Dear fellow travellers,

You might have already discovered this sad piece of truth – there is no postcard for sale in Bogotá. (Well I don’t know other places well enough to speak for them. The same thing may be true about the rest of Colombia.) Usually, a tourist destination like the Eiffel tower or Sydney opera house may have a cluster of souvenir shops around them, where tourists can get some practically useless objects to make their memory last longer, extend their travel experience to others or show that they’re still thinking of their loved ones while away. The pre-internet era’s fossil has not gone extinct because of its perceived usefulness and paper-thin romance.

When my brother came to visit, he went into every seemingly promising shop hunting down postcards, since he had promised 14 friends to send each of them a piece of Colombia on paper. After a whole week of futile effort, he decided to check out a book shop on the Septima near zona G. They had postcards, but on them were not pictures  like the Colombian flag, colonial houses spilled over with Bougainvilleas in Cartagena, or the coffee hills, but some arty prints of water color flowers..

I would just go with coffee. Easy to find, helps the farmers.

TBC