Colombia Bogota: Day 6

To tell the truth it's hard to find things to write about this trip. We have been spending pretty much all day, every day (& sometimes the evening too) in meeting rooms struggling over Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoints, & big complex tables. Marking up pieces of paper, scrapping them halfway through, & starting again on another draft of the same document. Really, except for the intense racket of working in 3 languages, we could be anywhere.

And it's hard to make the work itself sound exciting. Curriculum development, project work has its own drama, intrigue & suspense but unless you're part of it, such aspects are difficult to convey. This project has been full of shifts in direction, new & revised data, backtracking & jumping forward, a bit of a Snakes & Ladders game. But here we are at the end of the inception mission & we do have a plan for the first year of the project & we do have a really solid relationship with our Colombian partners so in many ways it has been a success.

To celebrate, we went out for dinner with our counterparts from CEGEP St. Laurent. All 8 of us ended up at a restaurant called Andres DC. I have never seen anything like it. It is actually like a 3-storey department store except each & every department is a restaurant speciality. The menu alone is 66 pages long! We took our time ordering (what else can you do with a menu that's bigger than many mail order catalogues), drank beer, & watched a troop of Colombian dancers perform in an open space beside our table.

An extra bonus for me was being able to walk to & from the restaurant, about 2 km each way. We will be sitting all day tomorrow on flights so the walk is appreciated.