Day 1 Wednesday - What does a girl have to do to get a drink in this town?

Brian & I fly to Cartagena via Miami. It’s about a 2 ½ hour flight from Miami. The Cartagena airport seems fairly new, but not in a tricked-out way. It is very minimal & modest but with some nice details, and it’s also really clean.

We take a cab to our hotel (the fare is a whopping $5). We’re staying at Casa La Fe, a charming bed & breakfast in the central part of the city (called El Centro).

Inner courtyard of Hotel Casa La Fe, where breakfast is served.

The Old Town of Cartagena is pretty small & compact. We’re able to walk around and see a lot of the city in the late afternoon. It’s like walking across Manhattan, time/distance-wise. Cartagena is an old walled city, surrounded by Las Murallas, a series of forts built in the 1600 and 1700s to protect the city from pirate attacks. You can walk along the top of the fort walls. It reminds me of the fort in Galle, Sri Lanka but with fewer illicit young lovers.

Fort walls.

We come across a bar/restaurant called Cafe del Mar on top of the wall. We want to have a drink there to watch the sunset. After we ask the waitress for every type of alcohol on the menu and get turned down, she tells us no establishments in the city are serving alcohol tonight because of a teacher strike (??!?). Honestly, a pineapple juice is not what I’m hankering for, so we move on.

Eventually we walk by a small Cuban bar/restaurant, La Bodeguita del Medio. The owner is standing in the doorway, and she tells us that she will serve us cerveza. This place is cozy & a little divey. It probably seats 25 people maximum. Its walls are filled with photos of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. We have a couple of beers. This place actually becomes our home base in Cartagena; we wind up stopping by here for a drink or snack practically every day during our trip.

Awesome stained glass portrait of Che hanging over the bar of La Bodeguita del Medio.

Matt, a guy from NYC that sat next to me on the plane, meets us and we go to La Vitrola (Vitrola is a brand of phonographs) for dinner. I order the grilled shrimp, which is served with arroz con coco (rice prepared with coconut milk). The restaurant has a Havana-esque décor, and a Cuban band. It got packed, so it is apparently quite popular with the local crowd.

We go to an outdoor café in Plaza Santo Domingo and order beers. The waiter says something about coffee, and at first I’m thinking he wants to give us a Red Bull additive or something so we can stay up late dancing. However after a couple of minutes we figure out he’s telling us he can’t be seen drinking outside so he’s asking if he can serve us beer in coffee cups vs. bottles so it appears that we’re drinking coffee: “Colombian coffee.”