Bogota city tour and an attempt to climb Monserrate

In the late morning, Freek takes me on a couple-of-hour-walking tour through the city after I finally manage to pull out money with my regular German ATM card. Some of the main streets are blocked for cars on sundays for a couple of hours, so you can walk, run, skate or most commonly, ride your bike down the streets.
Therefore, it is a very relaxed walk, even though the streets are filled with people now. They call that "La cycluida". I think that would be a really great thing to do in German towns as well!
As we walk down the streets of the city center, it feels like we are on a gigantic festival because there are little snack places all along the road where you can get almost everything, from fresh fruit shakes and smoothies to meat on the stick or fried empanadas. And an amazing wide range of other fried things, sweet or spicy, lol!
I have a little bit of everything and especially enjoy trying out fresh fruit that you can only get here, in any kind of variation: Cuanabanas, Lulos and many other names that I can't remember!

We start hitting to a part of the city called "La Candelaria" that looks very hippie, bright colors everywhere and little shops that sell any kind of handcraft. It is the oldest part of the city, so the houses are all colonial style and there is a small old plaza where people hang out and chill, everything and everybody seems very relaxed.
We have the best coffee I have ever tasted until then at Juan Valdez, a local coffee shop chain that buys parts of the best coffees of the country to sell them in its local stores in Colombia. The usual coffee you get here is actually pretty bad because the good one all gets exported.

From there, we walk towards the Monserrate, a 3152 m high mountain, right at the edge of the city, from where you can overlook the whole city. It takes 500 steep stairs to climb it.
Unfortunately, I only make it till stair number 250 until I start feeling really dizzy and have to sit down, so I don't throw up, lol! I hear a lot of locals passing on by easily, giggling "gringa" at me very obviously! Freek says it's the alttitude because Bogota is already pretty high up itself and then trying to go up even further from there within the first couple of days usually hits the foreigners that are not used to it. Sure, lets leave it at that, lol!

We end our tour with having a really tasty (and surprisingly not fried! or at least mostly not) dinner at a local restaurant. I forgot how it was called because it was kind of hard to pronunce, but it consisted of soup with chicken and vegetables in it, served with an extra plate with half an avocado, sour creme, capers, a pile of rice, a fried platano (cooking banana) and a piece of arepa (flat round bread, made out of corn flower or something like that... tasting like paper, lol!).
Now, what makes it interesting is that you cut all of it up and throw it all together in the bowl (even the avocado and the banana!). Sounds really weird but OMG, it tastes delicious!
Also, whatever kind of vegetable or fruit you get here, it is like an explotion of taste in your mouth every time! Everthing is so fresh and has 10 times more taste then back in Germany, it's unbelievable!

Through our tour, we passed the usual sightseeings, the main plaza with the Presidential Palace, beautiful churches and other old buildings but what stuck out most to me was, how close those sights and touristic areas are actually to really bad and poor areas. Sometimes you could already end up there by making one wrong turn. Another turn and you might be in a really wealthy area again. It was surprising to me, how close together and mixed up everything is here. I was very lucky to have a guide like Freek who always knew where to make aturn and where not.

After all, it was a very busy and overwhelming day, so I pass out, sleeping like a stone, waking up Freek a couple of times with my snorring as he tells me later, lol! As nice as it is here at daytime, it gets freezing cold at night, so I won't get rid of my cold during my whole stay in Bogota!