LA CANDELARIA
This was our fifth day in Bogata and was as full of sensual experiences and activities and exhaustion as every other day. It feels as if we have been here for weeks. It reminds me that wherever you live in a routine of repeated activities that the weekends zip by like electric poles beside a speeding train. But where everything is new and different time slows down so much that days become weeks and weeks months. Time has almost stopped for me here and it seems that we have been here forever.
So today we decided to visit La Candelaria again but to explore it a little bit. Our only goal was to go out to lunch at a new restaurant mentioned in the Lonely Planet as being interesting, Origen Bistro, and then to see what we would find in La Candelaria, the oldest part of the city with low two story houses now turned into a tourist site.
First we passed the hubbub on the nearby main pedestrian road with only a narrow bike path where vendors were already out selling their wares from carts or tented booths.
Then we entered La Candelaria and in a short while were at Origen Bistro, a new restaurant in a traditional building with a large garden courtyard in the middle. The food was delicious. There seemed to be a lot of tourists there but from South America, with none of them from the USA or Europe.
And then we walked by the painted hotels and cafe’s of La Candelaria and found ourselves passing the Museo Botero. It looked inviting and was free so we walked in to see what was there and ended up spending a couple of hours seeing every sculpture and painting in the beautiful small museum. The two story museum is built around a large garden courtyard with the gallery rooms opening onto a wide walkway below and wide balcony above. Fernando Botero is Colombia’s most famous artist. He left both his large collection of European, and even American paintings by Picasso, Courbet, Rauschenberg many others and a large number of his own paintings to the museum, said by the Lonely Planet to be one of the best museums in South America. All of Botero’s people, often nude, are corpulent, huge. He reminded us of Beaner, who grew up next to Todd and Susie, and whose Marshall paintings are equally oversized people, often nude. She would love Botero’s paintings and feel a kinship. I am showing a few of Botero’s paintings and sculptures here.
Then we sat in the beautiful museum coffee shop and shared a delicate dessert with coffee.
At that point I was exhausted and got in a taxi and took the twenty minute ($3) taxi ride back to the airbnb and fell asleep.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 