We walked into town in the morning from our hostel out in the middle of nowhere, wandered around a bit, then met up with Johanna for brunch at a famous restaurant called 'Brunch'. Perfect. It was pretty great. They had a good atmosphere with a bunch of writing on the walls from tourists and was run by an older American guy. They make their own peanut butter and ice cream on site too, which was pretty delicious. After brunch we wandered to go find the lookout point of the town (AKA The Mirador). It was nice, but it was kind of cloudy up there. You could see pretty deep into the jungle/valley on one side and the historic town centre on the other. Not too shabby. Then we wandered through all the little touristy shops around town just kind of hanging out. By this point in the day, there was already a pretty strong police/military presence because of the election and a street was taped off. At this point, we didn't really understand what was happening considering the town only had about 5000 inhabitants. Whatever, it'll all be good. We went to a restaurant and asked for beer presuming to be denied....and we were in luck! We were allowed to drink as long as we were discreet in the back of the restaurant and drank out of mugs instead of bottles. Okay, I can deal with those stipulations. We wound up drinking more beers there than expected because it started raining for a bit...we couldnt leave during the rain of course. After a couple hours of that, we went back out to see how the elections were going. We went up to where the street was taped off, and it turns out the people who supported each of the major parties was yelling and chanting accross the town at each other. It was crazy! It was the blue shirt people vs. the green shirt people. No violence of anything, just rowdyness and strong support of their parties. We wandered around both sides and it was pretty eye opening...nothing like that would ever happen at home....especially in a town that size. I wonder what the big cities are like. Trevor felt a little weary wearing his bright green rain shell through the crows of blue supporters...oh well. Nothing bad happened.
By this point Trev was getting a bit hungry (classic Trevor..he eats about 2 times as much as I do) so we went back to the Brunch place again for some grub and ask the . Turns out they had a little movie theater in the back and the American owner said we could drink in there....so we each had a beer. Such rebels. When we left it was dark and raining. The green party seemed to be ecstatic so I'm presuming that they won or something. I did some googling and it's not even for president so I don't really understand what all the fuss is about. No matter it was pretty cool. The main square had a huge riot control truck show up with a bunch of SWAT type personnel in crazy amounts of protective gear. We even had one of the SWAT guys come up and try to explain in broken English what was going on...it was tough, but it was really cool. He assured us everything was safe and that nothing crazy was going to happen. We took a picture with him and went back to the Hostel after meeting up with out new friend Celeste. Johanna came back to the hostel too, so we played some board games and drank a couple drinks. Salento has been fun, and we are surely going to miss the colder climate, but tomorrow we're off to Buga.
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