Bogota Blogger

Not easy.

Colombians can visit something like 30 countries in the world without visas, and most of those are Latin American countries or obscure island ones, with a few exceptions (Israel, South Korea, Japan). Colombians can’t even visit Mexico without a visa, and Mexican visas are hard to obtain, because–my cynical theory–the US dictates to Mexico their visa policy because we don’t want any of those Colombians getting closer to our border and trying to come into our country to take what we got!

There are websites for companies who supposedly help people get visas to places like Canada or Europe, but I think many of them are not too trustsworthy and that the best way is to find out through research the policies and procedures and just do it yourself. Visas for Colombians are harder and harder to come by to first world countries, so most of those agencies can’t help so much in the end anyway. A program to study English in Canada or England is probably one of the easiest routes to a visa, but even that requires a lot of work and, honestly, a lot of cash (and a few connections).

So, I last year helped my Colombian friend Jose try to get a visa to go to England to study English. He had a friend who had a connection with a language school in London, and we started there. Then, since the school works with the British Council, all the paperwork collection and documentation was supervised by that agency. The good part was that the British Council knows what the government wants to see and tells the people working with them what to gather in order to present a case. Basically it comes down to studying fulltime (21 hours per week) for at least seven months, with the course and a month of accomodation paid for in full up front, proof of a long-standing Colombian job, ability to pay living expenses in UK, property ownership, and lots of other detailed stuff.

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In Bogota, and in most of Colombia, litter is everywhere.

Monserrate Full of Plastic Bags

On my first or second weekend in the city, some friends took me up Monserrate, one of the major tourist things to do in the city. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday day, and there are hundreds of vendors of all types at the base of the mountain where the train station is and where the trail starts. Then, there are another or so hundred vendors on the trail.

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Arepas are a kind of corn-bread, sort of, fried on a stovetop generally, that come in lots of sizes, thick and thin, but only one shape–round.  They are eaten all over the country but especially in “paisa” terrority of Antioquia and the Eje Cafetera.  Lots of times they are filled with cheese, or topped with cheese or butter.  I would think of them as bread-substitutes, but Colomians don’t really see them that way, and they don’t hesitate to have both arepas and bread with a meal.

Sometimes arepas are moist inside, whether they have cheese or not, and lots of people like them this way.  I prefer the extra-thin ones that are very flat and crispy, and I guess they are less popular, because they’re a little difficult to find. In my local Carulla I can sometimes find Dona Paisa Extra-Delgado, but only on a semi-regular basis. Often at roadside restaurants, which are common in Colombia as they used to be in the US in the days before interstate highways and chain fast-food places, arepas will be standard fare, either alone or as part of a meal. I suppose arepas could be eaten cold, though I’ve always had them hot, and I’m sure they’re better that way.  Maybe arepa is a little of an acquired taste, because I didn’t really like them much when I first came to Colombia, though now I eat them whenever they’re served and make myself one at home almost every night as sort of a snack–either with cheese or butter melted on top.

Just around the corner from where I live is an old and somewhat decrepit mansion called Villa Adelaida. It sits on a plot of land that stetches two blocks, from the Septima to the Quinta, just north of Calle 70. It’s also been a controversial subject for the past two years, as long as I have lived here, because some developers want their hands on it.

Right now Villa Adelaida is some kind of office for a parking company, and the back half of the property, the part facing Quinta, is actually a parking lot (and and expensive one) on the next block from where I live. It was scheduled to be converted into a shopping mall by Pedro Gomez, one of the biggest developers in Colombia and in Latin America, but the people in the neighborhood thought that was a totally inappropriate use.

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Smoking in Colombia is big. Though it’s starting to be banned in some public places, it’s surprising the places where smoking is still allowed, and the number of people who do it is also kind of astounding. This is another way in which Colombia seems like the US 40 years ago. It’s not uncommon to see a politician on TV with a cigarette in his mouth.

When I first arrived in Bogota at El Dorado airport, when I got off the plane the guy in front of me lit up a cigarette. That was kind of a surprise. But about a month later a smoking ban went into effect at El Dorado, so that doesn’t happen anymore.

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Something I was totally ignorant of before coming here is that Colombians can’t go very many places in the world without visas, and that those visas are usually difficult, and often impossible, to come by. I’ve seen a couple of different lists of where Colombians can go as tourists without visas, but this one, from the Ministry of Foreign Relations (the Colombian equivalent of the US State Department), says Colombians can go here: 

Andorra, Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Dominica, Philippines, Israel, Japan, Palau, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, St. Kitts and Nevis, San Vicente and Grenadines, The Vatican, Singapore, South Korea, Timur, Tuvalu, Trinidad y Tobago, Uruguay, Western Samoa. 

Notice that most of these countries are in South America.

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