Errands and Classes

This past week has been a busy one.  Abe is here until Monday, and we had previously decided that we would take a week's worth of Spanish language classes at a nearby Spanish school.  Because Monday was a holiday, we ended up with a somewhat unusual schedule where I had four days of five hour classes, and he five days of four hour classes.  Four hours is a long time to be in class.  Five hours is a very long time to be in class.

None of this prevented either of us from going on a number of excursions, some necessary, some not.  I had written before about Abe's winning experience at the Rockefeller Poker Room.  On the strength of his first experience, he decided to back and enter into a tournament taking place on Tueday night, beginning at seven-thirty PM.  I traveled up town with him, bought him a beer at the Bogota Beer Company, wished him well, and headed home.  Working in our hostel room that night, about every half hour a car would pull up in front and I would expect Abe to be ringing the bell and coming in to tell me how it went.  When I fell asleep, around midnight, this had not happened.

Fortunately, when I awoke in the morning, there was Abe in the room.  "How did it go?" I asked.  "About as well as it could have," he replied, unable to contain the broad smile that flashed across his face.  Having entered a tournament with thirty others, he had made it to the final four, who after a few hands had decided to split the prize pool evenly.  His wallet was overstuffed with Colombian bills totaling in the vicinity of four hundred US dollars.  Now and again Abe asks me why I do not play poker with him.  I think the answer is quite clear.

As the poker room is uptown and we are just south of midtown, going back and forth involves a good bit of public transportation.  There are three basic options: the micro-bus, the TransMilenio, and the taxi.  Micro-buses here ply the streets in extraordinary numbers, particularly on tenth avenue where they sit back to back, two lanes each direction, for as far as the eye can see, slowly inching their way north or south.  Those that meander through the smaller streets do so at the maximum velocity possible, all the while spewing black exhaust into the air.  Each has a placard in the front window with roughly ten words written in a variety of colors, sizes, and typefaces.  Theoretically, these tell you where the bus is going.  Usually it takes me about ten seconds after they have zoomed by to realize that I should have hailed them.

Because of this, the TransMilenio is, so far, much more appealing to me.  The TransMilenio is basically a subway system built above ground and utilizing buses in a series of dedicated lanes.  One enters the TransMilenio in dedicated self contained stops, much like one would enter a subway.  There is an intricate system of express and local buses which change names depending on the time of day, the day of the week, and the direction they are traveling.  Despite this, the system makes some sense, and the buses make good time traveling down the avenues in their special lanes.  A secondary benefit to this system is the availability of these lanes to emergency vehicles, which can zoom through the city even when it is gridlocked with rush hour traffic.

The final option, and the only realistic one late at night, is the taxi.  During the day, one generally hails a taxi on the street, but at night, for extra security, they are generally hailed by phone.  The dispatcher gives you the number of the cab and a special two digit key that you present the driver.  The driver then speeds you along on a nighttime adventure through the city in which very few red lights are stopped for.  During the day, these same red lights at least warrant a slowing-down and a honk.  This is one of two reason that people in Bogota use their car horns.  They do not use them if they get cut off, in fact cutting others off is a true art form in Bogota's streets.  Basically, if you can squeeze in front any part of another car, they will yield and let you in, but without any of the cursing or finger raising that one might find in a city like Boston.  No, the other reason for honking is that the vehicle in front of you has stopped for any reason other than a red light at a major intersection.  If you stop to, say, let someone off your bus, to not plow into another car, or to allow a kindly old gentleman with a cane finish crossing the street unflattened, you will surely elicit a good horn sounding from the two or three cars behind you.  They will then attempt the previously described cutoff maneuver, regardless of the size of the street.  Despite all the chaos, I've yet to see any signs of accidents occurring -- neither banged up cars nor glass strewn about in the street.

My adventures included apartment hunting, obtaining information about getting a visa, and meeting with NGO I'll be volunteering for, but this entry is getting long, so I'll leave these thrilling tales for the next installment.