When life gives you lemons, make limonada

There we were on Friday: backpacks packed, passports ready, excitement bubbling, and all set to go to Cartagena.  Jay was busy double checking the details about taking a bus to the airport, and I was checking us into our flight so we literally just had to roll up to the airport and get on the plane. Except Avianca wouldn't let me check in, no matter how many times I tried.  It was then we discovered that the untranslated email Avianca had sent Jay wasn't a "Thanks for choosing Avianca, we'll see you Friday" email, but a "We need you to call us within 24 hours of this purchase to confirm the charge to your credit card" email.  Our reservation had been cancelled since we had not called them, and so no beach filled Cartagena weekend for us.

***Lesson learned-always translate emails.

After our initial rush, with no luck, to try and find a flight that would take us there, we had about an hour where we were a little disappointed.  Then, we looked at the bright side.  Oh darn, we have to spend the weekend in the fabulous Medellin.  So, we picked ourselves up and started walking to a restaurant for dinner.  There is a popular street here called Calle Buena Mesa that is a street full of delicious restaurants, but somehow it kept eluding us.  Not tonight.  Since we were not going to eat fresh Caribbean seafood in Cartagena, we decided to eat at Piscos y Mariscos, a fancyish Peruvian restaurant that specializes in seafood.  Both our meals were amazing, and it turned out to be a pretty good night.

Saturday we decided to finally do the Metro Cable.  Medellin is surrounded by mountains, and there are many farms and barrios on the sides of the mountains.  In the past, it was really difficult for the people that lived up the mountainsides to get down to the city, it pretty much wasn't done.  When Medellin built their above ground metro, they included a metro cable that goes up the sides of the mountains.  It is functional part of Medellin, giving people transportation to and from the city. For visitors like us, it is basically the coolest sky ride ever.  

Jay and I took the metro down to the station that switches to the metro cable cars.  Unfortunately, we had poor timing, and got to the station when everyone else was going home for the day.  After waiting in line for about 20 minutes, we finally got to load into a car.  I kept thinking how it was so weird that I honestly felt like I was waiting in line for a ride, but this is actually an everyday part of these people's lives.  Our ascent up the mountain started immediately, and we had an amazing view of the whole city.  This would be a great place for a picture, but it is a little awkward to snap pictures when you are in a small car with 6 others who don't think they are on a ride for 15 minutes, haha!  As we headed up the mountain, we also had a bird's eye view of the different barrios.

We got to the station at the top, and were dropped off into the barrio of Santo Domingo.  We immediately loved it.  Everyone seemed to be out in the streets, eating, drinking, and visiting with eachother.  We walked around for awhile, and found an awesome view point.  We took some pictures, had a drink, bought some snacks, and watched a really cool neighborhood in action.

view from Santo Domingo

view of the barrio

little ninas that wanted us to take a picture of them, and wanted our bottle of water, haha!

finally tried banuelos, little fried balls of heaven

these street carts are everywhere!

it was a little windy on top of the mountain, my hair was everywhere

night view from the car 

After the metro cable we headed home and got ready for Saturday night in Medellin.  Jay and I had been out to some fun bars, but we had yet to experience any of the many popular discotecas that Medellin has to offer. Angela came over, and brought her muy guapo (and bonus-tall!) friend Camilo with her.  We hung out at our apartment for a little while, and then began our extremely fun night out in Medellin.  Angela and Camilo took us to a place in discoteca central, Barrio Colombia, which is surprisingly really close to our apartment. It was actually raining that night,  so we only made it out to one of the discotecas, but I think we got a pretty good experience. I think it was pretty equivalent to a Vegas style club, except with more spanish music and better service. There was lots of dancing, music, dancing, music, go go dancers, dancing, music...it was awesome.  I wish I had taken pictures inside but I was too busy dancing, haha!

Doing some salsa dancing before we head out

Jay and a discoteca ready Angela

A not so discoteca ready me and Camilo 

On Sunday, Jay and I had made plans to go to La Piedra del Penol. We had heard about it from our spanish teacher, and after researching it on the internet, it seemed like an awesome place to go.  It is in the town of Guatape, a tiny town about 2 hours outside Medellin.  La Piedra del Penol is a massive rock that you can climb up, and it has amazing views.  

After a very late start, Jay and I took the metro to the bus station and figured out how to take a bus to Guatape.  We were pretty proud of ourselves for figuring this all out, but our elation was short lived once we realized we were on the worst bus ride of our lives an unfortunate bus ride. It was a long, loud, crammed, twisty way to Guatape.  We were pretty happy to see that rock at the end.  

view of Piedra del Penol from where the bus dropped us off

We got off the bus (at the wrong place, but the rock is huge so it was easy to find) and started to walk towards it.  Still a little queasy from our ride, we took a break at a little restaurant and enjoyed some guanabana juice.  That was when I realized how GORGEOUS Guatape is.

Guatape from the restaurant

Once we felt better we trekked over to the rock, and checked out some of the things around it before we went up.

open grill 

of course there is a place for salsa dancing, should you feel the urge after you  climb down the rock

Then we finally started to climb the rock. 

stairs only, this is one steep rock

And then we made it to the top.  It probably is one of the prettiest views I have ever seen.

360 degree view of this

Jay's panoramic view

Jay had a friend getting married that day in Chicago, so we celebrated our climb and cheers'd to her atop the rock.

After we had our fill of the beautiful view, we went back down and had our fill of some Colombian food before going back to the area where the buses pick people up to return to Medellin.  We asked some ladies where we could buy tickets, and we basically understood that there were no more tickets being sold and the line outside was for the last bus of the evening back to Medellin. Oops. 

So, our only options were to stay the night in Guatape or try and figure this out. We stood in the line of people waiting to get on the bus with some hope that we might get some more information about this.  Luckily, there was a very sweet older couple next to us that took some pity on the "americanos without tickets."  The guy spoke a little english, and told us that if there was room on the bus that we would be able to get on, no problem.  The only thing was that the line was pretty long, so it looked like there would be no room.  Then he talked to a policeman, the policeman waved a different bus down, the little man ran over and talked to bus driver, and the bus driver made room on his bus for us.  We were so thankful for the kindness of all these people!!  We then had a much more pleasant ride back to Medellin, complete with blasting spanish music and way less motion sickness.

It was an epic win of a weekend.

And thanks to Jay's uber-slick skills at finding inexpensive plane tickets, we still get to go to Cartagena!  We'll be soaking up the Caribbean Wednesday-Friday, hooray!