The Mission Comes to Bogotá

On one of our first nights in Bogotá, Molly and I went to a concert with a guy we met at our hostel.  The show was supposed to start at 9, but when we got there at 10:30, I felt like we had stumbled into the living room of someone much cooler than me. 

The front room of Matik Matik, minus the Colombian hipsters

The front room of the club, Matik Matik, was brightly lit and decorated with a legless piano,  three massive silkscreens of Chairman Mao, and a bookshelf filled with well-worn Colombian children's books.  The other patrons in the bar were dressed like they had just walked out of the Latin American Club and into Latin America - girls in short vintage dresses or leather jackets, boys in thick-rimmed glasses and too-tight pants.  They looked at us with suspicion when we walked in and then went back to drinking their weak cerveza Poker or children's Tylenol-flavored vodka (sold under the name Yo Me Mato, or, "I'm Going to Kill Myself").

Sometime past 11, a curtain at the back of the room was pulled aside and we were ushered into the back room.  The band bounded out - three girls in mercilessly teased wigs, ripped neon tights, and sparkly Spandex, who I later learned went by the name La Borracha Y Los Cliches Sociales - "The Drunk Girl and the Social Cliches."  Backed by a tiny curly-haired man in a nylon ski jacket and shiny purple leggings, they yelled tuneless, Peaches-style lyrics about their coños while Scandinavian dance music played in the background.

After the concert, the music kept going and the band came out to join the crowd.  I found one of the girls - the one who had been introduced as "La Borracha" - and congratulated her.  Before I knew it, we were being introduced to everyone, and the crowd that had been so intimidating when we first walked in was suddenly filled with our new best friends.  With the exception of a quick break for empanadas around the corner, served to us through the slats of a thick steel fence, we danced with them until Matik Matik started to wind down sometime close to 3 am.

That was an early introduction to a country that feels not unlike home, but with friendlier people and more dancing.  Everyone is eager to show off a country almost as new to them as it is to the tourists who have just recently started to pour in, the freshness of past violence evident in the sheer giddiness Colombians seem to feel at its sudden absence as much as it's evident in the country's unofficial tagline - "Colombia - The Only Danger is Not Wanting to Leave!"