Medellin is a gigantic valley surrounded by mountains. The city centre is where all the nice neighbourhoods and malls are (like the fancy one our hostel was in), and up the slopes of the mountains with the incredible views is where all the poor people live. It’s sort of the opposite of how North American cities are laid out, but the roads and the slopes make everything really inaccessible, so no one ever really wanted to live up there, I suppose.
Medellin is one of those cities in Colombia that has had a really amazing turn around in the last 20 years. I just read a book about the violence through the 80`s and 90`s and how Medellin was at the centre of so much drug terror. The violence was not quite the street gang petty drug trade that it is in North America, it was more about the army working with large producers of cocaine to assassinate whole political parties who wanted to legislate tougher laws against them. They also planted bombs in public places just to remind everyone who was in charge. Now, Medellin is all cleaned up, crime is a tiny fraction of what it was before, and they even have a fancy subway and a huge mall with an ice-skating rink, the true sign that a city has made it on the international stage.
There is a brand new cable car commuter line that goes up the mountain slopes to the poor neighbourhoods. It`s strange because the people on it are either rich tourists who are going to see the view and come right down again, or very poor people who have to get to work. The sights are incredible and justify all the ear-popping. Medellin is almost entirely constructed out of reddish brown brick, so the valley looks like a big earthenware bowl.
We went to an art museum that heavily featured Fernando Botero, who was born in Medellin. He insists that the people, horses, cats, buildings, cakes, and fruit in his paintings and sculptures are not “fat,” but instead “voluminous,” and “sensuous.” One of his most famous ones is a painting of Pablo Escobar getting machine-gunned to death on a Medellin rooftop. Pablo Escobar was actually fat in real life, so I don’t see too much artistic licence here.
From mid-December to mid-January, along the canal through the center of town, there is a massive display of Christmas lights. They build enormous dioramas that are big enough to walk through out of cellophane and wire frames and string them with millions of lights. They tell various Christmas stories and legends. On top of a hill in the middle of town, they constructed a 40 foot high nativity scene, complete with an elephant-sized baby Jesus that is visible all over the city. Along the canal was a solid kilometre and a half of stands selling toys and souvenirs, barbequed corn, grilled meat, hot dogs (perros calientes), arepas, sweets, ice-cream, and gallons and gallons of cheap liquor and beer. At the end there was a fountain light show.
One night, we went to a salsa club. We were invited by a guy from Ottawa we met at the hostel who had been invited himself by a Colombian girl. They had a live band and we were crammed into a tiny space with a crowd that must have doubled the fire code (if they have that here). Actually, it was a bit contentious to call it a salsa club, as most of the dancing consisted of hugging and squeezing to the left and right a few inches. The band was fantastic. They even had a local Medellin micro-brew beer for sale with hops in it that tasted like something I would pay money for in Vancouver. Ahhhhh!
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