It's a small world after all

This world is really so so so so small. Ridiculously small.

I was walking through La Candelaria the other day, and we passed a bike tour shop. We have been looking for that bike tour shop since we first heard about it in the first week we were here, so we went in and started talking to someone about it. He started speaking to us in English, and after a pleasant conversation, I asked where he was from. Turns out, he grew up in Walnut Creek and went to UC Davis! We will probably be doing a bike tour soon though.

Another La Candelaria story: Yesterday I went out for coffee after work with four friends. We were walking along the main road back to the Transmilenio station when, all of a sudden, a bunch of people started running away from the main station, back up the road towards the way we had come from. We abruptly stopped and tried to figure out what was going on, when some kind of bomb went off and smoke started going up in the air! We realized that all the shops had closed the metal panels on their windows and doors, and we took off back up the hill and ran into Crepes and Waffles, one of the only stores that hadn't closed up. We stood in there watching more and more students run up the road away from the center and learned that it was a demonstration. The police take demonstrations very seriously here, and they had brought in two tanks filled with water and tear gas if needed! There were at least 200 police men surrounding this demonstration. After we learned what it was and saw Colombians walking towards the center again, we felt safe enough to leave. It was such a scary thing at first though, to see people running away and hear a bomb-like thing go off! We had to walk about 10 minutes down the road to the next Transmilenio station because the main two stations were closed.

Other than that, I have been doing a lot of research about traveling and what I want to do with the rest of my year when I am done with this volunteer project! I am really leaning towards Patagonia and possibly an Antarctic trip, in which case I would be in debt to my parents a very huge amount of money. For now, I am going to work on enjoying Colombia and exploring everything it has to offer (which is a lot)!