Bogota Journal: The Children Of Violence

I am copping the title of this post from the late great Doris Lessing`s magnificent series of novels ¨Children of Violence.¨ I will write more about her in a future post.

I visited yesterday the Candelaria, or the Candel-Scaria, or should I call it the Escandalaria.  It`s all good but this is yet another reaon why I usually don´t pay much attention to travel guides.  Just because a place is touted as a must-see that tourists have to visit does not mean that I am going to enjoy or appreciate it. Perhaps I could subtitle this post ¨The Contrary Traveller.¨ I like it.

This is the Historic Centre of Bogota with charming beautiful architecture and full of trashy shops and crammed with people.  I felt drawn to a magnificent, cathedral size Baroque church nearby.  It was closed off by construction barriers, apparently under renovations and there is a huge plaza in front, barren, desolate, dirty with broken flagstones and homeless men so broken and destroyed looking that they make our homeless in Vancouver look like millionaires by comparison, sleeping out in the open. This to me is a powerful metaphor that anyone involved in Christianity and the church could heed and meditate on. Another street was clogged with sex workers, another with rather rough looking young men lingering in front of very cheap looking shops.  Motorcycles everywhere.

I went towards the nicer area, where the tourists are meant to go.  It was of course crowded and noisy.  I slipped into the cathedral. On the way in I gave a few coins to a small old man with a very sweet disposition. It is not quite as big or ornate as the one in Mexico City.  Inside it also seems a little more austere and toned down.  Magnificent columns inside topped with gold leaf, no stain glass or murals, but still a silent, sacred space where the weary wanderer can rest a bit, clear his head and sense something of the Divine Presense.

When I stepped out of the cathedral a smiling young man approached me and offered me a rosary with a card with a prayer printed on it.  After he put them in my hand he asked for a donation, roughly around ten dollars or more.  I explained to him that I was not able to since I am travelling on a reduced budget, but he wouldn´t let me return them and accepted from me a much smaller note equivalent to one dollar.  He said it was for the church. I guess I`ll give him the benefit of the doubt.  He was very gracious about it and that somehow makes it okay. And it is a nice rosary.  He also remarked that I seem like a very nice person and I replied candidly that Canadians tend to be very nice people (tee-hee!  Just doing my bit of diplomatic work here!)

I made my way onto one of the huge main streets of Bogota, Carrera 7 and saw that ten blocks or so are blocked off for tourists.  I was feeling very tired, I think from the altitude, and burning with thirst. At these heights one is always craving water, it seems.  I stopped and rested inside a couple of other churches.  One was white inside with intricately carved ebony wood trim throughout.  The next had terracota stripes of yellow and red and beautiful stain glass that I want to see again. I went up through a park on the hill (Parque Independencia) and made my way up to the Macarena, a beautiful, but gentrifying neighbourhood of brightly painted colonial buildings on the mountainside where I stopped to rest and draw inside a rather precious cafe inside a bookstore.  Still, a beautiful place with music of Bach and Vivaldi in the background.  The two young women working there, dressed of course in black, came off at first as pretentious little snobs and then tried to talk to me in English.  I responded, with evidence, that my Spanish is pretty acceptable but they are more than welcome to practice their English.  After that they were considerably warmer and more respectul.
I continued to walk through the Macarena, which is quiet  and quaint, into the ungentrified part.  There was a mature, dishevelled looking man, indigenous I think, seated on a step, weeping, his face covered by his hand.  Then I went by a playground where two boys were practicing soccer with a big purple ball with little spikes on it.  The ball flew out onto the sidewalk and I just managed to catch it with my umbrella before it rolled down the hill and tossed it back to them.  Soon the daily cloudburst and my newly bought giant umbrella almost saved the day.  I ducked into a small restaurant for a sandwich and water, always water!, ate, drew, then stepped back out as the rain was ceasing.  I walked back flanked by intense rush hour traffic to my bed and breakfast from there, a distance I think of eight miles, or thirteen kilometres or more.