A Birthday in Bogotá

Our second week in Bogotá followed a weekend of being resigned to the sofa with my cold. I suffer uncommonly with the common cold. Seems my body is badly designed for it and I ended up sleeping almost entirely through at least one day.

Anyway, by Sunday I’d got over the worst of it and we set off out to explore the market in nearby Usaquen. This is a great market and it sprawls in and around the surrounding streets. First we set off in one direction where it was mostly comprised of food stalls but ended with an eclectic mix of stands. In this first side we came across one particular stall that had lots of cute, Japanese inspired, kawaii style things. We were heading towards Zia’s birthday on the Friday of this second week and throughout our time in Bogotá and previously in Costa Rica we had been collecting gifts for her. It was a really interesting experience to have the first of our family birthdays overseas. With more travels ahead of us we could not buy a huge amount of gifts as we’d have to carry them around for the rest of the time. It was also impractical to keep them secret. Finally, the whole process of shopping for things was generally much more challenging than it would have been back home. In this instance Zia picked out a cat-ears headband that she liked and a cute pink kitten purse which were added to the not-at-all-secret collection of birthday gifts she was going to receive.

We made our way back towards the other side of the market. Rachael was looking to buy a mochila here as she regretted on her previous travels to Colombia never getting one. There were quite a few stalls selling them but she was also keen to find one which had been made in the traditional manner from the people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the north of Colombia. Sometimes it’s good to have a search on your hands as it meant that we wound our way round that whole side of the market in search of the right bag. Finally, right towards the end we came across a stall where the woman was stood weaving a bag as she watched over the stall and she explained to us that her hands never really stopped making bags. They were beautiful mochilas and from here Rachael found the right one. At this point the girls were hungry and although there were lots of food options around and about they were tired and so was I so we made our way back to the apartment.

By Monday I was pretty much better and we managed to arrange for all of us to meet up with Charlie for lunch. He’d found us a good place partway between where he worked and where we were staying which served a broad range of traditional Colombian fare. It’s fair to say that there is a much richer food culture in Colombia than in Costa Rica and perhaps this is amplified in the bigger cities where there is an even greater choice of places in which to eat. However, there are also similarities to note between these two countries. Much of the traditional cuisine is still based around a similar selection of ingredients: rice, beans, plantain and perhaps some meat. In Costa Rica we found that the meat is usually chicken, in Colombia it was more common to find beef and lamb on offer as well. These ingredients are served in a much plainer fashion in Costa Rica than in Colombia where just a little more flavour seems to have been worked into things. However, in both cases, given the huge diversity of potential ingredients in this part of the world it seemed like an impoverished cuisine. Back when I travelled to Brazil to look at wild foods there we had discovered that they have somewhere in the region of 40,000 species of plants and of these around 8,000 are edible. For contrast, in the UK we had around 4,000 species and around 400 of those are edible. I’m going to assume that the figures for Colombia and throughout much of the tropics are comparable to those of Brazil. It’s a staggering level of diversity. If you went into your local supermarket, or even one of the fresh markets here which seem to house a bewildering array of fruits and vegetables I would guess that you’d count up at best somewhere between 50-100 species. Most dishes probably only use around 5 ingredients as their foundation. So how did this situation arise? My speculation is that it has something to do with the process of colonisation. At that point in time when first landing on these shores we did not form a right relationship. We didn’t come and recognise the wealth of ingredients on the land which would have required a very different relationship with both the land and the indigenous people living here. It seems that rather people arrived in a place where they did not know the names of the plants, did not recognise what they could and could not eat and set about modifying the landscape to become something more familiar. This pattern has repeated on most human landscapes: the simplification of what the land is producing into what we can easily recognise as food. It’s interesting to imagine what might have been had the relationship formed been a different one. What would the cuisine of Latin America look like now if those early colonists had come asking the native people how they make use of the huge diversity of edible species on offer?

In giving time to this short digression I don’t wish to take anything away from the richness of Colombian food culture. It’s amazing and delicious. For us it is also ridiculously cheap to eat out. My point is just that with the narrow selection of ingredients available that such a rich food culture has been possible. How much richer could that be using a hundred times more ingredients and flavours than are currently in use? These thoughts did spark an enquiry in me while we were there and I found that at least a handful of restaurants in Bogotá are carrying out this exploration of native ingredients as part of a global pattern of chefs who are understandably falling in love with the huge diversity of flavours in al manner of shapes, sizes and colours with which they can enrich the palette of colours that they use to create their dishes. For chefs more than for most of us, the appeal is almost irresistible.

