By the third day of the conference I was deep into a bunch of origami ideas, folding silently at me desk while listening to the other speakers. Most of these ideas centered on icosahedron geometry developed from a triangle grid: stellated and dimpled icosahedra, that kind of thing. This is of course perfectly acceptable behavior at an origami event, provided the rustling of your paper isn’t so loud as to be disruptive. One session on freeform creative folding led me into another new and interesting direction somewhere in the crossover zone between abstract and figurative.
The conference ended mid afternoon and we had a few free hours before the next event, so Jeannie and decided to check out the Museo del Oro, which was right in the neighborhood. Oro is Spanish for gold, and the museum features an amazing collection of gold art and artifacts, mainly from the pre-Colombian era. The region was historically rich in gold, and gave rise to the legend of El Dorado. Interestingly, most of the people we met identified as indigenous or mestizo, saying thing things like “when the Spanish arrived they took all our gold, and burned all our paper.” The pieces in the museum were just amazing in terms of craft and artistry, and full of religious and cosmological imagery and significance. Some were ancient, going back to prehistoric times. It’s a bit like how in Europe everything has an older, Roman layer; here it’s pre-Spanish.
Back at the hotel, the first post-convention activity was the Autobus de Fiesta, or Party Bus. Basically the bus drove around while everyone salsa danced and drank shots of Ouzo the came from a cardboard box pored into a half gourd shell you wore on string around your neck. After an hour or so we climbed up into the foothills to a spot with a scenic overlook of the city, where local twentysomethings on motorcycles came to smooch with their dates. There were also some food stands serving things like grilled meat and empanadas. When we got back, a bunch of our local friends invited to come along to the local salsa bar, where the drinking and dancing continued late into the night. Beers were like fifty cents each, so I bought everyone a round. Someone bought a bottle of rum. An attractive woman was teaching me dance steps.
The music everywhere was great, and fascinating to northern ears, and evoked a pleasant and relaxed mood. Their broad term for all latin music is salsa. The music we heard encompassed a variety of genres, including reggae, dub, modern electronic pop, traditional Cuban and samba, what I think of as salsa, and a variety of other Caribbean and South American styles. But just as all North American music from big band swing to modern alternative rock emphasizes the backbeat, everything down there has the clave pattern. Indeed, one of the songs I knew on the party bus was Informer by the famous Canadian rapper Snow (from his record 12″ of Snow), but remixed with a salsa beat.
Monday morning Jeannie and didn’t feel like getting up to get on the bus by 8am for the tour de jour, so we slept in late and did our own thing that day. The main event was going up to Monserrate, a monastery up in the mountains at the edge of town. You have to take a gondola to get there, and it’s above 10,000 feet (3 kilometers) elevation. It’s full of beautiful architecture and gardens and views of the city, and fun to walk around. For lunch we split a plate of grilled meats – three kinds of sausages, chicken, and two kinds of beef. The stations of the cross there was a great piece of environmental art, situated along a winding mountain path so that you’re walking uphill the whole time, and due to the elevation, every time you got to the next station you had to stop and catch your breath.
That night a bunch of us went out to a fancy dinner at one of the nice restaurants in town. Their specialty was – you guessed it – grilled meats. The was a moment of confusion when we looked at the menu and the prices were shown as $60 for a steak. Did that mean $60 US, or $60.000 pesos (about $12 US)? It turned out the prices were in pesos. They also served something I had seen my entire time in South America – a salad! The man I was sitting next to, Eduardo, came from Buenos Aires, and his flight was twice as long as mine!
Tuesday was our last day in Colombia, and we did a tour with the group. It was a two-hour bus ride out into the mountains, and everyone continued to talk about origami and other things, and we got to see a bit of the countryside. We stopped for breakfast at a coffee and pastry shop in some little village, very picturesque. The main event was a national park with a hike to a high elevation lake in a natural bowl formation. The lake is bright green due to algae that grows in it, but the algae is quite a way beneath the surface, and no one knows now deep it actually is. Various theories have been advanced for the lake’s formation, including a meteor impact, a volcano, and my favorite, a solid gold meteor that opened up a portal to another to another dimension if you can swim deep enough. Apparently the whole region is rich in copper and gold, and ancient kings used to put on golden apparel and wade into the lake, where they’d shed the garments and emerged renewed and purified. This too became part of the El Dorado legend.
We had lunch at a place in a little town on the shores of a man-made lake, much larger and still quite high up in the mountains, a reservoir for a hydroelectric plant. The town was very quaint and charming, and apparently was something like a vacation resort. It was originally designed for villagers who were going to be flooded out of their homes to have a place to relocate to. But the story goes that the villagers didn’t want to relocate, and holed up in the church as an act of resistance, whereupon the government blew up the church. I guess that means there’s a blown-up, very likely haunted church at the bottom of the lake.
Anyway, lunch was again mainly grilled meats and empanadas, but this time I got the soup, the very same dish depicted on my chocolate wrapper a few days before. Yummy!
The bus finally made it back to the hotel sometime after dark, and it was basically time to say our goodbyes and head off to the airport. I should thank Maria, who is the head of the Bogota local origami group, and was the main organizer fo everything in Bogota, our hostess and tour guide, who made sure everyone was safe and well oriented and having good time. Mucho gracias, Maria! Thanks to Ilan as well, the leader of the CFC organization and the conference talks and panels. He has a long term vision for what origami can become and how to use CFC to help it get there. Thanks also to Jorge, Gerardo, Diego, Matt, Madonna, Leyla, John, Jared, James, and the rest of the conference volunteers, presenters, and attendees. I really hope to get back to an origami convention in Bogota again someday.
Before we got off the bus, Maria told everyone who was going to the next day’s tour an hour early, because there were protests scheduled and these often turn into riots. I guess this is what the U.S. government warned us against. Ah well, good thing we were leaving.
The flight home was uneventful. It was an overnight flight, and again we were able to take advantage of the sky lounge to sip some whiskey before boarding, and get some good rest on the plane. I found out later that the very next day the airport terminal at JFK where we landed at caught fire, and they were turning back flights from around the world as far away as New Zealand. Good think that didn’t happen to us.
Nevertheless, I feel like the pandemic may finally be over and the world returning to normal, at least for travel.
Also, I’ve updated by CFC artist profile here. Includes free diagrams!