Living like Queens

So my parents are super amazingly awesome!! As a side effect of this awesomeness (and I think fear of their only daughter coming to a big scary place like Colombia) they gave us their hotel reward points and put us up in the Embassy Suites for three nights! It was an amazing couple of days where Laura and I lived like Queens. The Embassy Suites Rosales is in the luxurious Zona G district of Bogotá, and is super nice. We enjoyed a free made-to-order breakfast every morning and a complimentary happy hour every evening!

Our suite had a sitting room, a bar, a huge nicely lit bathroom, two large flat screen tvs, and our bedroom with two incredibly comfortable double beds! We instantly claimed the territory by throwing our clothes all over the place, moving the furniture (to create a yoga space), and spreading our makeup and toiletries all over the bathroom! It’s amazing how easy it is for us to get back into our old routines from back in the golden days when we lived together.

We spent our days wondering around the Candelaria (the historical district) and the Zona Rosa (an extravagant shopping district), and enjoying the ciclovia! The ciclovia happens in Bogotá every Sunday, half of the cities streets shut down for cyclists, runners, walkers, roller-bladers, you name it! We ate dinner out at some really nice restaurants that to Colombian standards are quite expensive, but considering the delicious food and drink we had, it really wasn’t all that expensive. My favorite dinner was at a restaurant called La Despensa, I had a local beer, organic roasted chicken in a creamy mushroom sauce with potatoes and tomatoes, and some Malbec… all for about $20!

Even though I said several times that I wanted to continue with this lifestyle and just move into the Embassy Suites, we had to go back to reality. Reality was that we didn’t have a place to stay. Laura had been working all week on finding us an apartment (I am useless without the ability to read or respond to ads!), and on Sunday afternoon we were starting to feel very worried about leaving the Embassy Suites to become homeless the next day.

Luckily, Laura had connected with a Colombian guy and after a long walk, a cell phone mishap, asking several people for directions, and many phone calls saying we still don’t know where we are… we finally found Filipe and his awesome apartment. It is a three-story, 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment where Laura and I share a bedroom for about $350 a month (so $175 each- so much cheaper than Boulder!). We have Colombian, German, and American housemates. Moving in was a breeze and we are already enjoying our large room where the only decoration is a rainbow painting (for those of you who know Laura you know how perfect that is) and a 72 inch flat screen tv- and yes we have cable!

We’ve left the luxury, but we might still find a way to live like queens!