Comuna 13

Today we booked a free tour of comuna 13, one of the hillside slums surrounding Medellin. It was one of the most dangerous and violent places during the 80's and 90's during the cartel eras but has been safe since 2012 and has become a tourist attraction.

First we had breakfast downstairs and there was a tasty chocolate granola with bits of dark chocolate which we ended up finding at the supermarket across the street from our hotel. The supermarket has bougie stuff that expats and rich condo dwellers would want. 

We took an Uber to our scheduled tour of comuna 13 at 930. The tour is a free tour where you can cancel for free and you just pay what you want. Of course we ended up tipping what a normal tour would have cost ($100), cutting out the middle man. Diego, our guide, lives in comuna 13 and gave us a harrowing history of the area. It consists of displaced people by guerilla warfare that found a place to live in the steep hills around Medellin, who then became victims of the same guerillas when they came to victimize them in Medellin again. They have been victimized by the failure of the government to protect them and by the guerillas both FARC and ELN and paramilitary groups from time to time and are still controlled by gangs. They still pay dues to the local gangs as their tax. During the Escobar years it was home to a lot of the guerilla activities until 2002 with Operation Orion when the military came in with helicopters and tanks. The paramilitary filled the void for the next few years. Since 2012 escalators and cable car system was installed as an apology to the community for the heavy handed response by the government and tourism came in and has developed around the escalators. Murals and graffiti express the history and violence the community has had to endure. We watched some breakdancing and tasted some popsicles called crema. We drank some sugarcane juice and snacked on Diego's grandmother's homemade sausages and arepas, which were the best we have had thus far. 

We ate lunch at a restaurant a block away, a country platter and a menu of the day ($13) and the kids were not impressed by the ambiance.

We took a cab to the cable car station and rode it up to the top of the comuna and back again. A ticket costs 70 cents and saves easily over an hour of walking.

We ended up taking the metro system all to way to the southern end of Medellin to shop at yet another Decathlon.

Christine's "rain jacket" was more of a windbreaker so she was shopping for a real jacket. This was the largest Decathlon in Medellin out of the three and she was successful.

this is not the jacket she bought 

She also found a hot chocolate and cheese at a coffee shop and the kids played at a Christmas ball pit display.

She didn't want to eat dinner at another mall, but it was getting late and the kids were hungry so we went to the food court and Ellie had KFC and Dd for some reason wanted a subway sandwich which he has never had before and he has never eaten a sandwich before. They both finished their meals because they started at lunch.

Mission success. We went hope to wash some ink out of Christine's purse from a blown pen. It got everywhere.