Our First Impressions of COLOMBIA | Bogotá Street Food, Monserrate, And More

Welcome to Bogota, Colombia. Just landed in Bogota and it's finally country number 60. Okay guys we just arrived at our Airbnb in Colombia. It's like 45, 50 dollars a night. It's not super big but the design is quirky. Our bags are in the kitchen right now so you can't really see it but here's what it's like. Nice big shower and we're about to make a gourmet dinner. Restaurants were closed so this is what happened. Pasta, olives and tomato sauce. Let's cook. So it's our first morning in Bogota. We're so excited to explore because yesterday we were out right here but we didn't realize that there were huge mountains all around and it's so so beautiful. Our Airbnb was located in the Chapinero neighborhood which we highly recommend staying in. It's a very trendy area with lots of restaurants and things to do. It's always so weird when you arrive somewhere in the middle of the night and it's pitch black and then you wake up the next morning and it doesn't look at all like you imagined. Drink. All right let's start with the basics. Bogota with its roughly 7 million people is the capital of Colombia which in turn sits just above 50 million. Colombia has many other large cities including Medellin, Cali, Barranquilla and Cartagena. Bogota sits at a whopping 2,644 meters height making it the fifth highest elevated city in the world. The city sprawls out next to the historically important mountain and hiking up to the monastery at the top became our first stop. A hike like this would have been strenuous under normal circumstances but considering that this was our first day at such a high altitude it got really intense really quickly. Hiking as a form of exercise is highly underrated. This hike is insane but hopefully it's gonna be worth it. On the top of the 3,100 meter high Monserrate lies a 17th century church built by the Spanish colonizers. However, the mountain was important long before the colonizers arrived. The people who lived in modern-day Colombia, the Muiscas, were one of the four advanced ancient civilizations from South and Central America. The Muiscas were really into astronomy and were fascinated by how the sun rose directly behind the mountain on summer solstice in June. They hence built temples here dedicated to the sun god and aptly named the mountain meaning grandmother's foot. Let's just say this place smells a lot nicer than what I imagine my grandmother's foot smells like. Nowadays the peak is also packed with restaurants with incredible views. It's digging so crunchy. It's almost like chocolate but it's still good. Side note, this was also our first time ever on our travels seeing female figures on pedestrian traffic lights. You better work Bogota. This street is awesome! Bogota is a very pretty city if you know where to look and the best place to look is around Plaza de Bolivar in the old town center. In Sweden we're so used to shopping from large stores that we think it's very weird to buy things from individual people but we forget that these are the people we want to support when we travel. Sadly, it's clear that the pandemonium has hit businesses in the city hard. More than half of the storefronts were shut and activity seemed very low. Hopefully the city will bounce back sooner rather than later. One cool thing about Colombia is that street art is legal here. There are beautiful murals everywhere like this and they really contribute to a friendly atmosphere in the city. We met up with Giovanni and Joey, two local food and travel bloggers who offer one of the best city walking tours we have ever done. We started out with a traditional Colombian meal. Finished! Wow, I see the buses. We hopped on one of the very modern buses to do one of the highlights of the tour. Playing Tejo, a Colombian throwing game with gunpowder. We also got to try some real Colombian coffee. We're usually not huge coffee fans but this was cute. The tour ended with some local fruit tasting and drink making. Most of these fruits we'd never seen or heard about ever before. Like no reaction. Well, I think after the sauce it's, yo, you don't really feel the flavor as strongly. Whoa, it's a little bit, yeah, it's a little bit snotty inside. Don't say that to him. Does it taste like passion fruit? I love the texture of the seeds. Really? The texture of like potato chips. Yeah, they're like, they're crunchy. Thank you. Wow, so beautiful. Okay, let's try this. You weren't supposed to try it by itself. No, we were. Guys, cheers! So there you have it, our first impressions upon landing in Bogota, Colombia. After this, we continued on to Medellin where we made a very important video. You can check that out next if you want to see more from our trip to Colombia. Thank you so much for watching and stay tuned for the outro. I'm Oscar. And I'm Dan. And we are on our way to visit every country in the world together. So far, we've made it to this many. This will be a journey full of ups and downs and we'll make sure to share all of it along the way. So if you want to come along, and we know you do, hit subscribe and click our channel name down below to check out all our other videos. See you around the world!