1. Probably the most frustrating thing about Bogotá and the #1 reason why I could not live here for the rest of my life (this will definitely be my last year in this city) is the transportation situation. The Transmilenio--the city's wanna-be metro system (but what it really is is a system of elongated buses with their own special lane apart from normal traffic)--is almost always crowded and they only run North-South. So for getting cross-town (east-west) you must take a buseta or a cab. Busetas are small buses which are seriously so crowded half the time people are hanging out the door. They stop about 500 times, even if you're only going a mile or so. Also, I am too tall to fit in most of them; my head touches the often carpeted ceiling and my hair ends up sticking up straight because of static-electricity and I am mildly claustrophobic so I would need to sit/stand by an open window (which there are never any). Therefore, I avoid them like the plague, especially at peak hours. So my last option--a cab--is how I normally get around. However, they are obviously more expensive than the Transmilenio or busetas and they are often very difficult to find. If it's raining (which is most of the time) it's nearly impossible to get a cab. And even if you manage to flag one down, the driver may not like where you're going and say no. Really??!! Do you not want my money? Fine. Hence the reason I walk to school and to most places in the North (where I live and work) and I only take cabs if I'm going anywhere in a hurry or more than 2 miles away. But regardless, you will always see traffic. There is not ONE time of day where there is no traffic (okay...maybe between 11pm and 3am, no joke). Even my roommate who lived in NYC for 17 years says she has never seen traffic like this before.
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| The Transmilenio |
2. Closely related to the transportation problem is the pollution. My nose is CONSTANTLY running and sometimes when I blow it, black stuff comes out. Ewww! You will always see a Colombian wearing a scarf wrapped around their mouth and nose, or wearing one of those ski masks, or wearing a surgical mask like they did in Asia during the H1N1 scare. Weird. Also, I find I can no longer wear my contact lenses. I've had conjuctivitis like 3 times and my eyes are always red, dry and itchy (or super watery) so I will be buying a new pair of glasses soon and probably using them most of the time.
3. Colombians do not know how to walk properly in a city. In big cities in the US (New York, DC, etc) and even in other countries I've lived/visited, people usually stay to the right. Or at the very least will acknowledge that you're there or approaching and will walk around you/to the side, etc. Colombians, however, (and particularly Bogotanos) walk aimlessly like zombies and will cut you off or bump into you without even a grunt, let alone a "perdón" or anything. My friends and I often joke about how they are like moths attracted to light because when we're walking down the sidewalk and a Colombian is coming towards us, it's as if they want to run into us because they actually start walking diagonally into our path and make no attempt to walk around or avoid us in any way. And if they're in large groups, be prepared to have them take over the entire sidewalk (or blocking an entrance to a building) and you having to risk your life by stepping into the bike lane or street (or running into a wall or door) to avoid them. And then they think they can walk with a newspaper or texting with a cellphone? OH GOD. NOOO!
Closely related to this is the absolute disregard for personal space. I know this is typical of other countries as well and in my former host nations of Costa Rica and Guatemala it was the same, but I feel like more so here I always have somebody standing on top of me and breathing down my neck when I'm in line at the grocery store, coming up to the teller window next to me at the bank when I'm already clearly being attended to, not making room to let me get out of the crowded buseta, or cutting me in line at the bathroom without asking if I'm waiting (yes of course, I'm only standing here for my health). And there is never a "con permiso" or "perdón" when people want to get around you or by you or anything. What ever happened to simple manners??
4. Apparently planning ahead for a trip is not okay. The last time Jeni and I tried to buy tickets for Mogotes, she went to the bus terminal a day before our scheduled travel date to buy our tickets in advance because it was a holiday weekend and we were afraid they'd sell out. Logical, right? Apparently not to rolos (Bogotanos). They told us you can't buy tickets in advance. Also, Jeni only had a credit card on her and most places only take cash. Really? What if I'm rolling up with 20 people I have to buy tickets for? Who the hell walks around with that kind of money??? So the next day we tried to buy tickets again for the same day. "Ohhh, sorry, we're sold out!" Exactly what we were trying to avoid. But get this, when we got to San Gil, a small town in the middle of nowhere Santander, we were able to buy tickets 2 DAYS in advance to get back to Bogotá. REALLLLLLLYYYYYY!!!! Bogotá, you ARE a capital city, aren't you?
