Bogotá, the capital of Colombia
The first time you land in Bogotá, the city knocks you off your feet, all at once, all of it. Bright colors and colonial houses of impossible beauty sit right next to grim low-rise buildings; grand churches and real street art next to ugly tags scrawled across them. Actually, there's a lot of beautiful graffiti here too, real art in its own right. Jewelry shops, kind strangers who suddenly offer you advice, and people you'd rather not make eye contact with.
The city pulls in every sense you have: you catch the smell of street food, upbeat music everywhere, from street performers, from shopfronts, from cars passing by. Your eyes keep landing on the mountains towering over the city, on trees in full bloom, and on my very first day here I saw a hummingbird.
You can tell right away that people here feel free to express themselves, in their thoughts, their clothes, their whole look, and no one judges, no one gives you a sideways glance. There's real lightness in that. There are also an enormous number of motorcycles, more than cars, it seems.
Cross one street and the whole world changes: run-down buildings and trash on one side, spotless cleanliness, friendly doormen, and security guards on the other. You quickly learn that choosing where to live isn't just about the neighborhood, it's about the exact street, sometimes one block makes all the difference.
Architecture that has stood for centuries, next to barred windows and barbed-wire fences. I caught myself getting lost in the architecture, the carved facades, the symbols, crests, and details someone poured into these buildings long ago, and that are still here, centuries later.
At first you simply can't take in so much variety. You don't know how to feel about it: admire it, fear it, get used to it? But one thing you feel for certain, even in Bogotá: a kind of primal freedom, full of possibility, where caution and curiosity mix together.
Slowly you start sorting it all out, learning the city neighborhood by neighborhood, figuring out how to actually live here. And it helps enormously to have someone by your side in that first stretch, someone who's already walked this path.
