Plaza de Bolivar

Yesterday afternoon, Andres our driver took us to the Plaza de Bolivar. Tracey and I really didn't know what to expect. Bogota is the capital of Colombia, and just like our president lives in the white house, the Colombian president lives inside the gates below. We walked in the plaza and the statue of Bolivar is in the center. Pigeons are all over , with people feeding them corn and other edible items. Many museums and church's surround the plaza. There are armed guards surrounding the presidents house. They reminded me of the guards you see at Buckingham palace that never flinch or move. I tried to get the two guards to talk or move. They held true. Andres took a picture of me making my best Colombian guard pose. We spent a little over an hour here, but one could spend all day looking at all the museums and history here. The streets are very narrow, just like in the old city in Cartagena. After our tour, we took Andres to Waffles and crepes. I strongly recommend this place to eat if you visit Bogota. The salad actually looked like a nice american salad, and the food was very good and flavorful. Andres was happy that we offered. Andres siad "muy bien".

This morning, David (Lucia's son) picked us up and we made our fifth trip to the passport office. This time we had success. Ruben got his passport. No time to celebrate, as we jumped the first taxi and off to the US Embassy for the visa. We were told that to expect about a 3hr wait. There were only two families in front of us, oddly enough, one family was our Boston friends from Monteria. The whole process was about an hour, and they told "your papers are in order". These are definitely the words you want to hear them tell you. We were told to come back after 3pm tomorrow. So we are finally almost finished. We were unable to move our tickets up a day, so we will stick to our Friday flight plan.