretty excited for the trip! We are leaving right after school on Friday afternoon and will not be back until Monday night, so I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend! :)

p.s. ONLY 14 days until I am on a plane to that beautiful, all-inclusive Thanksgiving vacation in the Caribbean. Life is good. :)

Semana Receso: Bogota & Villa de Leyva

I'm back!! Thanks to those of you who made comments on missing me while I was gone...even if it was just missing my blogs updates. After not checking email, Facebook, and blogs for five days I feel quite out of touch.

Last week we had a week long break from school, so after 3 curriculum in-service days for teachers (Monday to Wednesday) we took a much needed vacation! I traveled with four friends, Catie, Scott, Kelsi, and Maggie to Bogota, the capital of Colombia, and Villa de Leyva, a small colonial town about 3 hours from Bogota.

According to Lonely Planet Colombia:
Villa de Leyva is where time stands still. Declared a national monument in 1954, the town has been preserved in its entirety and virtually no modern architecture exists. The result is a colonial town par excellence - a place where the streets are still cobbled and the walls still whitewashed. It's easy to see the place in just a day, but many travelers find themselves caught in its magical grasp and hang on for several more.

Ready to go in the Cali airport on Wednesday night!

Here are some highlights from the trip, organized in friendly lists for your reading pleasure. :) Enjoy!

Top 5 Fabulous Touristy Things Visited

• Santuario de Iguaque. Located in a Colombian national park just outside Villa de Leyva, this lake is sort of like the Garden of Eden for the Muisca people. According to the legend, the goddess Bachue emerged from the lake with a baby boy in her arms. When he grew up they got married and populated the earth. In old age, they transformed into serpents and dove back into the sacred lake. We started this day at 6 am, leaving our hotel to catch a bus to the national park. The bus dropped us off and we walked about a mile and a half uphill to the entrance of the park. From there we hiked about 3 hours to the top of the mountain. While it was definitely a challenging experience hiking at a high altitude, I LOVED being able to look out over the valley at all the farms and nature surrounding us. Also, a benefit of doing it early in the day meant we were pretty much on our own for the hike up, which made the nature seem that much better! (Don't worry it was a national park so it was totally safe!)

Sign at the start of the hike!

Hiking up the road to the trail head.

Successfully completing a very steep incline during the last hour of the hike!

Valley below! WOW!!!

At the lake! Finally! :)

• Cerro de Montserrate or Montserrrate Summit in Bogota. We rode a cable car up to the top (at 10,400 feet!!) for $3.50 one way and enjoyed some amazing views of central Bogota. The day was totally clear and we could see for miles around Bogota. Climbing to the top and watching the views get bigger and bigger reminded me so much of San Sebastian, Spain when a group of us rode the funicular car to the top!

View from the cable car on the way up! A little bit scary...

Inside the church on the top.

Kelsi is excited to be in Bogota!

Bogota and me!

• Plaza de Bolivar, the main plaza in central Bogota, which is named for Simón Bolívar. In the middle of the square is a bronze statue of Simón Bolívar (cast in 1846), the work of an Italian artist, Pietro Tenerani. This was the first public monument built in the city.

Maggie, me, Kelsi and Catie in the Plaza! Photo credits to Scott :)

LOVE THIS! Okay so while walking around in La Candelaria neighborhood there is this unique art project started by Jorge Olave. He uses recycled materials to make these art works of comuneros, common people you find on the street. This particular guy watches over the Plaza Bolivar from the Casa de Comuneros. "Best seat in town!" according to Lonely Planet.

• Colombian Stonehenge! (formally called Estación Astronómica Muisca or El Infiernito) Used by the Muisca people to determine the seasons; inside the park there are 30-odd cylindrical stone monoliths sunk vertically into the ground about 1m from each other in two parallel lines 9m apart. By measuring the length of shadows cast by the stones, the Muiscas were able to identify the planting seasons. The observatory was also a ritual site, a fact that got in the way of Spanish plans to lure the Indians into church. To prevent the Indians from going to the site, the Spanish renamed it El Infiernito (The Little Hell) and promoted its association with the devil.

Sign at the front of the park.

Welcome to Colombian Stonehenge

At the entrance.

• Pozos Azules. Big blue pools of water in the middle of the country side in Villa de Leyva. At the end of a bike ride we went to them and after encountering a very intense guard lady and forking over $2000 pesos ($1 USD) we were in! We went swimming/dipped our feet in and cooled off from the bike ride. The surrounding hillside provided a beautiful back drop for an impromptu lunch picnic.

Maggie next to one of the pools!

Loving it.

View from about halfway down the hill to the pools.

View from about the top of the hill looking down to the pools.

Group photo. Awesome that my bandana flew up at that moment.

Pozos Azules!

