Day Fourty-Six: Medellin

 

On the plane to Bogota I am sitting next to a couple with a three month old baby.  They sit down and the baby begins to cry hysterically.  A crying baby, wonderful…

The father next to me gives the baby his milk and the baby smiles and stops crying.  He is really cute, amused by everything.  So tiny.  The father clearly adores his son.  He kisses him over and over on his forehead.  It is sweet.  I learn the baby’s name is Juan Andreas. I watch as the father changes Juan Andreas’s bib and puts his sweatshirt on over his tiny arms and I wonder what kind of man Juan Andreas will become.  A little Colombian.

We run in a circle at the Bogota airport to make our connecting flight to Medellin.  We go through the same security checkpoint and waiting area that we went through nine days ago when we took our flight to Santa Marta.  It feels like yesterday that we were here but we have experienced so much since arriving in Colombia.  

Medellin countryside

We land in Medellin, the city of flowers and once home to Pablo Escobar.  We find Ricardo who is holding a sign with our names on it.  Ricardo is loading our bags in the car and Roman calls him to check in on us and make sure we arrived.  Ricardo tells us that he has a daughter named Katherine, who goes by Katie too.  He shows us a picture of her with his grandchildren.  Two of them are in Holland and one is in Spain.  

 

The countryside here is gorgeous.  Rolling hills of green.  Crisp air.  It feels like Spring.

Ricardo tells us that Medellin has 3 million people and it is 1,400 meters above sea level.

After settling at the hotel, we head Pueblito Paisa, a kitschy tourist site on top of a mountain that has displays of the radio station and rooms in the homes as they were in the 1940s and 1950s.  It is a mini version a typical Antioquian town.

 Ricardo has lived in Medellin his whole life.  He tells us that there was a nice restaurant up in this Pueblito but it had to close because after the trafficking it wasn’t attracting the same type of money.

   

Pueblito Paisa

Medellin had one of the highest homicide rates in the planet when it became the worlds cocaine capital under Pablo Escobar in the 1980s.  Gun battles were very common.   After he died in 1993, this city became one of the safest in Latin America.

 At Pueblito Paisa

Radio station at Pueblito Paisa

It is raining and starts to pour.  A good day to go to a museum.  We see a lot of Fernando Botero’s work.  He was born in Medellin and is known for his volumous figures. New Yorkers may know him for his sculpture of the bull on Wall Street.

Pablo Escobar Muerto by BoteroPlazoleta de las Esculturas

Visit of Luis the XVI and Marie Antoinette to Medellin by Botero (they’ve never been to Medellin) at the Museo de Antioquia

“What I say is that they are not fat, but volumous,” he says of his figures.  See more pictures.