Cali day 5 - Tuesday

Today was our cultural day, visits were planned to a couple of museums and an art gallery, but first we ate lunch at Lucero's while Mama Leny did laundry. Mama Leny has a small apartment and it would be difficult to fit a washing machine into her apartment without taking up a lot of space in her kitchen. So, once a week, she hires a washer. The unit is delivered to her apartment and hooked up to water and electricity, she completes her washing then two hours later the washer is taken away. Total cost - less than $4. This is a real service economy. Anything can be ordered for home delivery and service is quick, cheap and always carried out with a smile.



After another excellent meal, Lucero drove us downtown to the Calima Gold Museum, located in the building owned by the Colombian Central Bank - Banco De La Republica. The primary Gold Museum is located in Colombia's capital city, Bogota, but Cali, as Colombia's third largest city, has been lucky enough to warrant a smaller version of the museum with many interesting artifacts. Though the museum only occupied one room it was full of interesting facts, including information that the Calima region, which stretches from the Pacific coast in West Colombia and across the mountains to Cali, had been settled for more than 10,000 years. This particularly impressive figure had gold earrings that had expanded his ear lobes to more than four inches in diameter, a gold nose ring, breastplates and belt and various gold ornaments. There appears to be little information on Calima on the web in English. The one site I did find http://www.procalima.org/ has some great photographs (click Projects then photo gallery)

This area of the city is characterized by colonial architecture that has been preserved. White stucco walls to reflect the sun, wooden shutters that can be opened to let in the cool afternoon breezes that blow down from the mountain and roofs made from half round tiles to protect against the regular rain showers.

From the Gold Museum we walked a couple of blocks to the Archaeological Museum - the Museo Arqueologico La Merced. The museum contains ceramics and pottery from the pre-hispanic societies which inhabited the southwest area of Colombia. The museum building is an old colonial church and monastery that has been converted. In the first exhibit room and at various places through the other four exhibit rooms the original floors and walls of the church have been exposed to show the construction methods used in colonial times.
One room focuses on ceramics, another on burial practices and a third on pottery colors and decorations. Glass cases with examples from each region are in each room. You can borrow, but not keep, a guide to the exhibits in English.

In the central courtyard of the museum is a copy of one of the stone statues found in San Agostin where civilization flourished from around 1,000 BC. There is also a sheltered recreation of a burial site from the Tolima people in the Magdalena valley. Remains of human civilizations dating back 16,000 years have been found in this region.

Here Sofia is descending the circular staircase in to reach the burial chamber 20 feet below ground. The dead were laid flat in coffins created from hollowed out tree trunks, then at some later date the bones were removed from the coffin and placed in ceramic pots, and (though this was not completely clear) the tree trunk coffin was reused.

From the Archaeological Museum we took a taxi 15 or 20 blocks (for less than $2) to the Museo La Tertulia (Museum of Modern Art) We arrived on completely the wrong date. The museum had been cleared of all exhibits and was dedicated to a display of movie posters. Only movie posters. Nothing else. And the modern art exhibits were not due to be returned until next week. Unfortunately we did not discover this until we had paid the $5 entry fee ($1.66 each) so we walked around and looked at movie posters for a little while.

The Museo La Tertulia is located on the street that runs alongside the River Cali on the opposite side from the park with the painted cats. So we crossed the street and the bridge over the river and looked at the artists submissions to be the "Cat Mother" The 20 cats are all about 4 feet tall and six feet long and each was decorated by a different artist in a competition. Several of the cats had been moved from the park so they could provide a whimsical sight on one of the downtown plazas.

From the cat park we crossed the road and walked to the Ventolini Ice Cream shop for Colombian Ice Cream. The store not only sells excellent ice cream (think Marble Slab Creamery) but also has a coffee bar selling espresso and various other coffee drinks with and without alcohol and since it was six o'clock somewhere in the America's I decided to have an Irish coffee along with my ice cream. "Got Milk" anyone?