Making our way back from lunch walking along the main street I started to notice two things. First was a number of new buildings going up. Large steel and concrete structures with pictures on the surrounding hoardings and fences showing the luxury apartments which would eventually be there. Selling the dream. All around these new developments there were empty buildings with signs in the windows that they were either up for rent or for sale. Sitting side by side this juxtaposition seemed so strange. To add yet another character to the picture there are huge numbers of homeless people in Bogotá as in most large cities. So we have people without somewhere to live, empty buildings and new speculative buildings under construction. Presumably these new buildings are going up in the hope of bringing a different demographic to the area. The old is being knocked down to make way for the new, and the new can only be inhabited by people who have more money so over time the status of the area will ‘improve’. Nevertheless, to see all of this happening strikes the observer as weird because on the surface it looks like new buildings are going up in places where the existing ones are all empty; suggesting that there is little demand for more housing. This pattern also repeats in big cities. Often we are given a narrative of housing crises and yet when you look at the statistics (or in this case just look around) you find huge numbers of empty buildings. These housing crises are not therefore a lack of buildings but rather a problem of distribution. In the UK we have 10 times as many bedrooms as we do people. Nevertheless, more houses are being built to meet a demand which in reality should not exist. Fairly distributed we already know that we produce more than enough food to feed the current global population: as with other resources (water, food, money, land, etc.) the sense of scarcity that most people have doesn’t reflect the reality that some people have access to more of a resource than others.

Having failed to ascend Colpatria the previous week we set off on Wednesday to go up Monserrate and admire the views from up there. It was Semana Santa and at this point the city had become noticeably quieter. On the journey there our driver informed us that around 30% of the population had probably already left. This was good for us getting around as the roads were clear the whole way around. Arriving at Monserrate there were reasonable queues of people but probably nothing out of the ordinary. We had a wait of about an hour in the end before we boarded the cable car to take us up to the top. I’ve omitted to mention until now that the climate in Bogotá is considerably cooler than most of our previous destinations. It was the first time in a while that I’d been sleeping until a quilted duvet rather than a thin sheet. It’s comfortable, pretty much all year round. Charlie has mentioned to me that other cities in Colombia where he’s worked have better weather in terms of it being warmer but that it makes it hard to get on with your work; you’d rather be at the beach or sitting in a bar. Bogotá is a good temperature for comfortably being able to get on with things and I guess that goes a long way towards making a city successful.

The views from Monserrate are amazing. I also enjoyed the change in flora once up there. In spite of the heavy tourist presence it also has a feeling of peace and calm: I suppose it’s just an effect of getting out of the city and seeing it from afar.

When the time came to descend again we had hoped to go in the cable car another time but the queues were so long that there was an attendant directing people away to instead take the funicular which is a kind of slanted train to accommodate the angle of the slope. After another wait in a queue we were actually glad that circumstance had led us to take a different method down as it was another kind of experience. Whichever way you ascend or descend it is good fun and if you are lucky enough to get to the window a great view all the way. We didn’t get to try going on foot. A few taxi drivers had assured us that there young nephews could do it or that they had done it as a child but we still didn’t fancy getting halfway up or down and then finding that we needed to carry Rosa. In a few years time I think that we would do the hike on foot.

We now arrived at the main event of our stay in Bogotá which was Zia’s 9^th Birthday! The day before we’d had a couple of last minute challenges trying to find balloons and candles for the cake Rachael had made. At that point Bogotá had become a bit of a ghost town. It was great at first until we found that along with all the people leaving almost every shop had shut. After a lengthy search Rosa and I managed to track down at least a handful of balloons and a pack of candles spelling out ‘feliz dia’. The morning began with presents being opened. It was very beautiful. There were not a lot of presents and she knew what each of them was going to be but she was very happy with everything that she received and for the day that we had planned. Once presents were done we were off out for our first experience with ‘bubble tea’. We knew little about this until Zia discovered it through her blossoming interest in all things Japanese. It’s a kind of milkshake with tapioca balls in it and an oversized straw through which to drink the ‘bubbles’. We were fortunate that we had been able to draw on Charlie’s experience of Bogotá to find out where we could get some bubble tea and so that morning we were off to T4 which is a well-known chain. Zia was very happy and we were lucky that circumstance had brought us to somewhere that it was so easy to grant this particular birthday wish; back home it would have meant a trip to London for the day!

After bubble tea the next birthday wish was to go for sushi. We ended up going to a chain called Wok which seems to be a slightly more upmarket version of Wagamama. The food was excellent and in particular Zia’s rainbow sushi was a real success.

For parents, birthdays can be stressful trying to get everything to come together. This birthday in Bogotá had gone surprisingly well and Zia had a wonderful day. I think that for her the whole thing had been a fun adventure. For parents birthdays are also days that you reflect upon your children. They are reminders of that first day when you met them and a chance to look at them now and cast back through your memories to see how they are changing and also to see the characteristics which seem to have always been there. On this particular birthday we got to look at Zia through that lens and see what a wonderful child she has become. On the other side of the world, away from all of her friends and familiar surroundings and with just a handful of presents she was a joy from start to finish. As a family we had worked together to find what we could do in the absence of all of these things to make her day special and memorable. Looking back now we know that it was a birthday that she will always remember – her 9^th birthday spent in Bogotá trying bubble tea and sushi with her Mum, Dad, little sister and Loli the kitten.