The police are an army. They all carry machine guns and wear helmets and flack jackets. They dress in camo. They're all over the place. This makes me wonder what the bad guys are packing. According to some cab drivers I talked to, the badass police are one reason crime has plummeted so much in colombia under the current presidential regime. Unfortunately, this also has to do with a more lax attitude towards civil liberties--the police can stop and search without much cause--but it's important to remember that, in America, we have never faced the types of security problems they have here. Consider that, during America's civil war, Lincoln suspended habeus corpus. Now imagine the US civil war, but the west is also seceding into its own country, and the South doesn't care about conscripting children, raping women, and leaving landmines all over for the off-chance of killing a yankee soldier, and, meanwhile, ultra-nationalists in the north have banded together in their own privately-run militaries that run around the whole country chopping people up with chainsaws and literally feeding their enemies alive to ponds full of crocodiles.
Colombia has amazing public spaces. The parks have good landscaping. Medians are parks. The Transmillenio bus rapid transit (more on this later) is more hygenic than literally anything I have ever seen connected to the government in the US.
The money is really big. 2000 pesos are one US dollar. You feel like you're making it rain in the club constantly.
Everything is really cheap. A regular meal here is like two or three dollars.
Bogota is surprisingly cold. It's 2000 meters high, so it doesn't matter that you're right next to the equator. It's colder than pittsburgh in the summer.
There are hardly any Americans here. If you want to try somewhere off the beaten path, try colombia.
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