After an amazing amazing week on the coast with wonderful friends, I am off to the community for a couple weeks (see my website, www.pedalingforpeace.org - and follow the links to "Info about San Jose de Apartado" to learn more...OR, even better. follow the link on the right side of this page to my teammate AJ's blog, who has been in the community since she arrived and gives a great overview of it). I am a little under the weather after lots of sun, flying and changes in altitude, but am eager - as I think I've said in my last three entries, to get out to the community and do many of the things that I came here to do. My current teammates think I'm a little loca, I think: they seem quite sick of the mosquitos, isolation, heat and daily routine. For better or for worse, those things are what I prepared myself for, and I am ready to start this next stage of my time here. I don't know how much internet access I will have, but will try to update this more fully later today and at least once during my time there. Please, keep me in your thoughts.
Here are pictures and a little bit of description from our trip...
Cartagena:
Cartagena is the most beautiful city I've ever seen. It is rightly famous for its balconies dripping with bouganvillea, the amazing purple flower pictured in this photo. It is also a city divided...there is literally a wall dividing the wealthy, picturesque "old city" from the new, bustling, skyscraper and slum-strewn part. Alas...we were on vacation, and did spend most of our time in the old city, but also got a chance to see how balconies and flowers gave way to poverty, filth and displaced communities once you stepped outside the walled city. 
Santa Marta:
Mis amigas in Santa Marta, where the sea meets the mountains. Santa Marta is supposedly four, but actually 6 or 7, hours east of Cartagena along the coast. It has the highest sea to mountain rise in the world - which means there are breathtaking views of mountains crashing into the sea everywhere you look. It has about half a million people, but quickly breaks up into isolated beaches and fishing villages on its outskirts. We spent three days there, with a lovely guide shepharding us on and off lanchas, or small boats, showing us the area, with a hotel right on the beachfront (where we swam in the mornings). We also visited the beaches of Parque Tayrona, a breathtaking National Park which consists mainly of fairly desolate jungle, we've heard, but we were content to hang out on its beached sea outskirts, where we did some amazing snorkeling.Bogota:
Us with Francisco, who is a native Bogotano, and who went to grad school with Gabi. He was our gracious tourguide, and showed us the paradasical national library pictured here, with Cartagena-like bouganvillea spilling over its sides. The library is surrounded by water, has gorgeous window views everywhere, and even has free internet. I plan on making this the FOR satellite office when I return to Bogotá.The mayor's plea for peace: The current mayor, Garzón is from the Liberal party, and the current president, Alvaro Uribe, is from the Conservative party. Their offices sit across from the equivalent of a small National Mall from each other, and so the mayor likes to make huge political banners and hang them outside his office so that the president, and legislature and courts, for that mattter, know how he stands. This banner says:"Peace feeds us - do not kill it," a reference, perhaps, to stalled peace negotiations or the recent para-political scandal which has implicated many high-level government officials of being directly involved in promoting the violent paramilitary agenda.
