Time to be a tourist!

August 18th
Before making sandwiches

This morning, me and four other volunteers went site seeing! We had breakfast at Crepes and Waffles (yum) and then hit the streets of Bogota!!!

                                   We tried not look like tourist but we most defiantly stood out:

                                        The streets of Bogota are CONFUSING!

The taxis are cute though. 

(they remind me of my mom's fiat.)

After we realized where we wanted to go we blended in a little bit better.

Graffiti is legalized here, so there is BUNCH of it! 

Some of it is scary, some of it is really good, and some of it I don't understand. So, I hope whatever this says isn't rude or offensive. 

We took the bus for about 5 minutes and then jumped off because it was going the wrong way. We had to walk to where we wanted to go but it was a nice walk. Weather was great, sites were pretty good, and I was just happy that I didn't have sweat going down my butt. 

We kinda ran into a neighborhood that wasn't the best place to be. Since I already looked like i didn't belong, I decided to take some pictures to add more attention to myself. 

After about a 30 minute walk, through good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, we finally made our way to the Plaza De Bolivar. Here a few pictures of what it looks like: 

HERE IS THE BEST PART: 

You see all these birds..... 

They are everywhere!!! So bad.
If you don't know me very well, I have a top 10 fears and birds are in there...maybe next to frogs. (so creepy and you don't know what they're thinking!)






Anyways, 
Lupe (one of the volunteers here with IVHQ that arrived the same time I did) decided it would be a great idea to buy bird seed and feed them -_-
I made a big mistake by freaking out. Just like in kindergarten, if you're scared of something the boy on the playground is going to chase you around with it.

I DID NOT LIKE IT. 




IT WAS NOT FUNNY. 





I THINK I DIED A LITTLE ON THE INSIDE. 

BUT then one of the other volunteers (Amanda) decided to give it a shot…and she was so brave. 

So, if she can do it…then maybe I can do it. As my one friend, Alyssa, would say, "DO NOT BE SO WEAK!" 

They flew. They walked. They looked like little flying demons. It was so bad.

I had to put the bird seed IN MY HAND.

Two landed on my hand and started eating the seeds. I'm pretty sure this is the face of pure horror. The volunteers thought i was silly, the locals thought i was odd, and i thought "Erika, you are so dumb for doing this!"

 Then I realized, hey this isn’t so bad! It’s kind of fun.

They are kind of cute… OK, not really cute but not so bad.

I liked it! Only 50 cents to get over my fear! So great.

My Russian friends! They are sisters that currently live in Alabama but are from Russia. They arrived the same night as me and I have really enjoyed hanging out with them. We get lost together, we make fun of taxi drivers together, we pull out our maps and look like total tourist together, have late night interviews with other volunteers in the house... it's been great. Sadly, they leave on Wednesday :( 

NEXT:

After the site seeing it was time to make sandwiches! While making the first round of sandwiches, the people that were helping us started praying. They prayed the entire time we made the food. It was interesting, I’ve never seen so much prayer go into food before. 

The second round of sandwich making was interesting too. About halfway through, everyone stopped to wash their hands and run to the chapel part of the house we were in. (I'm not so great with church words so I'm not sure if it was a chapel...but that's what I'm going to call it)

The nuns, people from outside, other people in the house, and the volunteers, all prayed for about 15 minutes. Now, it was all in Spanish so I had no clue what was going on but it was nice. 

I'm not religious (sorry if that's shocking to anyone) and I'm also an America; which means we work all the time and never slow down to really enjoy life most of the time. I'm not much of a prayer or one to go to church. But, to see these people stop their entire day to pray to a higher power and put so much love into something they believe was really nice to see. 

After the prayer, it was back to sandwich making! I believe we were there for about an hour and a half helping them make these sandwiches. They go to different parts of Bogota for the homeless and give these out every Sunday. Pretty amazing people. 

After we made the sandwiches, we sat and talked to some of the people that were helping us. Only one of them spoke a TINY bit of english, so the conversation might have taken twice as long as normal.

Again, saying goodbye in Bogota is very different than in America. It took us about 20 minutes to leave because of all the hugs, kisses, and thank yous. But, it's a nice change. 

I really enjoyed my day, seeing Bogota and making sandwiches makes for a great Saturday. I did not like the fact that you have to pay for toilet paper but that's a whole different story for the next blog. 

ADIOS for now AMIGOS!