Bogota Central - 6th April 2009

Today we decide to re-visit the centre of Bogota at the Plaza de Bolivar.

We do a lot of window shopping and also some shoe shopping for my gatita of course. Before we know it, lunch time had arrived. Out of pure luck we stumble onto a cheap dish of the day style place, its quite large and I notice they have fish soup which is something I always look forward to (when you find one at a reasonable price). We ignore the dish of the day and decide to go ala carte including the fish soup. It was yummy let me tell you. Nice and creamy full of squid, clams, fish, shrimp etc etc.

I remember the soup I used to have in a Colombian restaurant in London Bridge, London at a Colombian restaurant called Sin Fronteras (No Frontiers). The Peruvian office messenger called Rosendo used to take us there every Friday and I always ordered this soup as it was very very tasty (served with a side dish of chopped chillis in some wonderfully refreshing sauce). Since then and on both my visits to Colombia I have tried to find the same. We have found similar and very good in there own right but nothing like the one in London Bridge.

In all these walkabouts I've noticed that Bogota is undergoing a lot of construction work there are building sites everywhere. I don't think this is the right move as the infrastructure is not quite in place with loads of taxi's, private cars and busses, all sorts of busses provided by different firms. The only good one is called the Tranmilenio which is a Government run bus service and that does have its own road.

Here's another interesting fact, did you know that you can hail a bus!!!!! try doing that in London see how far you get jejeje. Over here you stick your hand out just as you hail a cab and the bus stops for you and believe you me in the mix of traffic there is some expert driving going on jejeje.

Coming back to the construction sites its very clear how professional they work, I watched them last year from my apartment window and in less than 17 days they had erected 2 floors (by hand - no machinery). The only machinery was a little lift type bucket puller which basically pulled or lowered materials but mainly it is used to lift fresh cement. The interesting thing is how quickly the bucket is shot up with the controller ready to stop it as it whizzes up floor upon floor jejeje.

The other thing I noticed is that they paint on the walls of the construction site. What they paint are all the adverts from the sponsors of the project/building. saves on posters and the likelihood of the adverts’ being ripped or damaged due to the rain. Pretty cool eh! I took a photo with my mobile.