Medellín

Today we left Santa Marta for Medellín quite early. From the airport we went to our hotel, which is supposed to be a famous old place in Medellín, with a lot of celebrities staying there back in the '70s. On the way there we read some bad reviews about the area and the hotel, but it didn't seem less safe than Bogotá or Santa Marta. We had breakfast at a local restaurant (as always scrambled eggs with the tipical Colombian bread, this time with rice as well and coffee). We walked around a bit until our walking tour started. There was a very nice square right next to our hotel, with many statues by Botero and some museums. The city was very vivid, a lot of sellers and shops on the street. We also discovered a huge mall, which looked very classy, half of the shops vere used as galleries, selling paintings, all the other shops were selling two things only: sneakers or branded clothing.
We saw some brutalist administrative buildings with vertical gardens and huge memorials, that were quite impressive.

During the walking tour we learned some more about the conflicts in Colombia and in Medellín, and we walked around an area full of theaters, murals and bars. At the end we went to the Memory House Museum, which aims to process the armed conflicts and violence of the country from the point of view of the different groups of victims.

At night, we went for dinner, Oliver got a haircut at a barbershop, as we walked down a street where the shops were basically fighting for the customers. As we walked around after dinner, we kind of understood, what the reviews meant by the sketchy area. A lot of homeless people were around, some doing drugs on the street, and many sex workers on every corner. We had a beer and a shot of Aguardiente in a bar which was in the tunnels of the hotel.Read more