Venturer's Log: Medellin

Running late on the blog, sorry mum! Still alive!

Today was one of those days where we had plans and then nothing really worked out. We woke up late (lovely) and I decided that I wanted to go for brunch. We've been eating a lot of Colombian food recently and as much as I have enjoyed it, I wanted something a little less rice-and-beans orientated and a little more eggs-based. 

So we headed to a coffee spot up the road about a 5 minute walk away called Hija Mia Coffee and grabbed a table. I had avocado toast with a poached egg, Nick had a bacon and egg sandwich - it was supposed to be a bagel but they had sesame seeds so he got sourdough instead. 

And that was lovely, very delicious, very happy. 

As we were having lunch, Nick received a text from the hostel saying that the volleyball game he wanted to play today had been cancelled due to logistical problems with the court. He'd been really looking forward to that volleyball game so he was disappointed, especially because if we had known earlier that it was going to be cancelled then we could have gone out into the city and down some more exploring. As it was, he found out about an hour before everyone was supposed to meet in the hostel lobby, so that was a bit frustrating. 

OK I thought, let's go into the city and do a free walking tour on the violence dynamics of Medellin pre- and post-Cartels. I'm really interested in learning about this period of Medellin history, especially because the city has gone through such a transformation since the 80s and 90s where it was a really dangerous city. 

So we headed towards the metro station. The tour was due to start at 2pm and we wanted to give ourselves some extra time to make sure we were there on time. We were just about to go through the ticket barriers when an emergency alarm started to go off in the station. We weren't sure what was going on because the Spanish coming through the loudspeaker was really garbled and difficult to hear properly, but loads of people started coming back up the stairs from the platform. 

We stood around confused for a while and asked a few locals what was going on but they didn't seem to be sure either. Time was ticking and while we had given ourselves a little bit of buffer time before the walking tour started, we didn't have loads and loads of time. We contemplated getting an Uber but there seemed to be several trains worth of people now coming out from the platform and outside there were lines of people waiting along the road looking for taxis and Ubers, so that didn't seem to be an option either. We considered just waiting until the metro lines cleared up to the point where we could get on the next train, but that didn't seem to be looking likely either. 

So ultimately we gave up and decided to head back towards the hostel. It was disappointing as this post-conflict tour is only available once a day and not available on Sundays, so we're sorta running out of time to take the tour and Nick is busy on Monday afternoon and then we're currently planning on leaving Medellin on Tuesday! 

We did a spot of grocery shopping to get ingredients to cook for dinner, and then wandered back to the hostel. Los Patios has a rooftop pool which we've spotted but not actually spent any time in, so we decided to make the post of it today and spent the afternoon lounging in the pool and chatting to some of the other people staying here. 

Don't get me wrong, it was an entirely pleasant way of spending the afternoon, but Nick said himself that it would have been better had we known from the moment we woke up that this is what we were going to end up doing today. 

Rather than cooking dinner like we planned, we ended up going out for dinner with some friends that we made and it was a really delicious meal, so that's definitely a bonus. We do seem to do this fairly regularly though - purchase ingredients for a meal and then not cook that meal the same day. But it's ok, we've still got 3 more nights in Medellin so we'll cook tomorrow instead and that will be fine.