Medellin, Colombia - Food

You Will Never Go Hungry Here
Medellin checks all the food boxes for me.  Cheap, plentiful, various and cooked from scratch.  This is the national dish, bandeja paisa, which can be roughly translated as "country platter."  Rice, beans, fried egg, slice of avocado, fried plaintain, chain link of deep-fried fatty pork, blood sausage and a chorizo.  Dodo and I combined could not finish this.

Medellin, Colombia - The Hood

Visiting La Moravia
We booked a walking tour called "Barrio Transformation" and toured one of the Medellin's most notorious neighborhoods - La Moravia.  It's built on and around the city's garbage dump and was once known as Pablo Escobar's "assasin's cradle."  This is a photo of how it used to look.

Medellin, Colombia - Transport

Top Class
Medellin, built in a valley surrounded by mountains, was once relatively small.  In the 80s and 90s, hundreds of thousands of rural migrants, displaced by the civil war, fled the countryside and built whole makeshift neighborhoods on the hillsides surrounding the city.   The public transport system adapted ingeniously.  In the valley, there is an elevated subway line.

Medellin, Colombia - Smaller Towns

Marinilla and Guatape
As part of our rock climb trip, we got to tour two small towns.  Marinilla on the way to the rock and the colorful town of Guatape after our climb.

Medellin, Colombia - Climbing the Rock

AKA "El Penol de Guatape"
We booked a day trip to a giant rock two hours west of Medellin in the town of Guatape.  The idea, as crazy as it sounds, was to climb 77 stories to the top for what is billed as "incredible views" of the surrounding lakes.  The rock is a chunk of granite pushed up into the air from plate tectonics.  Two-thirds of it is beneath the ground.

Medellin, Colombia - Botero

Museo Antipoquia
This is not the Botero museum per se, but his work dominates.  He is the most famous artist from Medellin and has donated many of his paintings, drawings and sculptures so they can be viewed together.

Medellin, Colombia - Pain

Working Out at 5,000 Feet
We found a gym  in our neighborhood giving one hour classes for 4 bucks.  I signed up for an 11am High Intensity Interval Training class, which I am familiar with from NY.  Bursts of very intense exercise with 20 seconds of rest between each.  I told Dodo she didn't have to join but her machismo got to her.  She puffed up and stuck up her nose "I can work out too!"

Medellin, Colombia - The Market

Medellin's Central Market

The walk from the Cisneros metro stop north towards the central market was filled with sketchy looking characters and dark alleyways.  We saw many who'd laid down on the sidewalk under a tarp and were still asleep.  How someone can sleep through the nightly downpour this way is unimaginable to me.

Medellin, Colombia - First Impressions

Not Wbat You Might Expect
In the late 80s it was known as the "most dangerous city in the world."  Since then, the homicide rate has dropped 95% and it's now called the "city of eternal spring", so named for the mild year-round weather.  Pablo Escobar is long gone and he hasn't left much of a shadow.  Medellin sits in a valley in the Andes, 5,000 feet above sea level.  Most of the buildings are made of brick, their brown color standing out against a ring of verdant mountains that rise another 2,000 feet.