New Year's Plans

Bogotá, Colombia

On the night of December 30th, Jay and I were hanging out in the Hernandez household with a bunch of Hernandez ladies.

There was Maria-Paula - a cultural anthropologist allergic to technology who I had met hiking in Minca. Also her mother, aunt, grandma, and younger sister. Allegedly there was a man somewhere in the house too, but we never saw him.

Jay was a hilarious old union friend of mine who spoke about 10 words of Spanish. But his limited vocabulary didn't stop him from being the life of the party. He traded traveling stories by showing pictures on his phone and introduced the Hernandez ladies to 3-Card Monty, which was a big hit.

The Hernandez ladies told us that New Years Eve in Colombia was a family holiday where people stay home and eat a big meal together. They warned us that most places would be closed. This turned out to be quite true.

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Our first plan the following evening was to hit up a Tejo club. Tejo is a Colombian pastime that's like "Bags" but instead of throwing bean bags in a hole you throw heavy metal discs into mud. There are 4 paper triangles in the mud that explode if you hit them, which is worth extra points.

Maria-Paula thought the Tejo club would be closed, but I got a WhatsApp confirmation from a number I found online that they would be open. So we took a cab out there only to find that they were closed.

Our uber driver recommended to us Parque de la 93, which he claimed was safe and would have open bars. Turns out it did have open bars, but the few that were open were all hosting $80/person New Years dinners. Which seemed outrageous to us, so we wandered on.

Plan C was a popular club a different cab driver had recommended to Jay earlier in the day, but that club had an exorbitant cover as well.

I texted Maria-Paula about our complete failure to find anything to do, and she suggested a Plan D to us - we could join her family dinner. But that seemed a little intrusive, and there had to be somewhere in the city serving beers and food. So I politely declined.

For Plan E we decided we'd settle for casino food, since the casinos would surely still be open. Except they weren't.

Jay was starving by this point, so we lowered our sights and bought burgers from a street vendor. The meat was a red flat slab of something and is making me nauseous just writing about it. There were two girls who ordered burgers at the same time as us, and after we got them we all went to the nearby convenience store to dispose of them. I took two bites of mine and threw the rest away. The girls had a better idea and gave theirs to homeless guys.

Plan G would have been the convenience store, but the line was so long that we decided against it.

I was dying for a beer, so we stopped in at a bar that didn't look too busy. The catch was, the kitchen was closed and they were only serving drinks. And when I tried to order a Stella I learned that they were only serving Corona. Also they were closing at 11. Which turned out to be 10:30.

We had seen a Gastropub that for sure had food but also a long wait. Lacking any other ideas, we decided to get in line at the Gastropub. It was 50 degrees fahrenheit and raining. We stood outside in the rain for about 40 minutes before finally taking our seats at the bar.

They were super busy and it was hard to get any service, so I ordered a pitcher of beer just for myself. Jay tried to order food but was told that they weren't serving food for another half hour. Then a half an hour later we were told 15 more minutes. Then 15 minutes later we were told 20 more minutes. There was a private party upstairs that had the kitchen on lockdown.

So we sat at the bar, me getting drunker and Jay getting hungrier, talking union politics. At midnight as the year turned over we were deep in conversation about whether labor unions should be devoting themselves to anti-fascism. We never did get served any food.

After the Gastropub closed we Ubered back to our AirBnB. I was drunk and entered the wrong address, so we had plenty of time to get to know our Uber driver. He was an Egyptian trade unionist who had fled to Colombia to escape the violence in Egypt. I befriended him on Facebook, but his page is all in Arabic and completely lost on me.

Back at the hostel we ended the night with grocery store tamales and leftover wine for me. Which if you're still keeping score was Plan J.

Ba-dunts.