Monsters and veggies
Colombia 🇨🇴: Each continent, each country, and each region has its own curiosities. Colombia is no different. The longer we explored this beautiful country, the more peculiarities we found. We loved all of it. You will soon find out that we are weirdos because we don’t look for the things that are interesting to the majority. We hope you’ll enjoy the picture of Colombia through our eyes. Because we loved it, and enjoyed every moment of it.
Veggies Veggies Veggies and Fruits
As soon as we checked in to Colombia, we went shopping. OMG, was it a treat! Huge selection of veggies, fruits, and beer for a few cents – paradise! We devoured fresh food like we wanted to compensate for last two years in the Caribbean islands. Soon we were sure that Colombia must be the veggie paradise, and with that thought, we started our Grand Colombian Tour. The plan was to travel across with backpacks (for a change) for about a month. We made a list of places that we wanted to see and we hit the road. First stop – Medellin.
Medellin is an ultimate destination for foodies, so you can find there literally any cuisine from all over the world. And that was exactly what we did. We were fine-dining, experimenting in some shady places, diving into street food with great enthusiasm for about a week. As we left Medellin, we slowly immersed ourselves in the Colombian food reality because you don’t travel half the world to eat pizza or Indian, right?
We quickly realized that Colombian food means mostly meat with rice, potatoes, plantains, and yucca. I don’t want to be unfair here. We were blind tasting whatever we came across, and I definitely don’t wanna say that it was not good. It was just like… Fresh veggies?… nah, not really. I could easily live a happy life on a plant diet, but I learned the hard way that in some parts of the world, it is too difficult, if not impossible. I really tried to stick to vegetarianism in Colombia as well, because I couldn’t accept that, with those beautiful veggies available, all you can order is bandeja paisa* . I finally gave up in Pasto…
bandeja paisa* – typical colombian dish composed of all sorts of meat, blood sausage, rice, plantains, baked beans… when lucky – avocado!
Pasto
Again… (I wrote about strange city of Pasto here. It blowed our minds, hence the content, and there will be more!). Pasto is a peculiar place. It is a city of about 400k citizens. High in the Andes. The airport is at almost 3000m (9800ft) above the sea level, in the clouds. Actually, flying from Cali to Pasto is also fun. After about 15 minutes the plane was in the mountains, but not really above them and so it continued for about and hour. Andes are up to 5000 meters there, and you can see them right through the window! Prime spot. Then, out of the blue, the pilot just landed in the clouds. Tada! Welcome to Pasto!
We arrived there on Sunday afternoon, and literally everything was closed. Not joking – dead closed. Empty streets, no restaurants, no grocery stores, no street bars, nothing. After hours of wandering with google maps on the screen, we ended up in front of the place of last chance (and last choice as well). It was called La Española. There was indeed big dark sign with the name, but everything else definitely didn’t look like a restaurant. Small, dark windows behind the bars. Heavy doors with a peephole, also behind the bars. It pretty much looked like it was closed. We were seriously hungry and equally annoyed with each other. The conversation was far from pleasant.
Meantime some family passed giving us the look, and knocked at those heavy doors. Like in the movie, a few seconds later somebody opened that peephole. The single Eye looked at them. Then that Eye closed the peephole, and few seconds later, we heard locks opening. Definitely more than two locks. We became silent. Our jaws dropped down on the grey tiles of the sidewalk. I mean… would you knock at those doors? As they entered, my brain managed to notice them closing vigorously. I ran across the sidewalk like a cheetah, and stopped them with my own body. A very surprised Eye looked at me. In some hunger fuelled Spanish I managed to explain that we totally and desperatelly need in, otherwise the Death soon will get us. He smiled, and said:
Claro, bienvenidos!
La Española
La Española is a family restaurant. Run by the same family for over 3 generations. Famous for breaded pork(beef/chicken) chops. In fact, appart from that and soup du jour there was no other option. But we were far from complaining. We ordered one of each plus mushroom soup! We were super hungry, so we didn’t pay much attention to the waiter telling us that portions are big. What came on the plates outdid our expectations and obviously the capacity of our stomachs… Monsters, the size of a pizza!!! Bigger than my both hands! Even the doggy bag was too big for an adult. I have to admit though… it was damn good!
next time I’ll tell you about coffee, caimans and some other curiosities.
See you soon
Yo-ho from Panama
KMV+Matt
