We woke up around 06:00, and Crystal did some yoga prior to us heading over to the airport.  It was an easy ride there, and this morning we were flying out of the larger terminal, not the small one we’d flown out of to La Macarena, Puerto Inírida, and Neiva.  The bigger terminal was infinitely better, mainly because we could keep our backpacks with us.  Moreover, since we were on Avianca, a Star Alliance member, we could hang out in the Avianca lounge.  

The plane was fully packed, so it was good we got on in the first group.  The overheads were as full as on a Southwest flight to Las Vegas.  Fortunately the flight to Medellin was a short one.  Outside the baggage claim area we met Mocando, who drove us to the hotel.  On the drive we went through a very long tunnel, about 8km, which Mocando told us shaved quite a bit of time off of the drive.  We arrived at our hotel (Diez Hotel) just before noon.  To our surprise, in the lobby we met Danna, our guide, who’d apparently been at the other airport waiting for us.  She said she’d be with us the next two days, and gave us some recommendations for places to eat and things to do this afternoon.

We couldn’t get in the room yet, so we just checked our bags and then went out exploring.  We hadn’t done much prep for Medellin, or for the trip in general - despite having four months to do so - so we were kind of just winging it.  The neighborhood we were in, El Poblado, reminded us of the Gaslamp neighborhood in downtown San Diego.  Everything was “nice,” but seemingly nothing was authentic, and everything was geared towards tourists (in this case international tourists), so we didn’t really feel like we were in Medellín.  The city was incredibly green, about the greenest city we'd seen outside of Singapore.  There were trees, bamboo, interesting cacti, ornamental bananas, and a whole host of other interesting and colorful plants.

We had lunch at Ocio, which Danna had recommended.  It wasn’t that full when we arrived, but it was pretty packed shortly thereafter.  The service was a bit slow, which wasn’t an issue because we were in no hurry, but the waiter was very apologetic and told us we’d get a free dessert because of the wait.  We used the time it was taking to check out everyone’s food as it came out, and then we changed our order accordingly.  Justin got a short rib dish that looked incredible, and which about half of the restaurant had ordered, but it looked better than it tasted (an A+ versus an A-).

We checked in and went up to the room after we got back, and it started pouring outside, with lightning and thunder.  This wasn’t a huge surprise to us, after having checked the weather report, but it was still a bummer to be stuck inside on our first day.  Once it calmed down and we saw out the window that the cars weren’t using their windshield wipers, Justin went out walking a couple times, scouting bars and restaurants.  He also watched penalty kicks in the Liverpool-PSG match in the lobby, with a handful of French fans who were a lot more invested than he was.  Crystal was fiddling around online with the wi-fi.  We tried to cast from either our phone or computer to the TV in the room - in order to watch the latest White Lotus episode - but we couldn’t make it work.

Eventually we decided to go to Siete Pulgadas, a listening bar that Crystal had found whilst fiddling around online.  Justin knew the way, as it was just a block or two from where he had turned around on one of his walks earlier in the afternoon.  When we entered, they told us it was cash only, so that limited us.  We still had some cash from before, but not a ton.  So we decided we’d do only one round unless the drink was incredible, in which case we could afford a second round.  The drink was good, but we decided to have just one.  We were transfixed by the graphic equalizers on the stereo and the Aurora Borealis light shining on the ceiling (we want to get one now).  On the walk back we stopped at Calante, just a couple blocks from the hotel.  The ambience was better at Siete Pulgadas, but other stuff was better at Calante, and we could also pay with a credit card.  We had just one round there also, then went back to the hotel and went to sleep around 21:00.