Medellin- Coffee, Parks and the Best Pizza Ever

Breakfast by the Park

It’s bright and sunny. Yeah! We head to the hostel restaurant which is also open to the public. The restaurant borders a lush green park with a gurgling stream. It’s a beautiful setting and good healthy food. John has a stack of five pancakes with strawberries and bananas between each pancake. I have avocado on toast with a salad.

Coffee Tour

After breakfast we wait in the lobby for our Cafe (coffee)Tour. The small bus arrives and we are on our way. I have a feeling that we are on a Spanish tour. John and I can pick out a few things.

There is a lot of graffiti everywhere you go. Some are wonderful and others not so much. We pass areas with lots of homeless people and other pleasant areas. There is lush vegetation everywhere I look.

Houses are built into the mountainsides with an efficient system of cable cars to transport people.

The coffee tour is ok. We learned quite a bit. My main take away is that medium roast coffee is the healthiest and best. Dark roast has a lot of the black parts destroyed by beetles that is still sold because it blends in with the dark roast coffee beans. Because it is roasted black, a person cannot tell that the rotted parts have been mixed in. You want to buy brown coffee.

We also learn about making coffee. A good mix is 10 mg coffee; a heaping tablespoon, for every 100 ml water. You increase the number of tablespoons per 100 ml water if you want it stronger. The coffee farmer said the French press was the best way to brew coffee but you pour just a bit of water in first and stir the water and coffee first to release gases before pouring the rest of the water into the French press.

When pouring the coffee into a number of cups, pour a little in each cup then go back and pour more in each cup. Keep doing this until the cups are full. You do this because each level in the French press has different properties.

The greener coffee beans are good for weight loss.

Parks & Pedestrian Restaurant Areas

At the end of the tour our bus drops us off at our hotel. We drop off our backpack and walk through the park behind our hostel towards a heavily policed pedestrian restaurant area.

The park is beautiful. It’s like walking through a lush jungle with streams and little waterfalls through it.

The restaurant area is alive with people and blocks and blocks of restaurants. It is heavily policed and some areas even have security guards with very obvious automatic weapons.

Street performers are at some of the stop lights one guy even has silk ropes attached to a tree above a road with stoplights. When the light is red, he quickly climbs up and artfully drops down at an alarming speed…all before it turns green again.

I am approached a few times by street vendors to buy souvenirs…it appears that I look like a gringo.

We can’t find the vegetarian restaurant I want to go to and the other one is closed so we head back to our hostel and drink cocktails at the rooftop bar. The staff are lovely and very patient as I practice my Spanish on them.

Return to Cafe Zorba

If possible, supper at Cafe Zorba is even better than last night. We have the chimichurri pizza and I order the Columbian wine. Ok the wine isn’t so hot (slightly reminiscent of battery acid) but the chimichurri pizza is the best I’ve ever had. John won’t let me order a second pizza (probably because I was rolling around and groaning after sharing a second pizza last night)…so I have chocolate Gelato for dessert.

John also won’t let me take his picture in the restaurant tonight because I was laughing so hard at the restaurant video he starred in last night.

Overall a really fun night.