5 things I miss about Europe

1. Seasons - on the one hand it is nice never to be too hot or freezing cold, but I am starting to miss changes in weather, light, precipitation, atmosphere, and the clothes I get to wear. While I am longing for hot summer days, summer clothes, and having barbecues outside right now, I guess between November and January I will be loving the 12 hours of daylight and 18 degrees temperature we have here every day. But then, the grass is always greener on the other side!

2. Walking and cycling to places around town - Bogotá's pollution and traffic make this a rather unpleasant enterprise.

3. Laugenbrötchen, naturtrüber Apfelsaft, Bouillet...

4. Improvising your daily schedule and activities without depending on traffic. For example, you can't just say, let's go to the movies or for a drink on a weekday at 6 PM because there is no way you will get anywhere on time. Plus if you happen to have pico y placa (see entry on Traffic) you can't use your car anyways and it can be sheerly impossible to get a cab by phone during rush hour. So it's always a safer bet to plan when you want or have to be where and prepare accordingly.

5. A more "middle-class-friendly" lifestyle - this one is hard to describe and I don't mean to create any false impressions. With the stark social and economic differences in the country, you are somewhat obliged to follow an all-or-nothing principle. Without mentioning education or health, which don't really leave you a choice as to public or private here if you want better quality (and which I used to take for granted as free where I grew up), you don't really have places like IKEA or Aldi which offer good quality products affordable for everybody. Of course there are plenty of cheap places around (how else would the vast majority of the population be able to cope) and certain things, especially services, are ridiculously cheap compared to France or Germany, such as taxis, domestic employees, hairdressers... But in other areas (furniture, baby equipment) you don't get too many low-price but good quality options.

Museo del Oro

Visit to Bogotá's Gold Museum, which hosts the world's most important Prehispanic gold craft collection. The exhibition takes you around the different Precolombian cultures and their heritage of mostly gold, but also stone, pottery, copper, textile, and wood creations. The most famous item is probably the Poporo Quimbaya and the Balsa Muisca representing the El Dorado myth.
For more details, feel free to visit the Museum's website.

Friends

This weekend we received a beautiful baby gift from Japan for our soon-to-be-born French-German-Colombian son (yes, we found out that he will be able to have all three nationalities!). Not only does this prove Colombian postal services might work for parcels after all (unlike what I have been warning friends and family about in the past months...!), but also shows we have amazing friends all over the world. The lifestyle we chose has made it challenging to set up a "conventional" circle of friends physically close to us, but over the years we managed to build some very unique friendships with very unique people - though we are scattered across all continents we know we can count on them.
Thank you so much Nana!!

News from Odi

Isn't he cute?

Paloquemao (3)

General impressions.

Paloquemao (2)

Tour around the fruit stands...

Paloquemao (1)

Time for some sightseeing in Bogotá: we went to Paloquemao market last weekend, which was amazing. A huge array of flowers, vegetables, fruit, legumes, meat, as well as all kind of miscellaneous household equipment from plastic cups to wooden spoons and coffeemakers. Prices are lower than at the supermarket and we brought back a massive amount of fruit and vegetables to stock up on our vitamins!

Olympic gold!

Mariana Pajón just won the second gold medal for Colombia in the history of the Olympic Games (BMX finals)! So far, the Colombian delegation's medal tally in the London Olympics stands at 1 gold, 3 silver and 4 bronze medals, which is by far their best performance ever, equalling the total of eight medals the country had won in the past Olympic Games since 1984. Upon receiving her medal, Mariana was congratulated by President Santos, who thanked her for this achievement via telephone.

This is truly an historic event, considering the Colombian team doesn't even have professional BMX tracks to train on and lacks the financial and infrastructural conditions to prepare its athletes compared to many other countries. Congratulations to all Colombian athletes for making the unbelievable become reality!

Baby shower

My mother-in-law organized a baby shower for us last week and as gifts, all guests had been asked to buy diapers rather than baby clothes or toys. Incredible result: we ended up with a total of 1500 diapers!!! This should have us covered for the first six months - let's see :)