Bolivar

Bolivar is a beautiful old town in a coffee farming region of Colombia. My mom and dad were raised there, before getting married and moving to Medellin. My gradmother's house was a beautiful classic colonial home in the center of town, across the street from the church and the plaza.

It's an incredibly verdant landscape, with every shade of green imaginable on the hillsides, including the dark rich green of coffee plants.

Most of our family and friends that still live there are involved in the coffee industry in one way or another, including my cousin Jaime who owns a huge coffee farm (next post).

It used to be the case that the only place to get good coffee in Colombia was to go to the airport and buy the "export quality" stuff that they generally sold to the United States, but I noticed that the quality of the coffee in general had improved quite a bit. Here are the boys drinking basically frapuccinos at a little coffee shop (much more charming than a starbucks) in Bolivar.

As in many farming areas, in Bolivar you have the extremes of wealth and poverty, so you see both beautiful colonial architecture and third-world shantys. The boys didn't seem fazed by any of it, but it was definitely a good experience to expose them to it all.

You can view the complete photo album here: http://picasaweb.google.com/oscardario/Bolivar