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Comment by personlurking | Hacker News Reader

> BTW, safety is an order of magnitude higher two decades later.

How is the current situation, safety-wise?

(Edited to make it one question, instead of two)

My wife and I are nomads and we've have lived all over the world. Medellin is one of our favorites. We lived in El Poblado last year for about a month and found it as safe as any big city and the people are lovely. It's true that El Poblado is the very nice part of Medellin, but we wandered all over the city and had no problems.

Nice to hear that. It reflects my stay in the city, also for a month, several years ago.

Was in Medellin last October. Perfectly safe. Certain areas you don't really want to go wandering around alone at night, but that's true of every city.

> [...] but that's true of every city.

Of a lot of city. There are exceptions, like Singapore.

Pretty sure Singapore have bad neighbourhoods too. By their standards. Their worse neighbourhood is probably better than most good areas in many cities.

>> Specific areas – Geylang and lower-cost government housing – suffer from more serious crimes (muggings, loan sharking, and illicit drug use) although not on the scale of a similar sized U.S. city.

https://www.osac.gov/pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=171...

Oh, they are better and worse area. But by the standards of "Would I go there at night?" they are all good enough.

(Also lots of cities in Switzerland are probably also all completely safe by that standard.)

I did end up lost in Comuna 13 for about an hour, but it was during the afternoon. I kept walking up sets of stairs that ended at different people's homes. It seems what was once one of the most dangerous places in the city, it now has walking tours in English.

I travelled and worked remotly in Colombia during 11 months in 2014, thereof 7 in Medellin alone and I now live in Bogota.

I always felt safe, even when stroling or going out in poorer neighborhoods at night. I'm actually more cautious about pickpocketing and mugging in the more touristic and richer ones. There are of course places I wouldn't go alone in the dark, but I don't really have any reason to be there anyway.

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