No sightseeing today or yesterday, just conferring at the conference, but I do have breaks here and there so I’ll tell you a little more about Bogota.

First of all, I know it’s Bogotá but I think it’s a little pretentious for me to pretend to grok Spanish accent markers. Second, Bogotá is the correct Spanish spelling but the original Spanish name is Santa Fe. The local name was Bacata, bastardized into Bogota.

Third, Simon Bolivar has a house here and jeez but I really thought that would’ve been in Bolivia. Then again, my education included basically nothing of South America, except for Paddington Bear. Apparently Bolivar fought to liberate a whole bunch of places down here. I guess that gets you more than one house.

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (the university hosting conference) is drop-dead gorgeous. It’s in a rainforest at about 8,500’ elevation, so it’s green and lush without being hot and sweaty. Unless you include the walking. Then you’re gonna sweat. All the talks are in the back corner of campus, higher up the mountain, and somehow they managed to design a building where you have to go upstairs to get to the basement auditorium.

So my calves are stronger than they were on Monday. My AirBnB includes complementary coca leaves for the altitude, but that hasn’t been bothering me much. I’m drinking like I’m in the desert, but I’m sleeping well and I’m not huffing and puffing (too much) on the stairs. That said, I’m glad I’m not trying to bike these mountains! Booster would love it here but I’d be getting my ass kicked.

A salsa troupe in one of the buildings on campus. Check out that green wall!

Last thing to know about Bogota: the food is wonderful. Great cafes, street food, casual dining, fine dining, you name it. And this is fun: last night I paid $95,040 for dinner.

Of course that’s Colombian pesos, which use the same $ (which I assume is called a peso sign, not a dollar sign). In USD it was $21. This for drinks, appetizers, dinner, and dessert, plus I have a story about dessert. It was a “regional cake” I didn’t recognize, drizzled with a sweet guava jelly. I couldn’t place the flavor, and the little dark crescents in it, which I thought would be apple or plum skins, turned out to be just more cake.

My Español no es bueno, but it’s just good enough to tell the waitress I have a question I don’t know how to ask en Español. She calls over her maitre’d, whose English is pretty good, and I ask him about the cake. He explains to me that there’s a local roll called… well, I don’t remember what it’s called, and I doubt I’d remember if it were in English. Anyway, it’s small and cheesy and dipped in guava jelly it’s a favorite breakfast around here. If you bake too many of these little rolls in the morning, he says, you can tear up the leftovers, mix them with milk and sugar, and bake them as a cake.

My two companions and I find all this very interesting, but the maitre d’ tops off the story by coming back ten minutes later with three freshly baked rolls and a ramekin of guava jelly to dip them in. He has these baked on the spot, not for our entire party of forty-some philosophers, but just for the three of us who heard the story. He wanted us to know what the bread was like before it turns into cake.

So yeah, that’s my review of Bogota so far: steep hills, good food, great conversation, and not to be matched anywhere in my travels when it comes to the post-dessert mini-breakfast surprise.

Philosofiction

The Bikepacking Trip That Wasn’t: Days 3-4