My arrival on Sunday morning was smooth. I met a young woman from Venezuela on the second leg of my flight who was extremely helpful and kind to me. I spoke Spanish with her as best my tired brain could manage; it is quite amazing how humans can communicate with or without proper sentence structure and very much vocabulary. (I think I’m gonna tell that to my English language-learners, that way we can always end class early 😉 It also becomes apparent how good at charades we can become when needed!
It continues to delight me how often people will connect and help out when simple kindness and friendliness is shared. And I mean simple! If our world leaders and politicians just shared more smiles and tiny gestures of kindness that let each other know, “yeah, we really are all in this together”, I feel like that could make the hugest impact even amongst all the tough stuff and divisions.
Nerleschka (a unique name for a Venezuelan) helped me with luggage, bought me a coffee (I know I looked tired), and let me share a ride with her driver who was the father of a friend of hers. Read: likely trustworthier than many taxi drivers. I ended up getting his number to call on him for rides in the future if I need. It was just a really nice, easy and friendly welcome to a new country.
I met with the Raisbeck (language school) hiring manager, Raul, and the other two new teachers from Connecticut: Rich and Jane. We saw the school office/headquarters (tiny), then had lunch and did a walking tour of a good portion of the “Chapinero” neighborhood. Chapinero is where the office is, and where our Air BnBs were (all within a couple blocks). Rich and Jane will be moving north, and I am on the hunt for a good room to rent with some nice, safe, friendly Spanish-speakers! I am hoping to stay somewhere within this locality, because it’s a pretty cool area. Lots of restaurants – of all styles and qualities – shops, markets, businesses, housing, parks, a movie theater, a small shopping mall…it’s nice there is so much to offer in one section of the city. Bogota is 8.8 million people. I can’t even wrap my head around that, nor do I even want to get to know a city that big. I want to know communities, neighborhoods, vecinos (neighbors)
This week we will work on getting our work-Visas, which are “sponsored” by our employer. That doesn’t mean they pay for it, but they provide the “permission” to get one and a bunch of paperwork. Rich, Jane, and I go to the Office of Immigration this week and hopefully it will go smoothly. With the extreme influx of Venezuelans recently, things could be much busier. I don’t get the impression it will actually be more difficult for us to obtain ours, as we already have an employer, but I do not know to what extent the impact other immigrants are having.
I’ve been out and about a few times on my own now, exploring Chapinero and a bit beyond while I have the time before starting work. The weather has also been incredibly beautiful. I had been reading about how dreary, chilly, and rainy Bogota can be, yet I’ve been greeted with blue skies, puffy white clouds, and 8,500′ above-sea-level sunshine that reminds you of your proximity to the sun hours after you retire inside and wonder why your skin is a bit pink.
Yesterday I scouted one of the 3 financial districts in Bogota, which is where many of our client offices are located (and teachers meet with clients in their offices or conference rooms). I was told that as the city grew, it was desired that some of the financial buildings be moved to or built in other locations to de-centralize the city and spread things out. Wow, are they ever spread out now! The majority of the city is set up on a grid system where all the street names are numbers. There is a pattern I am starting to get the hang of and it does make sense…until it doesn’t make sense. Like the orderly numbered streets until there is a 71a, 71b, and 71c (which are not quite in a row), and then there is no 72. Or something like that. And I’m sure it’s happened over time as the city grew and numbers or partial numbers had to be squeezed in.
The mountains are on the East side of the city. So that really helps with orientation, except I have to rewire my brain to stop thinking the mountains are always to the West like they are in Boulder where I’ve been living for the past 14 years.
I really really want to get up into those lush-looking, floral-y covered mountains but I need some friends first. Or to hire a guide because I don’t know where I’m going and, you know, the bad guys could be out there. So my brand new awesome trail running shoes I brought here are getting antsy but I just keep telling them my mom told me to be safe so they have to wait.
On my trek out and about today, I went south of Chapinero to a more edgy yet historic part of town called La Calendaria. I thought this was a good description from the wikivoyage.org site: Despite having a bit of a (snarky) reputation among well-to-do Bogotanos as a slum filled with drug-abusing hipsters, La Candelaria is the city’s beautiful historic district, the seat of the national government, a bohemian hotspot for the arts, has a good claim to be the original capital of South America—all travelers must visit.
I didn’t see any (obvious) drug-abusing hipsters, but what I did see of note:
- A thousand broken, hole-ridden sidewalks. My fall-risk radar still goes off all the time, even though I no longer work at a retirement community.
- A majestic backdrop of a wide variety of foliage-covered mountains that actually look a bit like hills because the city is already at such a high altitude
- Some sort of tram that goes up to the top of one of the local mountains; I want to do that!
- Two scrappy Colombians (one woman, one man) directing traffic at a VERY busy intersection; they were impressively good at it. However, I don’t know why they were doing it.
- Two men doing forward-flips across the street in front of stopped cars at a stoplight. Another extremely impressive, yet curiously dangerous, thing to be doing. It was obvious why for these guys though, just before the light changed (and dang, they have the timing down), they ran amongst the nearby cars to collect money for their “show”.
- A woman dangling from a tree at another intersection – not nearly as busy – from a very long, quite beautiful lime-green piece of fabric. She was doing arial yoga and acrobatics. I don’t think many people were actually stopping to watch her (like they would on Pearl St in Boulder). I doubt she was really able to collect any money for these feats, so I’m assuming she was just doing it for fun. Really.
- Innumerable street vendors selling almost everything you can imagine. If you need anything, I’ll be you can find it somewhere in this city but it might not be at the time you actually need it. Besides many of your “typical” street vendor fare, I also saw peronalized-while-you-wait dog tags (for your dog, not the trendy military style); an impressive assortment of magnifying glasses (how much demand for those are there, really?); gold-coated menorahs (seems out of season); and some fashionable knock-off wedge shoes which I’m sure really compliment the broken sidewalk situation. I apologize if I sound any kind of snooty, truly I just found these particular things amusing and it all contributes to the glorious messy intrigue of this huge city.
Thanks for reading! I start work later this week and am working on finding more permanent housing so if you notice long pauses in my entries…that is why. I truly love writing to you, though, dear fans. Whoever you are besides my supportive family 🙂
