Voyage of the Hungry Ojos: November 2014

Aside from the Candelaria district (the quaint post-colonial area of dangerously cobbled streets and crumbling 300 year old houses), Bogota reminds me more than anything of Terry Gilliam's set for Brazil: a post apocalyptic wasteland of fumes, seething crowds, and 80's style blockades of huge industrial towers.

The air downtown is so polluted you can taste it. Passing cars cough up huge clouds of noxious black smoke that clings to your clothing and hair. There are about three policeman on every corner, and they all look to be no more than fifteen years old. Some are accompanied by narcotics dogs, others carry AK47s. It's mandatory for Colombian males to serve two years in the police force after graduating high school, and so security is accomplished through quantity, not quality.

Las Policias

On a walk through downtown Bogota, I spotted a few women with bandaged noses, flaunting their recent plastic surgery. Colombia has the third highest rate of plastic surgery in the world, and undergoing the knife is often considered necessary for a woman to advance professionally. It's close to impossible for women who have never had plastic surgery to recieve any high profile jobs (such as newscasters, etc.) and in towns like Baranquilla and Cali, fifteen year old girls are often gifted with rhinoplasty and breast implants for their quinceaneras. Apparently some of the bandages are fakes: plastic surgery alone is perceived as so great a status symbol that some women will bandage their noses for weeks and flaunt them in public.
A chat with some locals in Bogota revealed that Colombia's obsession with beauty originated during Escobar's prime, when wealthy drug dealers would pay for women to have plastic surgery. In some cases, surgery was a means of smuggling cocaine into the United States. Colombian beauty contestants would receive breast implants filled with cocaine, and then swap the cocaine for silicone implants upon entry to the US. Sometimes the plan went slightly awry, however, and many women were caught in the act. This began the bizarre tradition of beauty contests within Colombian prisons, as evidenced by this video: http://youtu.be/FLDWHuL_EMI

For the most part, Colombians are a jovial, easy-going lot. Everyone I asked for directions in Bogota (about 30-some people, owing to my innately terrible sense of direction), obligingly showed me the way. The Candelaria district is a Sisyphean nightmare of concentric circles that inevitably always spit me out on the wrong end. Even though I spent several days winding through the city's labyrinthine knots I still couldn't make sense of it in the end. No matter how many times I tried, I'd lose my path in the hopeless confusion of Calles and Carreras (also, there's my permanent sense of bafflement when it comes to city layouts that are anything other than grids).

Casa Bellavista

One of my favorite items in Bogota was the Botero Museum, a delightfully weird collection of works by Fernando Botero, a figurative artist and sculptor who is self described as "the most Colombian of Colombian artists." Botero paints in an exaggerated form, and the museum is filled with his enormous renderings of reality; or, as Botero himself described, "fat figures." This included ponderous cats, a rotund Jesus Christ on the cross, a bloated Hitler, and several gargatuan still lifes.

Bogota is representative of Colombia's counter culture and the Candelaria district is brimming with muralists, graffiti artists, experimental hair salons and circus schools. I went on a "graffiti walking tour" in the area and learned that graffiti is becoming increasingly accepted in Bogota, with business owners commissioning local artists to paint on their buildings. While many artists paint politically neutral works in order to ensure their longevity upon the city's walls, many pieces were subtlely provocative and revealed the darker aspects of Colombia's past.