Blog: 2024-03-13
Alright, last day in Colombia and I'm chillin. Checked out of my room but left my suitcase at the hostel and I'm here now in a hammock. Nice all the hammocks that are here. 3:40pm, quite warm this time of day though there isn't much sun out today. Was planning on doing laundry but decided I'll make it back to the states and deal with it then. Ended up withdrawing some more money to pay for clothing since my card was declining, nice to do because then I had cash to buy a smoothie, will have cash to pay for my ride back to the airport; not having any local currency and having to pay for everything by card makes me hesitant to shop.
And shopping is a lot of what I do, I suppose. There's an outdoor public gym which is nice. There's plenty of parks, internet access at the hostel, and sights to see by walking around, but yeah capital is kinda everywhere. The currency here is COP - Colombian Pesos I believe - and the exchange rate is that 1 USD buys about 3000 pesos (3.000 in the local writing). Apparently their currency has stabilized as of late; meanwhile Ecuador is just using dollars and now Argentina is supposed to dollarize with the election of Javier Millei.
Before traveling here, I checked the foreign notices and the alert level from the united states is 3/4; I suppose there's some danger at the border with Venezuela. But here I pretty much always felt safe, only occasionally getting solicited by people for money or anything. Then again I seem to be in a rich neighborhood here, and nevertheless the poverty of the indigenous people is apparent. One night I was eating ramen and some sort of standoff between the indigenous people and the police happened; people were lining the streets, and it ended with a policeman swinging his baton and chasing them down; it wasn't apparent that he ever hit one, and nobody seemed to be injured. Sadly the presence of indigenous people is indicative of the fact that they were not killed off / displaced, as was the case back where I'm from.
I've been eating well here overall, though occasionally I'm on my computer through dinnertime and end up going to a bakery for "dinner" and just getting a couple sweets. I was thinking about how it's hard to go to a restaurant here by myself; prefer to eat somewhere without much fanfare. But that's just social anxiety / conditioning, there's really no problem with it at all; unless they're totally packed and I'm taking up a table that a group of several guests could eat at. But then again that's what the bar is for! So it's not a bad thing at all... I think part of the reality is also that I stress over what to order, should it be vegetarian, vegan, meat, how expensive, how much food, how healthy, ??? But at the end of the day Michael Pollan had it right: eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. And I'm rarely at risk of eating too much food.
Well typing in this hammock feels pretty good. Keyboard is right here and I'm supported by the cloth. Though all the better to just relax in one of these...