5. When we pay our rent on time we're still charged a late fee. So this last month Jeni and I went to the bank to pay our rent Saturday, August 4th for rent that was due the 5th. They told us they would charge us the August 6th amount (about COP$20,000 more) because it wouldn't be credited until Monday. Okay, so you're telling me that even though I'm paying a day early and the bank should have a way to show that the money was paid on the 4th, it won't be credited until two days later? When you pay a credit card bill it posts the same day. Why would this be any different? To top that all off, we pay the rent with a little piece of paper with a barcode called a bono. Not one scanner in the entire bank could scan it properly so they told us we had to go to the Real Estate agency and get a new bono. They don't have a back up plan for when this kind of thing happens? No manual way to enter a number? Really. Fine.
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| Colombian diet: NO CARB LEFT BEHIND! (Arepa, Potatoes and french fries) |
7. No back-up plans at local businesses. Like the case with our bono at the bank, it appears even major businesses have no back-up plans for when shit goes wrong. Another case in point, when Mark, Jeni and Mike went to take out their cesantías (severance pay), nobody was doing any transaction because the computer system was down. Okay, but there was no sign outside the building, no workers were there at the door warning people before they walked in that they wouldn't be attended to. And, get this, there were tons of people just sitting there waiting, hoping the system would be back up soon but not given any information as to what was going on or an estimate of how long they may have to wait. Hilarious.
8. The lack of consistency in treatment at businesses or whatever. Again, I use the example of the cesantias day. Mark, Jeni and Mike went to the same place to do the same transaction but had 3 completely different experiences with three different agents. In all three of their cases, Montessori had erroneously filled out their application with a cédula de ciudadanía (national ID), where all three of them have cédulas de extranjería (foreign IDs). Jeni was able to get the error fixed pretty quickly, got the transaction done and got her money in the five days they said it would take. Mark on the other hand got a teller who would not fix the error, told him he had to write a note and sign it saying such and such thing (when he can't speak, let alone write, much Spanish) and wouldn't write it for him when he asked (even though Jeni's teller wrote her note for her). To this day he is still waiting for his money (and this was over a month ago). And Mike at first had everything ready to go and appeared to be the first out of the three to get out of the office but then there was a mistake with his application and Jeni and Mark had to wait for him for a while. But he did eventually get everything worked out and got his money as well. Three people getting the same transaction done but three different results. Huh?
9. How nothing is open after 5pm for working people except for banks. I am unfortunate to have a job that I can't leave until 4:45 each day or sometimes later so I can never handle other business until the weekends (when a lot of the time things are closed). Banks are the only things that stay open late (until 7pm usually) and are often open on Saturdays from 8 to 2pm or something (except for mine but I hope to be changing to another bank soon). But if you work during the day and you get a letter from your water company saying they will come by on Monday to do an inspection, well...you either have to hire a maid to come clean your house that day or try do get them to reschedule for a Saturday (which is highly unlikely). Luckily at Jeni's new job they let them out early on Mondays (3pm) and Fridays (2pm) so at least one of us can have a life beyond school. Sheesh!
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| I think Colombians would die without ice cream! |
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| Domicilios are the best! |
12. Ordering in a restaurant being an adventure. Many times when my friends and I go out to eat, we often find two extremes: 1) the waiter/waitress either asks us immediately what we want to drink without even giving us a chance to look at the menu or 2) will leave us alone for a century so we sit there thirsty/hungry. Also, there have been a couple of times (most notably in Girardot) when we'll sit down in a restaurant, be given a menu, only to have the waitstaff come back 10 minutes later and say "Sorry, we are not serving any drinks except beer" or "Sorry we don't have any food except these couple of dishes" I understand if you're a mom and pops place that only has a set number of main dishes a day (and usually in these places you don't even get a menu but the waiter just names off what the plates of the day are...I am fine with this) but please don't hand me a menu if you don't have anything on it! And usually when we do get to have the food and drinks that are listed on the menu, we often get our food first (and not everyone gets their food at the same time) and our drinks much later. A$$ backwards.
