Medellin

Medellin called the city of the eternal spring, due to it's moderate weather all year long, not much of a tourist attraction though, a very modern city, which I came to visit mainly to check out the night life, I arrived on Friday night, just in time for the weekend, we decided to go out to Mangos that night, a place recommended by everybody and the lonely planet guide as well, turned out to be one of the most disappointing nights out I ever had, the place is just a big show with dancers doing acts all night (impressive performances actually), dwarfs in cowboy clothes which greet you when you come in, and people with amputated hands, dressed in hospital ropes, being dragged around on a stretcher, to promote selling some needles blue alcohol filled with some blue alcohol, I found that last bit kind of sick, we tried to hook up with some group of women, who mostly ignored us, and later turned out to be hookers (or at least some of them were), anyway it might have been different if we went first some other bar or club, and then came to Mangos after 2 , when all the other places close and everybody goes to Mangos or to the other two clubs in the city that stay open after 2. Saturday night we went out with the two sisters who work at the hostel, their friend and pretty much everybody who was staying at the hostel, we went out to this close by town, where there is a big concentration of clubs and bars, can't remember the name of the club we went into, but it was good music, and I danced all night, but the place closed at 2, just when things started to get really going.

The hostel I stayed at is called the black sheep, very luxurious hostel, with a very friendly staff, and great atmosphere, it is really easy to get comfortable and spend a week here.


During the first three days I basically seen nothing of Medellin, except the hostel, a supermarket and couple of clubs, so I decided to visit the center and the main museum in the city, which is mainly dedicated to Botero, the artist who is obsessed with depicting and sculpturing fat people (sometimes animals and trees as well), the plaza outside the museum is decorated by many of his sculptures, I found his works quite fascinating.


Entering the museum one is greeted by a large painting on a wall by Gomez, another famous artist from this region, the painting is called "La problema del petroleum y la energia" (the picture above) , it is ironic that seventy years later we are still talking about the problem of the petrol and energy, it just happened that they had a temporary exhibition of his works. Gomez works generally depict the problems of the Colombian society, specially the suffering of the working class, while Botero liked to paint his characters fat, Gomez often depicted them naked. It was really refreshing for a change, to enter a south American musuem that is not dominated by religious art, the second floor was dedicated to Boteros paintings, and contained a lot of his brilliant works, even included a couple Jesus painting, and one depicting Pablo Escobar being killed, both characters painted exaggeratedly fat, there were many paintings of bull fights as well, again both people and animals were painted fat. There were also a couple of brilliant paintings by Brasseur, a Belgian artist, who was invited to Medellin to join the art school, and was the mentor of Botero and other Colombian artists.


At a near by Plaza a sculpture of a bird symbolising peace was placed, ironically the original monument was blown up by a bomb placed by guerrillas (the picture above on the left), in symbolic decision the original sculpture was left as is, but a new one was created next to it (the right sculpture).