Bogota....how freeezing!

After one week on the north coast with my family and another couple of days in San Gil and Villa de Leyva (about half way between the coast and Bogota) we arrived in Bogota 3 days ago. It is 18 degrees.....after 6 months of absolute heat and summer (30 to 40 degrees every day) we are shivering here...unbelieveable how the body gets used to the warm climate! But it is just another week until we are back in Santa Marta!

on holidays with magdalenas family

A week ago, Magdalenas sister, Katharina and her father arrived in Santa Marta and we now have been travelling with them for already one week. We spent some days in the surroundings of Santa Marta, visited Minca again and the National Park Tayrona, which is amazing! Then we took a nightbus to San Gil and spent here the last 3 days. Have a look at our colombia travel page to see more pix!
http://volunteertravellatinamerica.blogspot.com/p/colombia.html

Playa Blanca

A nice saturday morning spending on a beach where we headed to by a boat. Could be a really nice beach, with a bit less people...:-)

pollo asado

mmmhh delicious

 

Excursion to Bonda with our English Class

On monday was again a "festivo", a day off without any reason. That happens often here in Colombia. So we decided to take advantage of this day and organised an excursion with our english class instead of giving class. We prepared a typical german "Kartoffelsalat" for the picnic which all of our students loved! (Thanks to god, it took us about 4 hours preparing it.. ) The place was nice, it is a river with many stones and you can lie down and enjoy the fresh water. As it was "festivo", the later it got, the more people arrived and around 2pm it was sooo crowded that it was not fun anymore to go into the water. Colombians love to eat and drink also in the water, so you can imagine how it looked like with hundreds of people doing it. And it is not that they eat a sandwich and have a coke, no, they have their proper food ( rice with chicken or the typical soup with chicken and vegetables, called Sancocho) and drinks like Whiskey and Beer! ;-)  It was fun though, above all to see where the locals head to when they want to break out from the heat in the city.

Colombia vs Ecuador - a colombian soccer match

We watched the Qualification Match of Colombia vs Ecuador in a place called "La plaza de la cerveza" It was full of yellow shirt wearing colombians, including us! We bought us a tricot of Colombia, too and are proud wearing them! ;-) But compared to the European Championship, they play so badly here... ppuuh. In the end they lost against Ecuador 0:1 but this was no reason for the colombians being sad. They kept on drinking and dancing as nothing happened...

Colombian Birthday Party

Our landlady was so nice to invite us to the birthday party of her father in law. We were really excited about how a colombian birthday party of a middle-class family will be alike and we did not get disappointed! We joined the party around 9pm and the whole patio of the house just around the corner was full off people sitting in a cirlce of chairs, with loud, colombian music playing. As soon as they recognized us, they opened us the door, gave us chairs and we congratulated the birthday-child who was actually now 79 years old! But believe us, this guy was the one who drank the most! Every five minutes one of the men passed all guests with a bottle of whiskey and handed out endless shots...to which you can almost not refuse..:-) They started dancing in the middle of this big chair-circle while others gave food to the guests. We had dinner between 10 and 11pm! The highlight was when a group of 4 men came and started making live music! Once they started ALL guests (incl.us! ) jumped off their chairs and started freaking out! Really! Imagine all uncles, aunts, cousins of all ages just dancing, laughing and having fun. It was hard to keep this in pictures. We really enjoyed this colombian night.