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Idle, potentially misinformed musings about Colombia (I was born there, adopted as a baby, and moved to the US, so I'm no local. Just trying to help):

1. The national anthem, ¡Oh, Gloria Inmarcesible! is pretty cool. It talks all about the battles in its history and gets pretty dramatic about them. It even mentions centaurs, which I don't understand. If you clicked the link, you might have noticed that the law apparently requires the anthem to be played at 6:00a and 6:00p on all radio and TV broadcasts. I can't verify this myself, but there it is.
   
   
2. ICYMI, Colombia was in the World Cup. They lost to Brazil in a terribly officiated game, but many agree that they were an amazing team despite missing their star player (Falcao) on an injury. Their quarterfinal appearance was the farthest the team has ever made it in its entire World Cup history.
   
   
3. /r/AskHistory recommends the book The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. I found it at a flea market by coincidence, which still amazes me, but I've yet to read it.
   
   
4. You'll notice that the flags of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela are very similar. These countries all came from Gran Colombia, a much larger nation that broke apart to eventually form the nations of northern South America that we have today. To be honest, have almost no knowledge of the history of any of the nations that rose and fell over all those years, but I want to point out the Wikipedia page for Gran Colombia let's you navigate through the all the nations that came before and after it in a very clear way on the sidebar.
   
   
5. Colombia has military conscription. You can pay out and you can be medically ineligible, but regardless you have to get a military ID card that declares your status or you can be drafted.
   
   
6. The largest ethnic group is mestizos, followed by whites. Yet somehow the Wikipedia page for white Colombians is more comprehensive than the page for Mestizo Colombians. Beats me. Also if any Colombians see this, I myself would love to hear about how different races are viewed by each other in Colombia (including mestizos, whites, blacks, and indigenous.)
   
   
7. Somewhat recently, one of Colombia's most renowned writers Gabriel García Marquez died. He wrote some books, including Love in the Time of Cholera and 100 Years of Solitude, that I haven't personally read, but are extremely well regarded and evocative of the images of Colombia. He wrote the first volume of an autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, but the second half was unfortunately cut short due to the onset of dementia. Very sad.
   
   
8. Colombia's constitution is younger than I am. If they enacted the same constitution just a few years earlier, I would technically be a Colombian citizen right now. One of the changes was that you can accept another nationality without losing your Colombian nationality. But getting it back is just a matter of paperwork if you've renounced it. Anyway, everything you could want to know about the Colombian constitution can be found right in the link, as there is an English translation of the document in the External Links section.
   
   I'm nothing like an expert in Colombia, so take everything I said as something to research and not just to take for granted. I hope people read this and get some ideas about what kind of things they want to look into, because that took a while to write.

I researched what books to read about Russia before traveling here and this was the most often recommended:

Land of the Firebird

So glad I read it, amazing book. It covers mostly the cultural history, but in doing so makes a very good summary of Russia's history as a whole up to 1917.

It's been very eye-opening discovering the history of Russia and Slavic people. You begin to realize there is another parallel European culture with it's own rich traditions of music, literature, folk lore and superstitions, most of which has been hidden from the West only because of politics. Without the Russian Revolution I believe we would know the stories of Pushkin and music of Rimsky-Korsakov as well as we know the Brothers Grimm and Beethoven.

Here are a couple books I think are pretty good:

What is the What by David Eggers

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih