Sunday in the park

Bogota has a variety of parks but the largest is called "Parque Simon Bolivar", and it is about the size of Central Park in New York. On the way to or back from the airport I had passed the park many times in the taxi. On this cloudy Sunday I decided to take a walk to the park... about 30 blocks to the east (direction airport) from Carrera 7 to Carrera 37....a good work-out!

On the Sunday morning the city of Bogota closes a number of its roads for joggers, walkers, skaters and cyclists. So I started my walk with hundreds of others on the Carrera 7 (or "el septima")...

A bit to the east on Calle 63 there is a Sunday market at a square in front of one of the classic cathedrals. Lots of people come here for a solid lunch as they make them in in the rural areas...

Carrera 15 is one of the large roads going from the south to the north with the special bus lines called "Millenium". The buses have special lanes and in the middle there are the stations. I think the city of Curitiba in Brazil was the first city to come up with this public transport concept, and Ottawa in Canada has some of this copied in its bus system as well. More and more cities in Latin America are adopting this system especially in cities where building an underground is not easy to do.

A bit further to the east on one of the highways going through the city from south to north, you can see on the left an old sports stadium and further on the newer large soccer stadium. Turning back you can see the mountain range in the west of the city, the area where my apartment is.

The park is divided in four areas and each has a small lake. Here a group of puppet artists practicing and in an other spot a group of Pilatus practitioners have found a nice place to do a Sunday exercise.

Others are setting up for a Sunday party in the park. This park makes big city living do-able...

The park has a huge sports complex with track & field, soccer field (of course) and also an Olympic aquatic center. In front of this center is one of the many places where they sell shirts of the beloved national teams; the bright yellow, so popular in many South American countries.

Last week I learned that the Colombian national road skating team won about half of the medals at the world championships (in Belgium this year). Here are some future medal winners.... :-)

In front of one of the entrances of the largest part of the park you can buy kites of all sizes and most of them wonderfully colorful.

This is one of the areas where a lot of people were flying kites. Unfortunately with my iPhone camera you can't really see how nice these colorful kites look in the sky.

In another part of the park two employees of the city's wellness team are having many of their fellow Bogotanians going in a good arobics excercise in the park. Many others set up little tents and hang out for the day in the park; here for example in a play-ground area.

You can't see it well on this photo, but on the top of the mountain in the background is the Montseratte where also many Bogotanians hang out on a Sunday (see one of my blog posts of February when I went up there). I hope you had as nice and relaxing a Sunday as I had today!