By: Emma Jennings
The past two days in Bogotá have been pretty busy, but also extremely fun! Yesterday, on the 22, we were able to explore the neighborhood of La Candelaria, since our interview scheduled for Monday was moved to Tuesday due to a holiday. La Candelaria has great murals, views of the mountains surrounding Bogotá, and a lot of museums. Again, because of the holiday, only a few were open on Monday, but we managed to get to the Museo Botero, an art museum featuring a large amount of pieces by Fernando Botero (namesake of the museum). We went back to the neighborhood we’re staying in for dinner, before getting together in one of our hotel rooms to prepare for our meetings on the 23. On Tuesday, we got going pretty early to meet with an IGL alum, Shanti Sattler, at her co-working office, which was actually only a couple blocks away from our hotel. It was so fun to talk to a Tufts and IGL alum about her work in Colombia, as well as her experiences since graduating–she gave us some great advice and very helpful information for all of our research projects. After wrapping up with Shanti, we grabbed brunch at a restaurant called Al Agua Patos, which is apparently pretty well-known in Bogotá, and after trying the food, that’s definitely not without good reason, it was delicious. It stormed most of the afternoon, so we stayed in the hotel preparing for our next meeting at 4pm with the Mayor of Bogotá’s Counselor for Immigration Issues, Iván Gaitán Gómez, at the Bogotá Marriott. He actually brought us into an ongoing conference that was apparently hosted by USAID for many different organizations involved with migration in Colombia. We think they were wrapping up a multi-year project based on the concluding remarks (we didn’t hear the introduction since we came in during the middle), which was a very cool experience. After the conference wrapped up, we were able to conduct our interview with Mr. Gomez, which offered a lot of insight into our topics and gave us a lot more information to work with. By the time we got back to our hotel, we were all pretty wiped out, but we did go out to dinner, then came back, worked on some questions, and went to bed–another successful day in Bogotá!
