Thursday, September 8, 2011

Que chicharrón!


Today I was finally planning to get out of the house for the night and meet an acquaintance (from when I was here in March) for dinner. It was going to be a restaurant called Local that serves typical Colombian food (yum!).

Was is the key word because today it also rained. Public transportation in Bogota as far as I can tell is pretty terrible. Additionally, there are a LOT of people living in this city and too many cars on the road...and when it is rainy - everyone decides to drive.

This evening my host my called 3 taxi companies for me trying to get me a ride to the restaurant. None had cabs available. Her daughter's boyfriend agreed to drive me. This restaurant is 60 blocks from my house - blocks are pretty small though. After driving for an hour I was 20 minutes late. I don't have a phone yet (getting one tomorrow after I pick up my Colombia ID card which should be ready) so Jose (the driver) called my friend for me. He was still at his office standing outside trying to get a cab - and had been for an hour. Augh.

So, Jose and I returned back to the house - after another 45 minutes in the car of course. It turned out to be a good Spanish lesson because Jose speaks no English and so we did our best to make conversation in Spanish - wish I had it on video!

Still, while there are many wonderful things in Bogota - traffic is not one of them. Today was the perfect situation to use my current favorite word: chicharrón (loosely translated: pain in the ass, complicated/unsolvable situation).

Will have to try being social another night. And I need to figure out the buses - although they also looked like a nightmare to be on today - people were packed like sardines.

No comments:

Post a Comment