In the morning, I explored the neighborhood El Poblado, where my hostel is located. My primary goal was to find an ATM, but since the street with all the banks on it also had a few malls, I also looked around in some of them. The entire neighborhood is very modern and western, full of banks and office buildings, coffee houses and fast food restaurants, malls and casinos. Santa Fe mall is the biggest and fanciest of them. It is a huge airy place with a roof that opens and a big flower garden on the ground floor.
It also had a store of my favorite fashion label - the first one I'd seen in all of South America! I indulged in this eye candy for a while, but refrained from buying anything - the prices above and beyond 100.000 pesos seemed a little intimidating ;-)
In the afternoon, I took the metro to go downtown. Downtown Medellín seems a little more run-down than rich Poblado. The metro station in the center, Parque Berrío, is not really a park, but rather a concrete desert littered with souvenir and food vendors, beggars, people working as mobile phone booths, and police; my nose registered the smell of weed in several of the adjacent streets.
Not everything is bad and ugly, however. There was this cool building, in the eclectic style, serving as a cultural center - which incidentally had a small photo exhibit about Medellín's 2011 gay pride parade :-)
Across the street was the museum of Antioquía (Antioquía being the province Medellín is located in). They had some more Botero artwork (fat midgets, if you remember). More interestingly, they also had some other modern art, like this one that I liked very much:
By the way, I find it fascinating that every single museum in Ecuador and Colombia - even art museums - allowed visitors to take pictures, only advising them to please not use flash. I seem to remember that museums always used to be very restrictive about photography - but with the ubiquity of smartphones nowadays, maybe this is changing slowly?
It also had a store of my favorite fashion label - the first one I'd seen in all of South America! I indulged in this eye candy for a while, but refrained from buying anything - the prices above and beyond 100.000 pesos seemed a little intimidating ;-)
In the afternoon, I took the metro to go downtown. Downtown Medellín seems a little more run-down than rich Poblado. The metro station in the center, Parque Berrío, is not really a park, but rather a concrete desert littered with souvenir and food vendors, beggars, people working as mobile phone booths, and police; my nose registered the smell of weed in several of the adjacent streets.
Not everything is bad and ugly, however. There was this cool building, in the eclectic style, serving as a cultural center - which incidentally had a small photo exhibit about Medellín's 2011 gay pride parade :-)
Across the street was the museum of Antioquía (Antioquía being the province Medellín is located in). They had some more Botero artwork (fat midgets, if you remember). More interestingly, they also had some other modern art, like this one that I liked very much:
By the way, I find it fascinating that every single museum in Ecuador and Colombia - even art museums - allowed visitors to take pictures, only advising them to please not use flash. I seem to remember that museums always used to be very restrictive about photography - but with the ubiquity of smartphones nowadays, maybe this is changing slowly?
