Bogota Blogger

My friend Ines Cristina, a teacher at my school, has a flower farm just outside the city, near the town called La Calera. Well, it’s not her farm–she and her husband own a piece of it, along with her husband’s brother and some others. La Calera, by the way, I always thought was the name of the mountain just above Calle 84, with lots of cool restaurants and clubs and a popular place on weekend days for bicyclists and brunchers. Now I know that i’s actually the name of a little town on the other side of the mountain.

Selling Roses all over the World

This farm is called Matina Flowers (the Italian word for morning) and grows roses only. Seventy-five percent of the roses sold in the US come from Colombia, but this farm also sells roses in Spain, Germany, and Russia. Ines says it’s important not to put yourself in a position of relying solely on the US market. Makes sense to me. They sell 30% in the US, 30% in Russia, and the rest in Europe and various other places.

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For the first year I lived in Bogota, I did not have cable TV, so I was limited to 8 or 9 stations, including the big three Bogota network stations, and I almost never came across any TV in English. That has now changed, I have cable, and 6-10 of the stations I get broadcast shows in English–in fact, many of them are US stations, like Fox, Fox News, CNN, etc. But, I’m going to talk about the Colombian TV that I used to watch regularly a year or so ago.

Three Major Networks

There are three major Colombian networks broadcasting in Bogota. They are RCN, Caracol, and the Canal Uno (Channel One).  Apparently all three are owned by wealthy families that have controlled Colombian media for decades, and have a lot of political influence, which means they get a lot of political favors, of course.

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When I came to Bogota with a contract to teach in a private school in the north of the city, the school provided the housing for me, and they put me in an apartment in El Chico, which is a strata 6 neighborhood and one of the safest in the city, and possibly the most boring one, also. The school does this, of course, because they want to be able to assure Americans coming here that they will be as safe as possible.

But they also put me in an apartment with a roommate, which was contrary to the agreement that we had before I came. So, about six weeks after arriving, I was apartment-hunting for a place where I could live on my own, and the mix-up (if that’s what it was) with the roommate situation turned out to have been a blessing, because I got to choose my own place in my own neighborhood (within budget limitations of the school, of course).

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From my experience, Bogota has more bakeries per linear foot than anywhere else I have ever been. Bread (pan) is everywhere. Within two blocks of my house there are four bakeries, and if I want more, I can go two more blocks. And, when I go into one of these late in the day, they’re out of almost everything, so obviously they’re selling all the stuff they can bake. I guess everybody eats fresh bread every day, just about.

I usually go to AutoPan, which is a little chain bakery, because it’s on the next block from me. They make these really buttery little rolls with chocolate chips in them, and if I buy six, I eat six. I try not to buy more than six.

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Renting in Bogota is not easy, for gringos or for Colombians. Most apartments are rented through signs on the window or possibly through an ad in the paper, but almost always there’s a rental agency involved, and a TON of paperwork, references, checks and double-checks, delays on top of delays. People put up with it, though, and the attitude seems to be that all this is necessary because there’s so much fraud in Colombia.

Even though I have a work visa and a Colombian ID, a job with a salary that probably puts me in the top 10% income bracket in the country, I would not have been able to rent an apartment on my own from most agencies. My school rented the apartment for me, even though my own credit had to be checked.

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Bogota is a city of about seven million, according to the census that was done last year, but 50 years ago Bogota had barely a million residents. That’s a lot of growth. Compare to New York City, with a population of about eight million that was, 50 years ago, about eight million. There are lots of reasons for the growth, and most of the new residents, of course, are poor and tend to live in the south and the west of the city, but the mostly upper class north part of town has also grown explosively. With the center of town being the Plaza Bolivar at approximately Calle 7 with Carrera Septima, as you head north, the city becomes more and more modern.

Some people live in houses close to the mountain or in a few of the older neighborhoods, but the vast majority of the population in the north live in red brick apartment buildings that are anywhere from brand new to maybe 15 years old.  Whole families live in apartments, just like in Manhattan, but the suburbs are very thin–that sort of lifesyle has not caught on here.

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Bogota (and other cities in Colombia, too) uses a rating system to label the social status and wealth of a neighborhood. So, block by block, you can say how nice your neighborhood is by the number it has been assigned. At first this sounds outrageous, to a supposedly egalitarian American, but there are some advantages to the system also.

The Six Strata

There are six strata, ranging from 1, the lowest, to 6, the highest. It is pretty much considered that 5 and 6 are the upper classes, 3 and 4 the acceptably middle-class neighborhoods, and 1 and 2 for the poor. I’ve heard that the difference between 1 and 2 is that, in strata 1, there will be at least one public utility that does not serve the neighborhood (so, no electricity, or no water, no telephone, etc.). But I’ve asked different people and gotten varying responses to the question of what makes a 1 a 1.

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Like just about everyone living in Bogota, I have had coflicts with the phone company, known as ETB. Many months I would sign up for some sort of long distance plan, which would usually involve getting a package of minutes for a certain price to the US. One month, when I paid $100,000 pesos for unlimited calls to one US number and a discounted rate on other US numbers, when the bill arrived I had been charged almost $1.00 US per minute for every call.

Now, the only way to deal with ETB is to go to an office, take a number, and wait an hour or several hours. There happens to be an office near my house, so I went in about five minutes before closing, when it was slow, got my number, and then refused to leave when they asked me to come back another day because they wanted to close. One of the first things you learn in Bogota is to be persistent, you MUST be persistent, if you want to ever get anywhere.

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Utilities in Bogota are attached to the property, and therefore the responsibility of the property owner. This means that the telephone number goes with the house, and whoever moves in or out will have that number. So, you might get calls on your phone for someone who lived there three or four tenants ago. The same is true or the other utilites–the service is attached to the property, not the occupant.

This has a couple of implications–one being that the tenant has no choice in what services are provided and who provides them. I suppose this didn’t used to be an issue when there was just one company for each public utility, but these days there are several companies who provide telephone service, for example, and the landlord gets to decide who will provide it in his property.

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Just like in the US, when you check out in the grocery, there’s a kid there to bag your groceries. They’ll also take your groceries to the car for you (I’m always walking, so don’t need that) or walk them home for you if you live nearby.

Last year I was having a party with a friend, Barbie, who was leaving the country, and she had gone to the local Carulla to buy a load of supplies. She had the bag girl walk her home, and was planning to tip her, but on the walk they got into conversation about how much the girl earned from Carulla.  The answer:  ZERO!!! The baggers work strictly for tips. Barbie gave her $20,000 that day.

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