I guess when you live in a 3rd-world country, every day is exciting when compared to the US.  Bogota is a great city and very cosmopolitan.  If you read the NY Times article in the previous post, you know that Bogota has great restaurants, world-class art, etc.  But in so many ways, you can tell that Bogota is different.

Today was an eventful day for the Kolb family.  Let me set the scene by saying we live by a relatively busy road where cars are always speeding, passing each other, and blocking oncoming traffic because they were trying to pass but couldn’t.  Kristen says during the day that cars are always honking, sirens are going off, etc.  And we have picture windows in every room, so we have a bird’s-eye view of several blocks.  I got up this morning and was out in the kitchen getting breakfast when I heard a screach, yelp, and thump.  I hadn’t really ever heard any of those sounds in combination, so I looked out the window and saw a taxi in the middle of the road and a man crumpled on the ground.  Apparently, the taxi hit a pedestrian trying to cross the street.  So I ran and woke Kristen up and by the time we g0t back, we saw several people around the man who eventually got up and sat on the curb.  Several minutes later the cops showed up and several minutes after that, an ambulance arrived.  They didn’t put him on a stretcher or anything, they just took him to the ambulance.  It was quite surreal and terrifying.  Mainly because we walk next to that street almost every day.  And it’s obvious that pedestrians are risk takers as are the drivers.  We are definitely cautious when we’re walking and crossing streets, but this gave us a horrible reminder to always look both ways, at least twice.

Today we also got our air shipment (which was supposed to have come earlier this week…half of it arrived on Tues. and for a while we thought that Jackson’s 2 boxes had been “lost” in customs), which had a lot of our immediate necessities (that we couldn’t fit in our 12 pieces of luggage).   The only two things that were broken were two pampered chef stoneware baking pans that Kristen uses almost everyday. We aren’t quite sure how very fragile things made it just fine and two very sturdy pans were broken into a zillion pieces.

We also now have cell phones, internet, and today we got DirecTV (which was supposed to have been installed yesterday) with some American programming.  We honestly haven’t seen any TV since we watched the season premiere of The Office on September 27th.    3 full weeks without TV! We are holding our breath for Vonage which should be up and running sometime next week.

Really all we’re still waiting on is about 5,000 lbs of our other stuff, which we haven’t seen since Christmas of last year.  Oh, and our pillows finally came in the mail!  We forgot to put them in our air shipment, so our necks have been paying the price because of the flat pillows.

So, that’s a day in our life!

-Seth