Bogota

Some people like Bogota, 8 million like it enough to live here all the time, but I suppose some of those don´t have much choice. Even more strangely some people from nice places like England choose to live here too, personally there are a couple of 4 letter words I can think of to describe it.

The Candelaria is the old town area which generally gets the hype and has cobbled roads in some areas and old buildings in spanish colonial style and lots of musuems and churches.

I thought it was over rated as an area but the musuems and churches are very good, I first went to the Carmen Church, actually I found several names for it but it´s a stripey church in maroon and white inside and out and one of the loveliest churches ever, it was light and colourful inside which made it nice to be in, I was just enjoying the peace and quite sitting on one of the pews when midday mass started, so I stayed, thankfully I didn´t get a migraine*.
The next day I visited the Gold Museum which has lots of Gold things in it, mostly flattened bits of Gold to make jewellery for fancy chiefs people and very finely made small objects and now they have a musuem full of it. Also the Botero Museum, named after an artist who likes to paint things fatter and rounder than they actually are, the Botero is set in a lovely colonial building with courtyard gardens but has the effect of an MC Esher drawing in terms of navigating. The best room for me was the Impressionists room, in which I spent most of the time.
Bogota also has modern bus system for some routes which works more like a subway in the way you buy a ticket and go through a turnstile and catch one that goes in the direction you want and generally find they never actually stop at the place you want to get off, and have to get another bus back in the other direction and so on until you get close enough to your destination, a bit like Mornington Crescent** only with buses. There is of course the older constrasting ramshackle busettas mini bus things that wizz about going God knows where.

*Situations in which I am most likely to experience a migraine; churches, planes, biology lessons. Which makes me a bit wary of churches, planes and biology lessons.
**An improv game on BBC radio 4, in which the panelists try to get to Mornington Crescent (an underground station) by announcing other tube stations and landmarks, they discuss each players choice which regards to various ´rules´ but there are in fact no rules and the game is completely incomprehensible and eventually somebody says "Mornington Crescent" and the rest of panel groan and then they all go off to have a cup of tea.