Up, up and away!!!

So what an adventure, and only five days in...I left Austin on quite a beautiful note, having had brunch with the most important people in my life at Blue Dalia which was absolutely essential, but to top that off, my final landing place in Austin was at the capital to listen to some 300 ohms radiating about the building! Yes, many of whom were people I would have never seen otherwise! After a day of blissful tears, laughter, and love, I left that afternoon at 4:00 with my traveling buddies Sarah and Nick. So, we headed to Dallas to stay the night and were up by 3:45 the next morning to make it to the airport. There, of course I would only find troubles with Spirit airlines who eventually scammed me into buying a return ticket because "colombia would probaby not let me in" with a one way ticket. Anyways, I got that worked out in the long run. The flights went smoothly and cut verrry close on time, which seemed pretty normal when watching all the Spirit airline employees as we were already delayed 20 minutes with only a 30 minute layover in Florida...So, the question really is, have you ever seen a plane sponsored by Cartoon Network? Because this one was! It was hilarious, covered in CN logos and Tazmanian devil, silvester and tweety pictures...too funny.

So we land in the crazed city of Bogota, which I guess you could say is nestled in the highlands of Colombia, but that just doesn´t sound right once you see it´s immensity from a chapel (monserrat or something like that) which lies at the top of a large mountain above the city. Our first afternoon we spent getting aquainted with our Couch Surfing host and his girlfriend, and their 3 month old white fluffy husky looking pup, who had a nice high rise apartment at the north end of town. Then we visited around a bit more ritsy area of northern bogota, getting some plantain dishes, yuuum, beer, and finished off the night eating out of this little local authentic japonese restaurant. Yes...as you can see, our trip has had some days completely centered on eating. Day two we went into town and walked around Candelaria, a very cute older part of town near down town and a lot of universities, so there is a large youth culture there. We got to see some of them juggling, doing acrobatics and hanging from Silks, then we proceeded to go up to the chapel to the appauling lookout of the massive city. One of the funniest moments was upon our return from downtown that day, on a bus packed full of people, we rode home and were coming near to our stop. Bogota has an above ground metro system for public transportation, so the busses pull up to these stations and you step off into the station, much like a subway. But, I had noticed earlier the danger of the space between the bus and the station being JUST large enough for a foot to fall right through. So of course, when I least expect it, our stop comes and the 3 of us are some five feet from the door, except ahead of us lies people as tightly packed together as a can of sardines. So I start trying to push through as the doors open, and eventually have to send all my weight forward to push the people out the way, saying "Tenemos que bajar!!" or "we have to get off!!" I think the only reason we were able to get off the bus that day, was just as i reached the sliding door, what do you know my foot falls straight down the gap and I´m leaning on my side, laughing hysterically looking up at Sarah as all the people move apart, some sympathetic women grunting "que peligro..." or "what a danger..." Anyways, my clumsy fall is what allowed us to arrive home without having to do any turn arounds and gave us a greeeat kick for the day. We went home to cook dinner and pack our bags to head out the next morning for the North, to a small town called San Gil. Never thought that bus ride would be so exhilerating...we took the public trans with all our heavy packs, goofy as you can imagine, to arrive to this strange set up of a bus stop to get on a bus headed north.