Our Bogota Neighborhood

We thought it would be nice to share pictures of our neighborhood here in Bogota.

Just a few blocks north of us is the monument called "Heroes" which honors the heroes of the revolution and Simon Bolivar. Our institute is called the Heroes Institute after this part of Bogota.
We shop at a little grocery store just a block away called "Romi". They have a wonderful butcher shop where we buy our meat and of course our Coke-zero!

Right across the street from the corner of our building is a stand that sells fresh squeezed orange juice in the mornings. We think he looks like Juan Valdez from the coffee commercials. He says "buenos dias" to us when we walk by and now we have become frequent customers. The juice is fantastic!
This is our building. Our apartment is on the sixth floor with the white blinds right next to the rail on the left side.
This is one of our guards (porteros) who keeps our building safe. His name is Silvaro. He is a real great guy!
This is Vicente, our custodian for our building. He does a great job keeping everything clean!

Flowers for the Apartment

This may be stupid to post, but I thought it would be nice to show what you can buy here in Bogota that is quite inexpensive. We bought this colorful vase and flowers all for about 15 dollars. Flowers are very inexpensive so Mark and I tried our hands at flower arranging. We set them on our table as we were preparing for our lunch. Yes, notice the coke-zero. I think we go through a 2 liter bottle every day.

Central Bogota

The altar and pulpit in the Iglesia de Santa Clara.
Llamas in the middle of the plaza.
During our time off we visited the central part of Bogota where most of the museums are located and the main square is and where there are very old Catholic Cathederals. This is a picture of a plaza by the Jimenez Avenida bus stop. Notice that it is soooo crowded with "muchas gentes"!

Botero Art Museum

Here is a Renoir and a Picasso painting.


Fernando Botero is a famous Colombian artist who paints very over-weight figures. This museum also had pictures of Picasso, Renoir, and other famous artists. We are not real fans of Botero's pictures but we can say that we went and saw the originals.

Vacation Pictures

Mark and I have had 4 weeks for vacation because the Institute is closed until January 17th so we attended the temple and visited museums. One day we just hopped on the Transmillenio bus just to see where it would take us. We ended up so far south that we were totally out of our mission. We also found a wonderful little Mexican restaurant in the central part of the city. One of the pictures is of the skating rink that was set up in the main square for the holidays.

Zone Conference

Last week Mark and I were invited to a Zone Conference with three of the zones in our mission. These pictures were taken outside during an object lesson by Elder Santorion, one of the assistants. The Elders are watching one of the sister missionaries begin her race. The Elders are Elder Morris, Elder Thomas and Elder McKay. Luckily the sisters did not do the wheelbarrow race that is shown in the other picture!