I had planned today to visit Arvi, the large recreational park outside of Medellin, with my girlfriend when she told me it was not safe. It didn't make sense to me that one of Medellin's main tourist attractions would be dangerous, but she read from the that day's paper that a group of tourists had been robbed at gunpoint of their wallets and phones right in front of Parque Piedras Blancas, where I had been with my camera on my one visit to Arvi.
When I searched Google to find this story for myself, the first story I found was about a murder six months earlier in the exact hotel I was staying. The second story was a blog entry about a man robbed at gunpoint inside a taxi by a motorcyclist. He was heading to DAS is daylight to renew his passport, exactly as I had done a few days earler. The next amazing coincidence was that my girlfriend knew the person murdered in my hotel, but that is outside the reason for this entry.
And the reason for the article is that you can never take your safety for granted, especially in countries like Colombia. It is so easy to get complacent, to forget you look different than everyone else, to pull out your iPhone, etc. My situation I think is especially dangerous because I repeatedly am visiting city parks with a very expensive camera.