colombia

How to send a letter – Bogotá mail

January 4, 2014 // 29 Comments

The first part of this post explains how to send a letter from Bogotá to somewhere else (either in Colombia or to another country). The second part briefly explains how to format a Colombian address when you are posting a letter to Colombia. How to send a letter from Bogotá Colombians rarely use the public mail service so it took me a while to find out how to send [more]

How to survive the Colombian markets – shopping tips

January 1, 2014 // 0 Comments

In Colombian markets, whether these be indoors, outdoors or people selling on the street, mastering the art of negotiation is essential if you want to pay a fair (or perhaps less unfair) price for goods. A typical market stall in Bogota First things first: you either need to learn the numbers from 1 – 1000 in Spanish (not as difficult as it sounds) so that [more]

The Bogota bus system: demystifying the TransMilenio

December 28, 2013 // 3 Comments

Bogota bus system - a Transmilenio bus at rush hour

Updated July 2019. In a city where getting from A to B can be stressful, tiring and chaotic, it doesn’t help that the SITP and TransMilenio system (i.e. the Bogota bus system is extremely hard to fathom, even for some Bogotanos! Look at a Bogota bus network map at any station and it might as well be written in ancient Greek for all the sense it makes – [more]

How to calculate your taxi fare in Bogotá

December 28, 2013 // 2 Comments

Bogota taxi driver and tariff This post will tell you how to calculate your taxi fare if you take a yellow taxi in Bogotá. For tips on how to get a cab using a mobile app, please see my post How to get a taxi in Bogota – Taxi apps. For safety tips, take a look at 10 tips for taking a taxi in Bogotá. My top tip is actually to use Uber in Bogota. If you already [more]

Bogota weather

December 9, 2013 // 0 Comments

I expect that Bogotá would come second to Britain in terms of how often people complain about the weather. Colombia lies on the equator, and as such does not have seasons as we do in Europe. There is the drier half of the year (January to June) and the wetter half of the year (July to December). During the dry season, the weather tends to be hot and sunny in the [more]

Bogotá: a city of opportunities (amongst the chaos)

December 9, 2013 // 0 Comments

Bogotá, like most world capitals, is a cosmopolitan city – hay de todo un poco (there is a bit of everything) – and thus is a city of many peoples (if not many cultures, exactly); Colombians have drifted towards the city of Bogotá for various reasons. One is that it offers more opportunities in terms of studies and jobs. It is relatively easy to set up a [more]

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