Top 5 Favorite Meals

• Spaghetti Ricotta with bruschetta, wine from Villa de Leyva, and bread with homemade pesto at a small Italian restaurant in Villa de Leyva, right off the main Plaza. I think it tasted 500 times as good because it was the night after we hiked to the Lake Iguaque.

Villa de Leyva wine!

• Dessert at a bakery in Villa de Leyva after the Italian food! Tres leches + chocolate orange + ginger spice + cheesecake = heaven.

• Pasta (again, weird, I know!) at Savia, a natural organic restaurant in the Plaza Mayor of Villa de Leyva. The restaurant is small and quaint, located with many other shops/little restaurants in Casa Quintero, a restored mansion turned retail space.

My pasta!

Maggie's veggies and potatoes

• Club Sandwich, french fries & honey flavored beer at Bogota Beer Company. This meal provided an amazing end to our trip and a chance to experience some flavor outside of the 3 national Colombian brands that taste slightly like tap water. ADDED BONUS: We watched the final 5 innings of the Twins game; exciting even if they did lose to the Evil Empire of baseball aka NY Yankees.

We've arrived...

Can you tell the Twins game was on TV but we hadn't lost yet?? I was loving it :)

• Breakfast at the French bakery in Villa de Leyva. Delicious tea, cappuccino, fresh baked bread and pan de chocolate (bread with warm chocolate in the middle!)

Outside the French bakery.

Top 5 People We Met

• Alex. He is the dinner chef at the Cranky Croc Hostel in the Candelaria neghborhood of Bogota, where we stayed on the book end days of our trip. He made us dinner the night we got in & did a great job with my instructions of "no sauce anywhere on my plate, thank you."
• Henry. He owns the bike shop named Bici-Full were we rented bikes to tour around the hillside of Villa de Leyva. He was so great! Very friendly and even biked with us at the beginning to show us the way to go. At the end we took pictures with him in his bike shop. :)

Henry showing us the Pozos Azules.

Henry and Maggie getting the bikes set to go.

Scott & Kelsi ready to ride.

• Mauricio. He works/is associated with the Cranky Croc in Bogota, but runs his own transportation service. He drove us to Bogota Beer Company and the airport for much less than a taxi. As an added bonus he has a CD of American music that he put in every time we were in the car. It starts with a song that I'm pretty sure came out when I was in middle school. :)
• Fernando. Owner of La Española Hotel in Villa de Leyva. He was a wonderful doorman and host during our three nights in Villa, and he also helped point us in the right direction for renting bikes and visiting the Lake Iguaque.

• Braiden aka random Canadian guy we met in our hostel...Kelsi and I hung out with him and some other people from our hostel on the last night in Bogota. He basically spoke no Spanish and was insanely grateful for any tips we had on living in Colombia. He and his friend just graduated university in Canada and they are traveling around South America for four months! (Sweet deal, I know!) Anyway, it was fun to hang out with some English speaking travelers and get their perspectives on Colombia.

Top 5 Colombian Travel Moments (where to begin???)

• The discovery that hitch hiking is a way of life in the Colombian bus system. Buses within a city or buses from one city to another will ALWAYS pick up passengers along the way. Basically anyone who jumps on the bus after it leaves the station is more money in the driver's pocket, so I guess I understand why they always stop...but it does make travel take longer! I would say on any given bus trip, at least one third of the passengers pay the driver directly. They usually just stand on major roads and wait for us to drive by...
• On the bus ride up to Santuario this little kid gets on the bus with his dad. After 5 minutes of him being on the bus I notice him playing with a HUGE BEETLE on his jacket...basically treating the thing like his pet. I felt terrified and Maggie told him I was scared. Then he held up his arm in front of my face so I could get a closer look. :( It was awful, and he found it hilarious. I couldn't wait for him to get off the bus.
• On the bus ride from Bogota to Villa de Leyva a girl of about 7 years old suffered from some major motion sickness that resulted in some major vomit on her part. Apparently this happens whenever she travels so she held her own hair back & cleaned herself up afterwards while proudly holding her plastic bag of unmentionable grossness as her mother looked on. Hilarious because she totally had the routine down.
• The plane ride from Cali to Bogota and back actually took like 30 minutes. AMAZING. I have never seen flight attendants move those drink carts down the aisle with such speed and accuracy.
• Bus ride from Villa de Leyva back to Bogota it was raining the entire time. (Don't worry of course we still stopped to pick up more people and open the door each time despite the rain.) This rain resulted in an hour and a half of sitting in Bogota city traffic while Kelsi and I had an extreme need to use the restroom. The bus itself went through a number of pond sized puddles in the roads of Bogota and I remained pretty confident we were going to hydroplane in every one. Awesome.

Officially.

The.

Longest.

Blog.

Post.

Ever.

Sorry and I hope to catch up with everyone SOON!! Sorry I have been MIA, but it doesn't mean I'm not thinking of you often!!