Business on a Bike in Bogota

Nancy, a 30-something woman from Bogota, is on her way to work.

Under a sunny Bogota sky, she’s mounted on a motorcycle that is large for her small frame. On the highway headed north, she twists and turns through mid-morning traffic, narrowly missing getting hit by taxis and buses plowing through the heavily congested lanes.

Almost on the outskirts of the city, she turns right into the parking lot of a shopping mall. She parks her motorcycle in a central area and places the helmet on the seat. She opens the metal box attached to the back of the seat, and unfolds a giant green umbrella to shade her while she works.

Nancy is open for business.

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A Word about COP (no, not policemen – the Colombian peso)

One of the funny things about living in another country is that you discover just how much money shifts, changes, and simply dances about all the time. Before moving to South America, the dollar was just the dollar to me. Sure, there was some inflation, but I never worried about it.

Then I arrived in South America and I continuously heard “the dollar went up,” “the dollar went down,” and I thought, “The dollar doesn’t move around that much, does it?”

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