Bogota, Colombia, South America

I didn’t do too much today. I went up to the nice shopping part of the city to try and find a place I can get my camera serviced. There are some specks of dust that are showing up in the pictures and I can’t seem to get them out by myself. I found an authorized Nikon dealer and they said that for me to get it serviced by them I would have to give up my camera for a week! That’s crazy talk! I thought it was going to take a day or two, but nowhere near a week. So I guess I’m just going to have to figure out another way to get these specks out of the picture, literally.

I met Melissa after work again and we went out for dinner at a really nice Italian restaurant. Our plan was to go bowling first, and then go to dinner, but the traffic is so bad in Bogota, we realized that we would have been sitting in traffic for a couple hours before we could bowl, so we figured we might as well eat now and let the traffic die down. It was a good choice, the food was excellent. We both had a soup to start, and they were so big that we weren’t really hungry when our pizza arrived. We each had a piece and then had to get the rest wrapped up.

We each had a beer with the meal, which is no big deal anywhere except for Colombia apparently. They have a very strict zero-tolerance policy when it comes to drinking and driving, so Melissa debated for a while before deciding to go ahead and have the ONE beer. We were at dinner for a good couple of hours, and decided that we were going to skip bowling for the night and just go watch a movie at her house. On the way home, on a little side street we got flagged down by the police for a random spot check. This has never happened to Melissa before, and of course it happens on the one night she has a drink with dinner before driving. The cop checked her license and then gave her a breathalyzer test, and fortunately she passed. She damn near had a heart attack when we drove away, she couldn’t believe that this happened tonight, of all nights.

We calmed down and headed back to her house to watch one of my favorite movies, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Melissa has never seen it, but being another traveller like me, I knew she would love it. She was enjoying it, until she fell asleep about an hour into the movie. Apparently it wasn’t exciting enough for her, even though she insisted she was loving it. I got a taxi back to the hotel and am getting prepared to move on from Colombia tomorrow. I’m not looking forward to it. I’ve had such an awesome time in this country, and with Melissa, I really don’t want to go. Oh well, I am sure I’m going to have fun in Ecuador too.