Visiting Boyaca

This weekend I went to Boyaca, a largely agricultural department of Colombia where my Grandpa Pinto was born. Boyaca has 1500+ towns and villages. The first picture is the town of Duitama, where we are driving around at 7:35 am AFTER milking the cows and playing basketball for an hour. In the picture, my cousin’s cows have wandered too far from home and we’re chasing them back to the farm in the car.

To keep things brief I:

· Went to the natural hot springs with Lee

· Went bowling (Wow! I am a TERRIBLE bowler. An 88!?! Really!?)

· Milked a cow

· Saw where Grandpa Pinto was born, used to live, and went to high school before he moved to the US

· Hiked a plot of land (aka small mountain) where cousin Ricardo wants to build 50 luxury/cultural condos

· Met lots of cousins, one of whom is a nun who has been living inside a convent for 41 years without ever leaving (she talked to us through a window with steel bars to make sure people can’t get in)

Milk that is not going to be used immediately (like what I drank) is boiled and then refrigerated to make it last a bit longer.

This might look like a delicious sausage, but it’s actually a delicious piece of intestine that has been stuffed with nothing but cow blood and rice and then cooked. Apparently they are so delicious that they were Grandpa Pinto’s favorite, and he used to sneak off to eat them when Grandma Pinto played cards because she thought they were disgusting. All testimonies of deliciousness are secondhand; I’m with you Grandma.