Museum Visits, Universities and Good Food (of course)

Yesterday we went to five museums and we only had to pay for two of them. Felipe drove us across the city near Montserrate, a tall peak that we can take a gondola up to and see all of Bogotá. As we drove through certain neighborhoods, Felipe pointed out that many buildings in one neighborhood had a lot of English influence, and there was one that a bunch of old people lived in, which converted to a lot of office buildings.

When we got dropped off, we went to the Botero Museum. I remember studying a painting of this guy in my senior year humanities English class! It was awesome to see the real painting of what I studied. He painted a lot of fat people. If I remember right, he criticized and mocked the bourgeoisie through doing this. In this museum was also some Picasso paintings and a sculpture by Salvador Dali. Wow, it was cool to see those!

I've always wanted to see how Mona Lisa would look as morbidly obese.

A drawing from Picasso 

After the Botero Museum, we went to La Casa de Florero, which had a lot of stuff about how Colombia won its independence from Spain. This was a really cool museum, but not quite as cool as the Museum of Regional Suits, which was founded by Juli's paternal grandmother Edith Jimenez, who was the first Colombian woman anthropologist, and her research to bring a lot of these indigenous dresses and artifacts was some of the first anthropological work to be recognized. We went here a couple days earlier, and had a free tour as her aunt works there. The building that its in used to be one of the places that Manuelita Sanz, Simon Bolivar's girlfriend lived. Simon Bolivar was the leader of the Colombian revolution against the Spanish. He is considered the liberator of the country and is very famous. Here are some photos from the Museum of Regional Suits.

All clothing was sewn by the women. In these outfits one can see the African influence in the designs of the female handbag.

Suits worn by the indigenous men to supposedly scare off enemies and animals.

 Anyways back to February 11, we went to the National Museum, Colonial Museum and Gold Museum. All were so interesting and contained a lot of golden artifacts from the indigenous people in the Pre-Colombian eras. Sadly, my camera died and I was unable to take photos of them.

We ate at a cool restaurant called Dos Gatos y Simone. It served Mexican food, and we had fresh-squeezed lemonade. I got to meet Caro Gomez, one of Juli's good friends. She, her boyfriend and another friend stopped by to visit us. The restaurant is close to the Universidad de los Andes, which is the school Manuela goes to.  Here are a few pictures of the campus.

It's a very dynamic university, as one can see. A little later on in the day, we met up with Natis Bernal and Manuela. Natis went to Viterbo for a year and was Juli's roommate, but now she goes to the Universidad de los Andes as well. We went to a cool cafe called Brot where I had Freijoa Juice which is a South American fruit that tastes like angel food cake. We also had a chocolate baguette. Here is Natis and Juli.

Overall it was a fun day filled with a lot of cool paintings and artifacts and good food. Oh yeah, we went to a Planetarium too, but that didn't have that much in it. Very cool day.