It has been brought to my attention that many people have goals for this year on the road of ours. Truth be told I didn’t set out with any goals for the year. I was just looking to fill the gap in excitement created by not working on a Presidential campaign. In early days we were put on the spot on to list some goals and I just tossed out “learn Python.” …so I’ve been working on that, which meant this was another day with my head down trying to figure out how to get the code I was writing to work. The whole day flew by and before I knew it, it was time for dinner. In what is becoming a wee tradition I met my roommate from last month for “date night.” We went to Criterion which I belatedly remembered is on the Latin America Top 50 list. As you’d expect it was excellent. Then after dinner drinks at Apache (since the first two places we tried to go were closed) also a cool rooftop bar worth checking out. …even though it is full of hipster nonsense.

Pretty uneventful day today. I remained completely caught up in this little coding conundrum so after heading over to the office I looked up and the next thing I knew it was nighttime. I hadn’t given any thought to dinner plans so I just walked down to Parque 93 and saw Osaki sushi which I’d heard was good. It was but nothing to write home about out.

Tried to have a productive day today. It’s a holiday back in the U.S. so things were pretty quiet. Which was good because I got consumed reading these books I started. Tried to go to Work&Go but didn’t actually do any work, just consumed their free coffee and kept reading. I was craving Italian so I had dinner at Di Lucca which was a great little spot. There’s a lot of good Italian places in Bogota but so far they’ve all seemed a little… off, to me so they haven’t done much to satisfy that craving.

Continuing the run of early morning tours of things today we went over to a coffee roaster and did a coffee tasting. Despite the multitude of tastings I’ve done in my day (whiskey, wine… food) this was my first coffee tasting. I’d always considered myself pretty up to speed on coffee but I was surprised at how much I didn’t know. Afterwards I ended up at another all day brunch at the Click Clack Hotel. In the evening I started reading this series of books that my friend has been recommending to me for months at that’s basically consumed me now.

Organized events have really been stepped up in the past two months. So, I had an early start today (earlier because I was trying not to lose the wager that I lost) to go on a tour of one of the Colombian flower exporters. Turns out Colombia is the second largest exporter of flowers in the world. Kind of neat to see how that gets done and how these flowers get flown up to the U.S. every day. After that I got bogged down in an annoying work problem that consumed the rest of my day and I just had dinner at this English pub. Which was much better than I thought it’d be.

I worked from this great cafe El Altillo today. As I was sitting in their little… indoor garden area listening to the music which was acoustic U2 I felt like I hadn’t even left The States. Mere moments before I was snarled in Bogota traffic fighting my way up to this cafe. And once I was there it was like being a world away. Listening to U2 in this little Bogota cafe, with it’s French coffee service, was one of those moments that really made me appreciate how small the world is. Back home Colombia seems like a world away. But when you’re here… or in any of the places I’ve visited this year things are so remarkably the same. My life is still sitting in cafes banging away on my laptop. Other folks own and run the cafes that I stop into the world over and their little stores and stands and for the most part everyone goes about their lives just like everyone else does everywhere else in the world.

Got sidetracked planning trips into the Amazon this morning so wasn’t super productive on the work front. Finally made it out of the house after noon and headed over to Work & Go to do some actual work but being too enthused for the Amazon just looked into that some more. Despite having a big dinner planned in the evening and trying to avoid eating I broke down and had lunch at Burger Town and then worked for a while longer. I didn’t sleep well last night so I took the unusual step of laying down for a bit before dinner. Then it was off to Leo for a 16 course or something tasting menu dinner that took over four hours. I don’t recall the exact stats on the hype but this was the best place in Bogota and… 13 or something in Latin America. So, obviously it didn’t disappoint.

Despite not having much work to do today I somehow managed to burn up the whole day working. I went over to Work&Go mid-morning to get started. I had lunch across the way at Burger Town with a fellow Remote so we could discuss the long-term future of the human race. Then it was back to work. I came across a place that does kayaking day trips on the Amazon and I’ve been trying to get a trip together but I can’t, for the life of me, actually get a hold of these guys. …so I worked on that for a bit. Went for a spur of the moment beer with another Remote at Chelarte and then that turned into a steak dinner at La Brasserie. ..kind of a high calorie day.

Woke up early today and did some work at home before heading over to Work&Go. I didn’t have much to do so I intended to just work for a couple of hours and then go explore the city. However, I got caught up in a project I’ve been working on for weeks and with the end of that in sight I decided to just power through and at least finish the first half of it. By then it was evening so I had dinner at Gaspar which was excellent and, like everything in Colombia, crazy cheap. After that we had a speed networking event with locals which was really fun too. Uber is illegal here even though it still operates… So I met a group of folks working on getting a legal equivalent to Uber off the ground. The other standout was these two guys who had a 3D printing/design outfit. I think the whole 3D printing thing is really cool so it was interesting to talk to them too.

In my first week in Colombia it has been put to me by several Colombians that they have “a lot” of holidays. The whole of last week was basically a holiday for Christmas/New Years(?) and just when it seemed like things were picking up there was another one today for epiphany. Sadly this meant that there was no free coffee at our office today. That wouldn’t really be a problem were it not for the sad fact that the coffee was locked up so we couldn’t even make it ourselves. On top of which, basically the whole town was closed. As a result I had a very American oriented day and got coffee at Starbucks and food at Subway. Somehow a fellow Remote even managed to get coffee delivered to the office later in the day which was a real lifesaver. With most things closed it ended up being a pretty quiet day, but I did get a lot of work done.