Santa Fe de Bogotá - First impressions

2. Cold & Rainy

3. Diverse

This is my top 3 impressions about this city. 

I haven't seen a city so big as this one, yet. On our first day, our couchsurfing host Jose drove us to the east border of the city, to a town called La Calera. He did that twice actually, the next day we saw it by night - beautiful! 

He told us that the view was only half of the city, the north side. If we were to go to Monserrate, we would see the other half.

The place to be in La Calera is a restaurant with an enormous terrace, called El Tambor. Here you can eat local tapas. We had a place full of meat - Colombia seems to have a huge meat eating culture - platanos, corn, arepas and cow intestines (!). 

Arepas are made of meal and usually have something inside. We had 2 types, one with cheese inside and a sweet version. There are more than 20 different versions of arepas in Colombia. I would like to taste them all! 

Jose introduced us to "refajo" a mixed drink, consisting of a local beer "club colombia" and a soda "colombiana". Even a non-beer drinker like me, can enjoy this drink! (maybe 'cause it doesn't taste like beer any more)

The north has the nicest neighbourhoods or 'barrios'. In the south you can find the ancient city center, La Candelaria. All the public buildings can be found there, one of the universities and lots of little charming streets full of bars and restaurants. We hung out there for an entire day, tried some local food and climed on top of the university building to enjoy the view. I'm glad we didn't get caught, because we used the fire escape which was closed. Yeah, we can be rebels sometimes... 😈

• Cafe Rec: a retro bar that serves jummy chai lattes & coffee and plays chilly lounge music. This one is located close to the Palace, when you come from Plaza Bolivar, turn left after the Palace.

• Fulanitos: South-American restaurant, hidden in a street you wouldn't normally walk into. From Cafe Rec, you climb further and a few blocks away, you turn left into a brick road. Good food and an a nice view from the terrace. 

After the city strolling, we wanted to enjoy the view of the city all the way up at Monserrate. It is easy to reach from La Candelara. You just go all the way to the east of La Candelaria and take the cable elevator. If you're a sporty type, you can climb it. I have been told it's more or less 1500 stairs. It's a good calf & gluteus exercise! #bootybuilding

We asked for directions to the elevator and got disppointed! The man who gave us directions told us that on Tuesdays you can't go up te Monserrate. Naive as we were, we believed him and didn't even try... In return we climbed the university building :)) 

Even tough La Candelaria was charming, the south is an area you better avoid. There are barrios that are "muy peligroso"! We have witnessed this live yesterday, but that is an adventure I'll elaborate on in the next blogpost. 

A few hotspots for having dinner:

• WOK: what's in a name... The restaurant is located around Parque 93, amongst a lot of other trendy places. You can order all kinds of asian food here. The menu is a magazine where all the dishes are mentioned with a picture, so even if you don't understand the menu español, you can still point at pictures. We had dinner in this place on our first night with Diego, Jose's best friend. I took a delicious Thai red curry (hey...what did you expect?!)