I love my city in Colombia. I want to talk a bit about Ibagué. The city is known as the musical capital in Colombia. It’s a small (actually big compared to European cities, but small for American -Latin American- standards) and hot (not extremely hot, but very hot compared to Poland) city near Bogotá with approximately 520,000 inhabitants.
Town hall and Plaza de Bolívar in Ibagué
I was born there and I’ve been living there all my life. The weather is perfect to me, because the temperature is around 20°C and 28°C on average along the year. In my city there are a lot of mountains around and we have the snowy mountain “Nevado del Tolima”, where we can go to walk (actually climb) and see the snow over the top of the mountain and we’ve got waterfalls that are amazing.
Snowy Mountain - Nevado del Tolima
Waterfalls near Ibague
Me in the Waterfalls
In Colombia there is a main square in all the cities. By law it is always called “plaza de Bolivar”. Normally, the town hall and the cathedral are located there, like some sort of Rynek. I love it during Christmas because there are a lot of lights and is beautiful.
Main square in Ibague
My university is called Univiversidad de Ibague, and there I spent a lot of fun times. Because I was working with IAESTE and I had the opportunity to know people and different cultures and I started to be interested in travelling. In the university we organized some festival for the students and It was wonderful.
IAESTE
In June (actually, 24th of June), we have the carnivals in Ibague, we celebrate “fiestas de San Juan” where we do a beauty contest so we have Miss Folklore. The queen has to have the best skills to dance the typical rhythms from our region, especially in this case a song called “Sanjuanero”.
- Miss El Espinal in “San Juan” parade
There’s a parade along the main street “La Quinta” (the popular 5th avenue) in which each of the Miss (they are from the different regions of Colombia) is accompanied by a group that is dancing with her and playing traditional musical instruments. Also we have the “Cabalgata” where people ride horses in the last part of the parade.
- Parade in Ibague
During the entire week there are different events as concerts, fairs, parades, parties in the street and all the people is celebrating the “San Juan” and is very happy.
