La Candelaria and Museo Nacional

I won't bore you with the details of the conference unless you ask about them, although I must say that I enjoyed a lot of the talks here. It was a very nice conference overall, and I'm looking forward to next time when I should be comfortable enough to present in Spanish. I was close to doing it this time, but settled for slides in Spanish and speaking in English. That combo only tripped me up once. :)

Today I took advantage of the sunshine and walked around the area near the hostel, called La Candelaria, and downtown. La Candeleria is part of the old city, which is mostly occupied by hippies and artisans. It is fantastic, colorful, and fun. The graffiti around here is great, I haven't taken pictures of all of the ones I liked but I liked the one that reminds us that the image of Che is totally overused.

I also visited the Museo Nacional. Apparently it used to be a prison, so a lot of the places where they have paintings and sculptures are actually old jail cells. They turned one into a display of the shackles and such, and you can still see scraps of newspaper and some writing on the wall from the prisoners. They called it the panopticon, but I don't think it would have met Bentham's standards. There were some other cool pieces of art and history in there, but unfortunately 2/3 of the museum was closed to change the displays. There is also a photo of some Colombian pesos from back when they were reasonable denominations. Now I feel very rich when I go out, because I'm dropping $6,000 for a full meal. That comes out to about $3. When I pull out the $50,000 bill I feel VERY rich, indeed.

The last photo is just some scenery near the hostel and the university where they held the conference. Monserrate is in the background.