La Catedral de Sal

Alright, hannah arrived safe and sound on monday night. tuesday we walked around the city a bit and went to the gold muesum, which is meant to be one of the best displays of gold in the world, and i can understand why. room after room was filled with pre-incan to post-colonial spanish gold. it was really quite amazing, if not a bit monotonous. gold is like sunsets, you´ve seen one piece, you´ve seen them all--more or less. we live in a nice part of town, right near two universitys, which means walking down the street you see all walks of life--hippies, headbangers, hipsters, you name it--there are some nice plaza areas, and a lot of chic resturants and bars. not much else to say about that, except that everybody here seems to know somebody who has been held up walking home, but ive been in some pretty rough places throughout south america and i havent been robbed yet, and im not starting now, so put your fears to rest blog readers.

yesterday we headed out to a town about 2 hours outside of bogota with 2 aussie guys and a brit. in this town there is the catedral de sal, or salt cathedral. its a massive underground tribute to jesus and shows the 14 steps of jesus being nailed to the cross, starting with him doing something like carrying the cross (i dont quite remember) and ending with him being nailed to the cross. since it was all underground the average shutter speed of my camera was 1/4 of a second, and thus the pictures are not what one would call "good." but you get the idea by looking at them what kind of work people did to carve out massive caves and caverns out of pure rock. we then saw a bad animated 3D short in spanish, and then headed back up. it was quite amazing, and, according to them, the largest tourist attraction in colombia, but lets leave that open for debate.

theres a cable car that goes up to a church at the top of the hill over the city that we might check out today, but its quite expensive, and we have tickets to see some world-famous Dj playing on the 30th story of an empty hotel on friday, and i think the views would be similar. so thats that for now. maybe on saturday we´ll head out, to a place called villa de lueyva or to medellin, we´ll see.

oh, the photos will go up soon, so hold your horses.