After fleeing the United States to Bogotá for a week after San Francisco, I rendezvoused with a group of international friends living in Medellín for six days and took it as an opportunity to hang out with international people that are otherwise hard to pin down. I stayed in two different apartments in Poblado, a really nice and also touristy neighborhood of Medellín where my friends had chose to stay. I’ve only been to Medellín once before and as I wrote afterwards it wasn’t a city that I really enjoyed. I hesitate to pass further judgement this time around because I didn’t even set foot outside of Poblado — instead choosing to work and hang out with my buddies rather than venture and explore a city I already decided I dislike. Nevertheless I will pass judgement! I really dislike Poblado. Just about everything about Poblado — from the dense demographic of expats, the meandering roadways with narrow sidewalks on a single side that switch from one side of the street to the other seemingly at random necessitating that you wait for the line of passing cars to give you passage between them so you might again not walk in the road — to repeat the […]
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As a travel hipster, Medellin is a place I’ve never been interested in visiting. It’s probably the most popular white person and ex-pat destination in Colombia owing to convenience, temperate climate, great infrastructure, lush flora and legendary, beautiful women. Without a doubt Medellín is the prettier, daintier little sister to the hulking, dirty mass of my-favorite-Colombian-city, Bogotá. So while I have been able to avoid it for sometime it was too easy to spend two days there on my way back from Santa Marta en route to Bogotá. In preparation, had so many reasons to be unimpressed. The best way I can describe Medellin is “Colombian Disneyland”. If you walk into a café in Poblando, aka Gringo Central, it’s not unlikely to find everyone there is an American. The city has been the beneficiary of a lot of post-Escobar foreign and local investment (Bogotá is a little sore that the money set aside to build its subway went instead to Medellin’s metro and Bogotá got stuck with the much-detested TransMilenio instead) and from where I have been in Colombia thus far it’s the most cush. Back when I was in Barth-a-lona I lamented the city’s infatuation with its own Antoni […]
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