Here we have a real featured blog about Colombia, a little different to what we can imagine. Normally many blogs try to show the best and most beautiful pictures and they have of course their right, but nothing better than show those things from the daily life. A country is known on its streets and countrysides, rather than in that so protected and well-arranged “tourist-tube” where visitors are conducted with always smiling faces and an intermediate-boring English to say “welcome sir, how may I help you sir, please sir”.
Picture of Carlos Múnera, “La silla del gerente (The Chair of the Manager)
This blog of Carlos Múnera from Medellín and his Somos iguales (we are the same), is a lovely exception. It is not only the magnificent photographies of what seem to be a skillful and artistic observer, but also the subjects he follows in the simple of the most characteristic of the Colombian life.
The logo is already a hint to the content, with that unmistakable popular shop of barrios with a weight and the creol potates. Details from the Medellín streets, the reflection in a wide way of the Colombian cities in their more popular corners, the simplicity of the people, the urban life, the popular characters like the banner of late commediant Montecristo, pages from the archive of University of Antioquia, very old promotions to the premier of a movie in that old cinema for adults that was demolished to give space to the growing metropoli.
Among the pictures one is worthy of an international prize: that with the title “la silla del gerente” (the chair of the manager), a almost presidential chair made of an old car and used by the owner of a mechanic workshop in La Bayadera, Medellín downtown. The colorful designs of a rural bus from Ituango town and the existencialist graffitti “la muerte es tan segura que nos da toda una vida de ventaja“, (dead is so sure that gives us a life of advantage), and at the end some recommendations of how to sleep in the street if you want:
1. Use your backpack as a pillow.
2. Put any electronic instrument like radios, handphone and others in a safe place.
3. Take out any ID Card that identifies you as belonging to any company, organization or institution. Try to be as much as anonymous as possible.