Friday May 9
We woke up to gray skies and fog/smog hanging over Medellin. Making our plan for the day, we headed out to a nearby mall for a late breakfast/early lunch. While passing a strip mall, the line to enter the parking lot stretched out onto the road blocking traffic. Wondering what great stores were in this mall to cause such a line-up, I noticed a security guard checking underneath each car with one of those large, circular mirrors on a long handle. It seems we're in Medellin now! Unfortunately, when we walked into the mall, most of the businesses in the food court were not open yet. Even though breakfast foods are my favorite, I settled for chicken teriyaki. We enjoyed the day wandering the streets around the hotel with no particular objective in mind. We had a nice view from our hotel room:
Saturday May 10
After our fruit and muffin breakfast, we walked to the same nearby mall to catch the Medellin TurisBus for a day seeing the sights of the city. We found the info on the internet and it looked like the best way to cover the city, since we were without a car. Medellin is a notch above Bogota in the general feel and look of the city. The streets, sidewalks and parks are nicely kept and the garbage problem seems to be under control, although there are more homeless people in evidence than in Bogota, probably due to the warmer climate. The bus tour was great. We were up high enough to see more and it is a great way to people watch. I think we also saw most of the highlights of Medellin without having to figure out how to get from one to the next. We exited the bus twice - once to spend a little extra time in the Botero Plaza, which houses a large collection of the "fat" sculptures of the Colombian artist, Botero, and once at Mt. Nutibara, a hill\park in the center of Medellin, which features a reproduction of a typical Colombian colonial town. Various people recommended we eat dinner there and it was a treat. Mike enjoyed his last Bandeja Paisa and I ordered my favorite, Pollo Planchada. Pictures: 1-7} Medellin scenes, 8) a Colombian beauty, 9) mini street casino in Botero Plaza, 10-12) the youth of Medellin, 13) top of Mt. Nutibara, and 14-15) our dinner restaurant.
We’ve become accustomed to being entertained at stoplights while in Colombia, as enterprising entertainers perform while traffic is stopped for a red light, creating a captive audience. Everything from singers and jugglers to acrobats and magicians, it’s always entertaining. During our bus ride today, we saw our first Cirque de Sol performer. This young man attached a long piece of fabric from a large tree branch hanging over the right side of the intersection. When the light turned red, he grabbed the fabric and climbed to the top in hand-over-hand fashion. Winding the fabric in and out of his appendages and around his torso until most of the length was used up, he then dropped rapidly, unwinding while flipping back and forth every which way until he came to an abrupt stop about three feet above the pavement.
Sunday May 11
We dressed then headed out for the nearest chapel via taxi. It happened to be the ward of Jorge Cadena (which we were unaware of until we met him there), who we did training with two weeks ago, so that was fun to see him again. We also met a woman, Sister Salgado, who was the first sister missionary (ever) from Colombia. She served in Chile at the same time as Mike and remembered meeting him in the mission home. To say it's a small world doesn't even begin to describe the moment. I took a picture of them together.
Our 75-year-old taxi driver who took us back to the hotel after church told us he has been married 52 years and works 10-hour days, 7 days a week to support his family. I slipped him $10 and told him to buy some flowers to take home to his wife for Dia de Madre (which is the 11 of May). I hope he did.
We ate a quick lunch, packed up and headed to the airport for our short, late-afternoon flight to Barranquilla.
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