06.24.03
Arts and Crafts
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 – Bogotá
After the party a bunch of us met and went to an art film theater to see a French movie called Le Roi Danse (made by Gerard Corbiau the same director who made Farinelli). The movie was quite fascinating, about King Louis XIV and his fascination with music and Ballet. It was also interesting in that it was a movie in French with Spanish subtitles, something I have not done in a long time. With the little bit of French that I understand I was catching all kinds of miss-translations.
This morning we had a great breakfast of Tamales Boyacences (very different from Mexican Tamales). I then visited the Xerox office in Bogotá and met a number of people. After that we went to the museum of modern art where they had a great exhibit of modern photography. We had enough time at the museum that we were able to drop by their theater and listen to the trail end of what was a very interesting seminar on Colombian cinema.
We met my sister and various relatives of her husband for lunch. My mom, my dad, Sara and I then went to a crafts fair. The fair was amazing. It was set up on huge fair grounds with each pavilion specializing in art from a different region of the country. In addition to sampling a lot of very delicious regional foods and seeing some amazing works of art I was able to buy myself some nice wooden spoons, a new leather handcrafted belt and a few gifts for the folks back home.
In an hour we will have dinner with my dad, Himelda and some invited friends. It is still early but I am already very tired. I look forward to sleeping a lot tonight.
The dinner was very and I mean VERY interesting. The guests were a cousin of mine,Vicky Coulver (founder of ‘The New School’), her husband, Agustin Lombano (the Colombian representative for the Fulbright scholarship and a board member of the Ford Foundation), his wife, my dad (who is a professor and co-founded the Bertrand Russell school), Himelda (who is vice-minister of education for Colombia), Sara and myself. Needless to say the conversation focused on the state of education in Colombia and various other education topics. Sara and I mostly stayed quiet and listened (partially because we were both half asleep and partially because there was some serious education power housing going on that was well above our heads) which was really quite fine since just listening to these people we both learned a hell of a lot.