arriving

So I.ve been here for five days only, and this lace is so fascinating abd different that I don't quite know where to start from. The easiest for me would be to try to tell things chronologically,

So the flight lasted nearly 28 hours including the 2 hour stop in Frankfurt. I was expecting it to be slightly shorter. Atleast I didn't get intot he same sort of trouble than when I came back from Hong Kong four years ago... that would have been deadly.

Getting through past the customs was fairly easy. No trouble to get my passport stamped. And then you get out of the terminal and start to feel dizzy.. apparently its due to the altitude. I'm in Bogota, and this 8.5 million inhabitant capital city is2600 meters up in the mountains. In fact, you even have problems breathing. The air however is quite plkeasant to breath (thats of course, for the little of air there actually is to breath): unlike what its like in parts of lower altitude where it feels more like air fromn the tropics, the air here seems very similar to what its like in Europe.

Bogota is living a ;ajor urban transformation with the extension to suberbs of the main transport system called the Transmilenio. It looks like a particularly long bus that drives along a road line made specially for it. To get on board, you need to queue up at a statuion as if you were going to catch a train. Other buses don't have bus stops: people just wave for it to approach, and people hop on it while the bus is still moving (bit it does slow down a bit). But I didn't use any of these means of transport: I took a taxi. Just mentioned it coz it was a nightmare getting to the center of the city, coz of all the road works of the trans;ilenio everywhere.

The taxi is something quite interesting: you can't just take any: you must always call the center. After telling them where you want to go, they tell you what the price would be approx, and they also provide you with a two digitt code. This code enables you to make sure you're steping into the proper taxi, and that the driver is not a crook. He basically can't start his counter unles sthe passenger gives him the write code. Everthing is done for you to feel as safe as possible. So, this is the taxi I'm taking to the center of Bogota: to the Candelaria where my hostel reservation is.