13. Answering phones in meetings and movie theaters and in public in general. This extends to all of Latin America, so really it's my rant of the last 3 countries I've lived in. Anywho, just put that s%&/ on silent or tell the person you'll call back later. I really don't wanna hear (nor do I care) that your aunt's friend's brother's daughter is buying panty hose at Éxito.
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| The church in Mogotes got it right: No PDAs!!! |
15. Paying a boat load of money just to get an appointment at the Ministry of Foreign Relations. So being Colombian-American, I luckily don't have to go through the whole process of getting a work visa or getting things renewed all the time. However, my roommate Jeni does so I accompanied her to get her visa and cédula renewed in July. Apparently she had to go twice: first to get her visa renewed under Montessori and then switched when she got her new job at the Buckingham School but they made her pay the US$50 BOTH times just to get in to the Ministry to make the appointment and then the US$205 AGAIN just to get the business name on her visa switched. En serio?! Can't one just pay a nominal fee to get the visa reprinted with the new company's name? Nope.
16. Building a credit history. Foreigners and Colombians alike have a helluva hard time doing anything here without a cédula, one, and without having any sort of credit history, two. Even though I've been here a year, apparently I still can't even get a phone plan with a fancy phone like an iPhone or buy a plane ticket without having that security code on the back of my card (which debit cards here don't have) unless I have credit history. And really the only way I can do that is to open a credit card or have all my bills in my name (which when it comes to my apartment I can't because all the service bills are in the owner's name). And although I want to begin having credit here, I am still not sure how much longer I will be here so kinda not convinced quite yet about opening a credit card account.
17. Different times it takes to get to the same place. So on this last trip to Mogotes as I mentioned in the last blog post, we got a 9:30am bus out of Bogotá thinking we'd get to San Gil with plenty of time to catch one of the last buses to Mogotes. We thought this based on how the last time we got back to Bogotá from San Gil it took about 6 hours. Well, it took us over 8 hours to get to San Gil this time and we barely got there in time to catch the last bus out to Mogotes (with 15 minutes to spare!). But when we left San Gil for Bogotá two days later, we also made it in 6 hours!! How can this be when 1) we're taking the exact same route, 2) the weather conditions were more or less the same (actually our return trip was wetter than the go trip), and 3) the traffic was WORSE going back to the city. The only thing I can chalk it up to was the drivers. The driver on our return trip was definitely going faster and did not make a pit stop whereas the drivers to San Gil were taking their time and we did have a 30 minute lunch stop. However, that still doesn't account for all the trancones we hit in the mountains and heading into Bogotá on the return trip which together probably added up to about 30 minutes we were stopped. Oh well. It will remain a mystery, I guess!
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| The hole in our wall from when they fixed our gas leak |
19. Moving into a place and not having all the services turned on. Again, Jeni and I moved into our new place on Saturday. When we got there, nothing was working! I had to call our new landlady several times to ask how to get the gas, water, electricity, etc turned on. It ended up being easy, but it's just funny how we were not told from the get go exactly what we needed to do when we got there. But at least we're going through a family now and not an incompetent real estate agency like RV Inmobiliaria. Case in point, I called this lovely new family Saturday evening to mention that we already had a leaky toilet in the master bedroom, two faulty wall outlets, and we needed a second set of keys. They came the next morning to take care of all that. People who actually respond to your calls and get shit done. SHOCKING!
Overall, I have enjoyed my time here in Colombia tremendously. The only beef I really have is with Bogotá. I mean all of the aforementioned behaviors and actions that drive me batty I totally can understand from a small town. Hello, I did Peace Corps for three years in a town of 10,000 and, of course, there were moments I was frustrated out of my mind but there were certain things I came to expect of a smaller town. There are always certain things you can expect not to have or not be able to do in a smaller city or town. Even in the U.S. But c'mon. Bogotá is supposed to be the CAPITAL. It prides itself on being a growing, modern, cosmopolitan city and in many respects it is. But it still has a long way to go, particularly with respect to customer-service. Especially if its current population is roughly the size of New York's and is supposed to double in 20 years or so, and even more so if it wants to continue to attract foreigners and foreign businesses. Oh bureaucracy, how we love thee.
In sum, the logic that Bogotá runs on is this: You can use your debit card (well, if you're a client of Banco de Bogotá) as a Transmilenio pass for up to 4 rides per day but you can't buy bus tickets to another part of the country in advance. SMH. SMH.
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