El Poblado and Pablo Escobar district

I had no plans for today, except that I had to move to another location for one night. I completed the task and then went to the city. I went to El Poblado, which is considered one of the prettiest districts of Medellin. There is a beautiful park there, Parque de El Poblado. Unfortunately, it is quite small and surrounded by busy streets. I walked around a bit, looked around, but didn't really find anything interesting there.

There was a double-decker hop-on hop-off tourist bus standing by the park. It turned out that you can take a ride in it, and it takes four hours to complete its route. Since it was supposed to leave in two hours, I thought that in that time I would take a ride to the Mirador de Las Palmas viewpoint. The only transport is a taxi, or rather I use a local app InDrive here, a kind of Uber. So I ordered one and it took me there. Unfortunately, it turned out that it was some other viewpoint with a similar name. Before I knew it, it was gone. I thought I would walk back, six kilometers down, such a nice trekking. I won't make it for the bus ride, but I can do it tomorrow morning. And today I will go to Pablo Escobar's neighborhood. You probably heard about him, he was the famous boss of the drug cartel from Medellin, about whom the Narcos series was filmed.

When I was already down in the city, I caught a bus going to Escobar's neighborhood, which is called Buenos Aires. The bus was going up like crazy on the serpentines leading up the hill. It was quite a traumatic experience, I had to hold on tight not to fall out of the seat 😂

When I was already there, all that was left was to climb a few hundred meters up the hill, to the place where the Monumento a Pablo Escobar is located. It is a building with a large graffiti depicting him. There is also a museum inside. People in the neighborhood are positive about this character, perhaps because he donated several hundred apartments in this neighborhood to the poorest. Of course, they were built illegally and with dirty money. Now there are a few thousand houses there and they have been legalized. Generally, however, Colombians are ashamed of this history 🫢

Later I went down to the downtown and spent the rest of the day there. I also went to the hairdresser, a Venezuelan woman who gave me a haircut. We talked a bit about the situation in Venezuela.Читать далее