Well after stepping of the sky train which was actually very modern clean and efficient, we arrived in Dumpsville, Dumpland. The streets were filthy, and so were the many homeless, and hookers that lined them.
Seriously, what kind of a hooker is out at 8:30 in the morning???
It was also a Sunday! So we held our bags close after reading that Medellin wasn´t exactly the safest place. It used to be the home of the infamous Pablo Escobar, and 80% of the worlds cocaine trafficing. We were turned away from a few hotels/hostels, but we finnally managed to find something. It wasn´t the cheapest but we were tired and wanted to get off the streets. When day finally arrived the streets cleared and the clouds opened up and Medellin came to life. That City is one crazy joint. There are just over 2.5 million people in the area and I think all of them were on the streets at any given time of the day.
Thats not exactly true. The night we decided to brave the darkness and get some food the streets had emptied slightly but maybe those people were just replaced by others? Christopher?
Yeah the place is still happening at night, and people want to party. Well at least the hooker that sunk her claws in to me definitely did. I politely smiled after my skin finished crawling and carried on my merry way.
Yowzers!
So Medellin must be the shopping capital of Colombia. Like I said everyone is on the streets taking part in what can best be described as an orgy of consumption and haggling. I´ve never seen anything like it. We had to fight our way through the throngs to get anywhere. We quickly warmed to the former drug capital though. Medellin is the Capital of the dèpartment of Antioquia. It is home to all the museums and art galleries of the area. It is also home of the famous artist, Fernando Botero. We visited the departmental art gallery that housed hundreds of pieces from Colombia and the world. Right in front of the museum was Botero Plaza which had quite a few very large bronze statues scattered throughout it. Other Highlights from Medellin included a hike up a 84 meter hill called Cerro de Nutibara close to the city center. There was a reconstruction of a small colonial village on top which doubled as a nice viewing point of the valley that Medellin lay in.
The best part about that hike was the ice cream cone at the top. The village was lame.
My ice cream cone sucked! It was a pre-packaged one, and it was all soggy, and falling apart. Really crappy! Anyway we also visited the botanical gardens which despite being under heavy renovations were quite nice. There was a lagoon, and small rainforest, as well as an impressive cactus garden. We tried to go for a walk around the university campus that was there but it was walled with barbed wire fencing, and there were security check points at the entry gate. Which reminds me of Bogota where the university had a more pronounced military presence and its own police station. (A little weird eh?) After deciding to not try and get on to the campus we walked to a cemetery near by and the only word I can use to express it is Wow! It was surrounded by a 2 storey wall, but it wasn´t the typical cemetery with headstones that we´re used to back in the great white north. Human remains were "filed" up and down the walls in an impressive grid. The path ways wound through the cemetery and all the time we walked we were surrounded by stacked graves. There were a few family mausoleums for wealthier people but there must have been thousands of others being stored in the wall tombs.
Some of the more recent graves had no tombstones, just the date scratched into the plaster. We saw a few from just days before.
The freshest of the tombs had hundreds of flies swarming around them trying to enter around the edges of the plaster coverings. Gross! I think Melissa´s favorite part of our time in Medellin was when she "pounded it" (high fived) with a man with no hand. How was that stump?
You did it too! He was begging for money and wouldn´t leave us alone. I couldn´t even look at him, his face was all magoo. Chris had to give him money to go away.
100 pesos, about 5 cents.
Still more than I would´ve given him...
You always seem to come off a little heartless... weird.
Well at least I´m not a sucker. Maybe we should talk about the beach in Cartagena????
Oh... I guess we forgot to mention it last time. Well a woman there violated me. That is to say she forced a massage on me after I clearly told her I didn´t have any money. I guess she didn´t believe me because she started rubbing me down anyway. After the smoke cleared I was 20 bucks poorer.
hahahaha! I couldn´t even watch. It was too funny! I´m actually crying right now, remembering.
40,000 pesos!!! I think she said she was from Medellin... Anyway we´ve left Medellin and are now about 500km from the Ecuadorian border in a town called Popayan. We´ll get to that in the next edition.
Ciao
Gotta go get some tiny empanadas
PICTURES OF MEDELLIN
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