I spent some time today organizing all the photos I’ve taken in the last week, and here are a few from Bogota and Mexico City …
Here are some shots from a lookout we went to at the end of the day Friday. It’s a mile or so out of town, up high on a nearby hill and overlooking the city. Bogota is over 7000 feet above sea level, and the mountains nearby are steep and rugged.
Security at the Bogota airport was very high. Our Microsoft colleague Sandra had arranged for two American Express people to meet us there and help us get through security, which was a nice touch. We thought they were a scam at first, when they approached us on the sidewalk out front, but when we saw they had a form with our names and flight information on it so we figured they knew what they were doing.
Every item in my checked luggage was removed and manually inspected, and the security guard even removed the lining of my suitcase to check beneath it. (I hadn’t know it was removable, actually, or I surely would have stashed a kilo of cocaine in there.) And he sniffed everything with his own nose — even my dirty laundry. Then at another checkpoint they made me turn on my laptop and boot it up, and they also went through everything in my carry-on luggage by hand. After all that, and two metal detectors, I still got patted down as a final step.
From the way the security guards were sniffing everything (here’s one sniffing a tourist’s bag of Colombian coffee) it appeared they were more concerned about drugs than weapons. Please report back to the planners of the war on drugs that Colombia is doing everything we want them to do, and there should be no use of marijuana or cocaine worldwide shortly, right around the time Iraq becomes a peaceful democracy.
Here are four shots from the flight, taken over Colombia, Panama, and Mexico:
And now we’re in Mexico City. Last night we hooked up with Guillermo, and after Megan showed him around Second Life a bit we went out to a rocking gay bar in the central part of the city. Lots more on that in the next post.
Our hotel here in Mexico City, Camino Real, is pretty cool. Here are two shots showing the combination of beauty and practical playground utility …
Traffic in Bogota is pretty chaotic, somewhere between Europe and Asia in my experience. And Friday morning I got to see how a minor traffic accident gets handled.
The bus we were riding on turned a corner a little too sharp, and I had a bird’s-eye view of the side of the bus scraping across a green sedan. The bus driver and the woman driving the car talked for a while, she made a phone call, and soon there were several police officers on the scene.
The officer in charge made a bunch of measurements, but I couldn’t follow the pattern. He seemed to be measuring the distance from various points on the car to things like the center of the sidewalk or randomly selected points along the curb. After a bit of that, the bus driver pulled around the corner to a side street, where the police officer took his driver’s license and continued the paperwork.
Then a manager from the bus company arrived on the scene, and she flagged down taxis to take us to our destination (the classroom where we were doing the training). There were about a dozen of us, so we were distributed among several cabs. I was the only English speaker in the cab I was in, and was surprised to discover after we pulled into traffic that nobody in the car knew where we were going. So we drove back to the bus, where the bus driver told our taxi driver where to go. By the time we arrived at the classroom, people were a bit worried about what had happened to us due to the long delay — our destination was only a few blocks from where the accident had occurred.
At the end of the day Friday, I was glad to see the same bus driver waiting out front, with a different bus. So it seems his little fender-bender wasn’t a career-ending move.
It’s late, and I need to check out at 6:00AM for our flight to Mexico. So no photos posted tonight, although I got some good ones including the traffic accident involving our bus this morning, the police doing their report, and the view of Bogota from high on a nearby hill at sunset. For now, I just updated the header with a view of traffic below my hotel-room window, and I’ll post more from Mexico over the weekend. See you soon, Megan!
P.S. Mom, I got out of Bogota without doing anything dangerous. Really.
Colombia really is beautiful. Lush, everything’s bright green with a nice wet sheen from a rain earlier today. And hot, much warmer and more humid than Brazil or Chile were.
I’m at my hotel, on the run with a lot going on, but I wanted to post something so Mom and everyone else will know I arrived here safely. Here’s my hotel room and the view. We seem to be in the hi-tech hi-rise part of town, and the Microsoft office is a block away.
I sure hope so.
Mauricio and I had dinner at the restaurant here at our hotel in Santiago, and we got to talking about Second Life. I offered to show him how it works, which of course I barely know since my wife handles all the heavy lifting in SL.
I stumbled around our house a bit, then showed him a few other places, and then I decided to buy something to leave in the house to surprise Megan. So I bought a Roland keyboard similar to the one we have at home, and put it in the corner of the living room.
But it was a bit too close to the wall, and the seat stuck through the wall. So I moved it toward the middle of the room, but there was a remnant of the seat sticking out of the wall. I thought it was a copy, so I tried to delete it. I got a message about deleting multiple items, and I thought “well, the keyboard and the seat are multiple items, that makes sense,” and I said to go ahead.
And the entire house immediately disappeared. All of the furnishings Megan had so carefully set up are still there, but the house itself is gone. And based on what I’ve read, I think it’s not undo-able.
Here’s a picture of Orcmid commiserating with me in the new open-air living room a few minutes later …
Sorry, Dear.
Mauricio and I flew in from Dallas yesterday on American, and we taught a workshop at SENAC today. Then we went out with co-workers this evening, to Caluma where Juliana and her husband were singing. They did some great covers. Eduardo, Miguel, Alex, Brent, Craig and Mauricio, were a lot of fun — we were hilarious, although I can’t remember a thing we said.
Then I logged on to Second Life, wandered around a bit and fell off the roof, and then Megan suddenly appeared. How cool is that?
And now it’s late, and I have no time to write or explain any more.
Good night.
