Monserrate y el Museo del Oro

The day started with a llama ride. Well, I sat on a llama anyway. Such a touristy thing to do, but I couldn't say no to an offer like that! I felt bad for the poor thing, I don't know how it managed to hold me up! We are in front of the Funicular that takes people to the top of Monserrate, a small peak that overlooks the city of Bogota. The view was incredible when the sun came out. It was pretty good when the sun wasn't even out yet!

Vera and I learned our lesson about hailing cabs on the street. We ended up taking 2 different cabs trying to get to the Museo del Oro, but neither one ended up putting us in the right place. The first one took us to the Plaza del Torro (ha), the second one dropped us off several blocks away. We did manage to find it, though, and it was a pretty neat museum. It was full of gold, mostly precolombian, mostly stolen from graves. Shiny pretty things, though. The most interesting parts were the explanations of techniques for getting certain designs using wax and clay molds, and different colors using alloys of gold, silver, copper, and platinum. Muy interesante. The best room in the whole museum had a bit of a light show on many pieces of gold while playing shamanic chanting. The best piece in the museum was the boat, shown below.

The next day I visited the mother of a friend of my father's. She is a super sweet grandmotherly lady with a ridiculously interesting life. She lived in more countries than I have ever even visited. She is Swedish-Colombian, so she made me a Swedish pancake with lingonberry jam and creme. Definitely not what I expected to eat in Colombia!

The pad thai that I had today wasn't impressive. It wasn't pad thai at all, really. There was no sauce or peanuts, and it was served on spaghetti instead of rice noodles. I'm not even sure why they called it pad thai. Maybe it was because what they called it was phaid thai.