La vida corriente y moliente II

While walking on the Carrera 7 on Sunday morning is fun and relaxing, it is a completely different thing during the week… I’m sure you can imagine that in an 8-Mio-metropole in Latin-America the traffic can be chaotic, but I bet Bogota would top your imagination. Picture this: 1 million motorcycles, cars and buses trying to move to the other side of the city at the same time twice a day… or actually rather during the whole day ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DdtA18DQjQ

Not only is the traffic corruptive for your health because of the smoke, but you actually risk your life crossing the street, because no one really cares about any pedestrians (or speed limits or traffic lights or any rule by the way ;)). I’m exaggerating of course, but it does happen that you have to wait for several minutes before zou can cross the street, because no one will stop for you. You even get honked on the pavement if a car wants to enter a parking lot or a garage and you happen to walk right there ;)
Anyways, they have introduced measures and sensitization-campaigns in the past, but the traffic volume is still huge. As car-owner (incl. taxis and busses) for instance you’re bound to the so called “pico y placa”-rule, which means “peak and number plate” traduced, and it’s a law that only allows you to drive on 3 out of 5 workdays a week with your specific license plate on peak times (from 6 AM to 8 PM). Naturally this can be cumbersome for many people who depend on their car to get to work as public transportation is not … let’s say… paramount.



They also have a rule called “contraflujo”, where they abandon two way traffic on certain important routes on peak hour and let the whole traffic flow in one direction (from south to north). The results though are mediocre because many more cars take the newly open roads way north and, as there are fewer roads south, you get a massive congestion both ways… So my recommendation for any visitor is, either to walk for a bit till the worst traffic is over or your destination is reached or just to sit down in a Juan Valdez (very nice coffee shop, much nicer than Starbucks ;)) and enjoy a cup of coffee, there is just nothing else to do about it!
While I am lucky and live rather close to my workplace, it still takes me about 40’ to get to the office. The bizarre thing is that it doesn’t really depend on whether I go walking, with the bus or with a taxi for the afore-mentioned reasons!

Still, if I’m not walking, my favorite vehicle so far is the “buseta”, because they are everywhere, cheap and quite adventurous to take. In Bogota you see all kinds of buses with different sizes, different colors and different ages, though all share the same crazy driving-style. Not only are the drivers amongst the most lunatic traffic-participants in traffic-lunatic Bogota, but on a bus there is also lots of stuff and other people to observe. Ah, and the bus-stops are funny too… mmh, wait a second: there are no bus stops! (This is not entirely true because the municipality has built some recently, trying to structure the public transportation service, but drivers as well as commuters stick to the old system.) That means you just have to step on the pavement-border and wave to a bus-driver wherever you want to stop him and the similar applies to getting off the bus: press the stop button anywhere, if you find it, or shout to the bus driver. Convenient in a way, but not very efficient at all! The adventurous part takes place when you have to stand, because there is no space to sit… (There actually isn’t any, even when a seat is free, because the seats are quite small). When you are standing you better hold onto something with both arms, because every stop and go (and there are MANY!), will almost knock you off your feet! Also if you get on a small buseta be aware of the roof, because head banging in there is not as funny as at a Metallica-concert. The next adventure, when riding buseta, is getting off the bus, not because of searching the stop-button, but cause you have to get to the end of the vehicle and the small gangway is usually full of people who can’t move, because they are holding on to the bars or seats and their life… but usually you manage even that with a few “disculpame’s”, “perdon’s” and some tender elbow knocks into the ribs of your fellow commuters. What I like most though (not that I like the elblows, by the way...), are the musicians and merchants that hop on the bus every now and then and tell their heart-warming sales pitch-story about their bad luck and circumstances that brought them into their situation or perform a melodious rap, rhyming about the passengers in the bus…

Another story is the taxis, Bogota is full of them and they are not too expensive either. I especially like to take a taxi if I don’t exactly know where an address is located. On the other hand you shouldn’t necessarily take the taxi if you’re not sure where you have to go, because if the driver notices you having no clue where you’re headed (e.g. he guesses because of your blond hair), he sure will drive you a few extra times around the block to push the taximeter ;)

