During this trip I have patronized mostly modest restaurants, where the bill rarely exceeded COP$38,000 for a main course. But looking around me, most of the other diners seem to be local and do not appear to be particularly affluent. So how do they manage to afford these prices if the hourly wages are a little more than US$1.

I even popped into a McDonald's in Cartagena, and the prices there seemed to be higher than the average US McDonald's.

So how does the economy function?