Sports and empanadas in Bogotá

So what else happened in Bogotá before I left Bogota.. (I am currently in Medellin) I got to play two different kinds of sport, one well known and one new one. Football is very popular in South America, as in many parts of the world. Given that Bogota is situated at 2600 meters above sea level and that I have played football about two times the last ten years I did not expect myself to be very good playing.. I met up with some people from the Spanish class and their friends and we divided the teams Colombia against the rest of the world (France, USA, Germany and Sweden). After about 35 minutes Rest of the world was feeling the altitude and just couldn’t run anymore. The Colombians were still running though and the game that had been pretty even was not anymore. After only about another 7 minutes or so the Colombians ran out of breath too and the game consisted of people breathing heavily and desperately trying to play football. It ended 22 – 19 for Colombia, which I think is respectable for both teams and I was extremely pleasantly surprised that I managed to do quite many things right on the field. After the game we were challenged by some guys to play them the following week.. I was told that they were really good and that we were in for a difficult game. Things did not look better when at the time of the game half of our team got water poisoned and had other things to do than to play football.. In the end though.. We actually won! We played like a team and played our defense very well. Again, extremely surprised about what I performed. I guess my strategy not to play for ten years worked out.
The other game that I played was Tejo. This is not a game most Europeans know. It is a sport which existed in Colombia before the Spaniards arrived and it is today the national sport of Colombia. If you combine bowling and dart and add gun powder, you end up with Tejo. What you do is to throw a metal disc onto a wall of clay. On the clay there is a circle which you are supposed to try to hit. The circle consists of small containers of gun powder so that if you hit them, they explode. And they are loud! It was a great fun and I hope I get to play Tejo again before I leave Colombia! Introducing gun powder to the game was obviously not done by the indigenous, since they didn’t have gun powder, but by the Spaniards. A nice contribution I must say. The place where we played kind of looked like a bowling alley but with Tejo fields. You don’t pay anything for playing the game, you only pay for the beer you drink. And you are expected to do so. According to Wikipedia: “Tejo is a sport that has been widely

exploited by beer companies in Colombia and, in the context of sports, is unique in the sense that playing Tejo and beer consumption is almost understood to occur simultaneously. There are no statistics on how many people consume alcohol while playing tejo.” We played the baby version with only like 5 meters distance to throw. The real playing fields were considerably longer.. But, it was dificult enough with this distance. And above all, it was really funny!

Empanadas. This is the number one fast food here. They can be really tasty, and they can be kind of horrible, depending on where you buy them. Close to the school was a place with good empanadas. In the picture you can see nurses, guards and office workers all having some empanadas. The cost of an empanada was about 50 euro cent. Often two were enough for me but sometimes I went for three. The cost was still manageable. Although they are deep fried, they don’t feel that unhealthy, only a little. Another thing which is good are the juices, the fresh juices. You find them everywhere and there are so many different one to choose from. It really feels like a luxury to be able to drink such tasty juices so often!