La Rue Vibre !

After one night of bus we finally enter in Bogota, under a rain so heavy it sets off the car alarms:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

and makes very happy the umbrella street sellers:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This is a really big city of 8 millions inhabitants (for 40 millions of Colombians), surrouded by mountains and at 2600m of altitude. Efforts are quite hard!
Bogota is a very crowded city which everything of a great capital: interesting historical center, industrial zone, residential area, trendy places full of bars and luxury shops, public transportation and.. thieves! Unfortunately we met them with their knives and only after few seconds we lost our 2 cameras, 100meters away from our hostel, at 8 p.m…
Policemen were not helpful and even lied to us. Apparently we were in the worst area, at the worst time. Christmas period is very dangerous and recent flooding increased drasticly the poverty of many inhabitants.

Thus we changed of place and went in a backpackers hotel where we met very nice French-speaking swiss : Sylvio and Malory. As we did not have camera anymore we used their pictures for this article.

The 7th of December there is a tradition in Bogota: it is the candle night. Every house and shops light candles in front of their door. The day after is off and in the night is full of illuminations. We had the good or maybe bad idea to do a bike tour on this famous day. Streets were full of people, there were many street vendors, music etc. But it was not really adapted to bike because we had to cross the crowd with them…

After an armed assault and a pickpocketing in 2 days we could have have a bad idea of Colombian people but it is not. In fact Colombians are really nice people.
Like Maria, our colombian new friend who made all the efforts decently conceivable to make us feel good in Bogota. On top of this she invited us (and treated us like kings) to a sister in law birthday, taking place in one of the strangest place we ever saw: Andre Carne De Res.

It is a strange but good concept where you mix a very good 4 floors restaurant (mainly beef) with a giant disco. After a given hour, everybody party everywhere , surrounded by a carefully designed decor.
Prices are high, and so most of the people come to celebrate a birthday. A team of actors and musicians make the whole thing very lively (they play above the club music, which is a performance sometimes).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

2 of the many Bogota’s museums seduced us:

• The Gold Museum, full of an incredible collection of unique gold prehispanic art as well as a guess at what was the ceremonial music at that time

  Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

or

• The Botero Museum, where a great number of his work (very distinct by his play on the volums), plus interesseting impressionist rooms (Monet, Pissaro etc.)

We weren’t lucky with Bogota, but we don’t mind. It’s a lively city full of hidden treasures: Colombians people!