Well, such is life in Commuter-Bogota and on top of that you will also get scared with stories about people who got robbed in a bus or at the station, while walking down the street or in their own car. Some even got taken by a taxi to the infamous “paseo millionario”, the Millionaire’s tour, which takes you to the next couple of automatic cashiers in the neighborhood with the unrefusable request to empty your banking account… So basically anything can happen everywhere, no matter how you move yourself through Bogota. But fortunately so far those are stories to me and I hope it stays that way! The alternative would be to stay at home, which is a total no-go, and therefore I prefer to be a bit more cautious than I would back home and certainly keep moving on!!

La vida corriente y moliente I

It is a bit exaggerated to talk about the “daily grind” after only two weeks living here, but there happen to be some remarkable attributes to Bogota that I have already experienced on a daily basis. Now, I know it’s going to sound like I want to small talk to you, but I’d like to tell you some bits about the weather and the traffic here ;)

On some days I think, that Bogota seems to be St.Peter’s fun park as you never really know how the day is going to turn out weather-wise, whether it starts with a stunning blue sky and sunny, grey in grey or raining. The same applies to the temperature, which can easily swing between 10 and 25 degrees Celsius each and every day. As you can guess the weather-forecast here is rubbish (isn’t it everywhere in the world?), and therefore you are basically forced to take half a camping-equipment with you, if you want to be prepared for the Bogota weather-circus. I actually should know better, as I’ve been here before and my parents even told me about the whims of weather, before I came, but somehow I didn’t think about it at all in the first few days and “preferred” to learn it the hard way. I probably thought that with Colombian blood in my veins, I’d be prepared genetically for any meteorological circumstance here... Anyways, the first incident was on my second day when I was on my way to my aunt Margarita’s, which is a 20’-walk from the closest “transmilenio”-station (that’s the public mass transportation service: buses on an extra-lane on some main-streets, really useful and fast, but packed with commuters like sardines in a can at peak times).

When I got on the bus the sun was still shining and the clouds were only a small apparition on the horizon. But as at Bogota’s eastern frontier the “Cerros orientales de Bogota” build a rather high natural wall, things can go quite fast with the accumulating air there and so when I got off the bus it actually started raining. It wasn’t hard at the beginning and although the other people were already waiting under a roof for the rain to stop again, I thought if I’d walk quickly I wouldn’t get too wet and beat St.Peter. Wrong… the minute I left the bridge leading to the bus-station, the downpour began. It was like standing in the shower. The only protection I had was just a sweater and far away from a raincoat or an umbrella, and all it helped was that I had an additional piece of clothes to dry later. The worst thing is that the streets fill with water instantly and the cars driving by splashing get the best part of your still dry parts! At least I managed to get to a slightly protected spot under a small roof and there I was able to take some pictures for you… I was lucky that my little cousin Sean has grown that much over the past few years, so I could gratefully borrow something dry from him.

The second weather incident was on Sunday, when I went for a walk on the “Ciclovia”. The Ciclovia is one of the things I liked most about Bogota so far. Every Sunday the “Carrera 7”, one of the biggest streets in Bogota (6 lanes and leading all the way from south to north), gets closed for all motor-vehicles from 7 AM to 2 PM and becomes probably the largest fitness-event in the world. People walking, jogging, skating and biking flood the street and enjoy the absence of the usual traffic. The participating number must go into the hundred thousands and many side events as well as merchants make it an impressive and worthwhile spectacle.

It also needs a lot of helpers and they have to get up really early to get the streets empty… And this is taking place every single Sunday! At all events, what happened was that I went out of the house without any sun blocker, because it was cloudy and of course during my two-hour walk the brightest sun ever appeared out of nowhere and left me with a nice red tourist-sunburn. The worst part here was that, in spite of all my efforts to come across as Colombian, now some people even started to talk to me in English… not the expected step ahead in my project “Get rid of that Gringo-air of yours” ;).
tbc...