Exploring the city of Medellin

Monday, Bill and I decided to ride around on the Metro and explore less common places in Medellin. Our first stop was Santo Domingo, a favela high above the north eastern part of Medellin. The area is reachable by road but we decided to take the Metrocable, a part of the Metro system built to give the poorer people way up on the hillside, the ability to easily and efficiently access the base of the valley for purposes of employment and education. Oh, and it's totally included with the price of your $2 Metro ticket. It was the best, cheapest "tour" I've ever taken. The views were spectacular. To put it into perspective, the Heavenly Gondola in Tahoe was about $45 per person. At the top, in Santo Domingo, there is an additional sky cable that will take you to Parque Arvi, a large, expansive park overlooking the entire Medellin Valley... supposedly. We failed to research a key part of this additional sky cable, the operating hours. Lol. It's closed on Mondays! Touristas estupido.

As usual, we made the best of the experience and just decided to wander around the favela Santo Domingo. I got the feeling this wasn't something most tourists did because we did not encounter another single tourist. We never felt unsafe though and was a great experience. On the way back to the Metrocable we stopped in at a local snack shack and had a drink with the locals. Like, literally a shack.

We jumped back on the Metro rail and rode for awhile until a neighborhood looked interesting and then jumped off and just leisurely strolled through parts of the city we would have never experienced and, likely, not experienced by most tourists in Medellin. Medellin doesn't seem to have a lot of tourists anyway, but I don't think I saw any in the areas we were in. It felt like a very authentic, local experience. Anthony Bourdain would have been proud.

After miles of walking we decided to take a cab back to our area and have dinner. Ha. We tried going to 4 different places that were highly recommended by friends and not a single one was open yet for dinner. Aparently most places don't even open for dinner until at least 7pm! We settled on a little divey "comida tipico" spot which serves up, as you probably guessed, typical Colombian food. It was decent but I was kind if looking forward to sampling some of the more artesianal side of Colombian cuisine. Whatever, it was still pretty delicious and cheap.

We then went back and napped then rallied for more Colombian nightlife. We stumbled around and eventually wound up back at Parque Lleras drinking and hanging out with our local friends Louis and Junior, two local dudes we were chilling with the night before. Totally cool, friendly locals. We stumbled through Spanish and they through English but we were able to communicate and had a great time! We learned a lot about the life of local Colombians. They had some pretty intense stories of life here in the 80's filled with violence and murder but seemed to have moved past all that and were thankful for the peaceful lives they have now