Eres una nota

... means you're an absoluter belter, a delight of a person. You're a musical note! Colombian spanish is incredible.

Since you last heard from me i've moved into a new flat, and am slowly filling it up with gubbins. I bought a load of furniture off this unfortunate English teacher, and travelled across Bogota in the back of a rattly removal man, lying in the pitch black on a red velvet sofa which was rather more haggard after this journey. Now in our living room there is nothing but the sofa in question, a Colombian flag pinned to the wall and my old school leather suitcase sitting in the middle of the floor as a kind of makeshift coffee table. I love it.

I've started classes now and the've all gone well so far, had fun whipping a class of 35 surly 18 year olds into an absolute frenzy over a game of "leisure time bingo", and telling them how much i like Colombian food.

Last night me and a few pals went to this belter of a bar just round the corner from the flat called Casa de Citas. This means "House of dates" (like a night out sort of date, not the dried fruit) and the place used to be a whorehouse, but now it's this big cavernous colonial building with old geezers playing Cuban music and old salsa posters everywhere. As soon as we arrived this guy came up and immediately riled me by asking what we wanted in English, but then when i asked for 2 Agilas (a delightful brand of Colombian beer) he responed in a thick Celtic drawl, "Aggeelaz, aaye?". Needless to say i was a little shocked to hear an accent as melodious as my own here in Colombia, shocked but delighted. He'd lived in Northern Ireland hence the amazing accent, and we ended up sitting boozing with him and his mates all night. The were really interesting, they all worked as political analysts, and one of them was a total big shot in Colombia who used to be a guerrilla but now works with the authorities. This is why i like going out during the week, because if there's only 6 people in the whole pub you're bound to end up talking to them. One of them was a total sports fanatic called Gina, who's going to take us to see a Colombian football match on Saturday! Braw.

Talking of football, one of my pals has just instigated the Bogota branch of the St. Mirren Supporter's Club, i'm not sure i can stand for there not being a PTFC rival to this organization, although we are probably the only two fans of wee rubbish Scottish teams in the whole country.

Scran

Yesterday i went out for some cheeky tapas, which was rather a nice change from all the meat, rice and plantain. It was interesting to see what the tapas here are like, i think it´s the same phenomena as some Chinese classics like chop suey (i think) not actually existing in proper Chinese cuisine but having been invented somewhere along the way, similarly there were about 2 things on the menu that you actually get in Spain, one of them being patatas bravas which came in a sort of mayonnaisey cheese sauce. Some tasty snags and a plate of delicious calamares al ajillo later, the grand finale of the meal arrived. In this tapas bar they had a few totally out of place items, like cajun chicken wings, but the best one was blokje kaas. If my Dutch serves me well this means "cubes of cheese" and that´s exactly what it was, about a pound of squeaky orange cheddar cut into huge cubes and served alongside a slick of apricot jam. It was great, although i had some strange dreams last night and woke up feeling really sad. But imagine coming all the way to Colombia to eat some kind of bizarre bastardised Dutch delicacy. Gezellig!

Through some sneaky negotiations with my various shady contacts in the British Council i´ve managed to nab some furniture off an English teacher who´s leaving Colombia, this is a pure godsend meaning that after some unpleasant howfing of furniture in and out of vans, up and down stairs, on Saturday night i´ll have a flat with a bed and a fridge and everything. Top notch. This guy is leaving because he got hit by a taxi, and meeting him has heightened my fear of the same thing happening to me. Road signs are kind of optional here, and i´d be raging if i came all this way and avoided all the other potential dangers of the country (much exaggerated, incidentally) only to be hit by a taxi.

This Saturday we´re having a wee perty in the new hoose, it´s very easy to find the building because it has "Yankees go home" spraypainted on the front of it. No joke. I´´m going to start acting the total Scot so´s nobody thinks i´m a Yank. An old lady asked me for directions in the street yesterday so i can´t look TOO foreign, i tell ye i´m glad i´ve got dark hair in this city, you stand out a mile away if you´re blonde with light eyes. In addition to genetic luck i´m supplementing my Colombian disguise with various disgusting items of clothing, latest two are a bag made out of a record sleeve for a song called "HOT HOT HOT!" with the performer´s grinning face splashed across it in garish colours, and a totally pimped up bomber jacket made of orange fake silk with stripey cuffs and a fur trimmed hood. I haven´t been robbed so far so i think it´s working.

I´m off to work now for a fascinating meeting on the promotion of foreign languages in the university, think i might suggest a wee weekly Still Game showing...

Housing success and empty streets

Today's buseta was driven by a total frustrated boy racer, blasting out Amy Winehouse at top volume and weaving in and out of huge ques of other buses, honking at everything that moved and appearing to head for motorcyclists on purpose as if he got extra points for giving them the fright of their lives. Greatest method of public transport known to man. Imagine just sitting there, clinging on to the seat in front of you for dear life, your legs all cramped because nothing in Colombia is really made for people over 5 foot 6, while a tiny old lady systematically gives every passenger the evil eye until one of them caves in and gives her a seat, the guy beside you absolutely reeks of onions and every 5 minutes the driver carreers across about 4 lanes to pick up a new passenger, even though there are already about 15 extra people crammed all up the aisle making a delightful mockery of the large sign on the side of the bus that says "No standing passengers admitted". I love it.

In other news, i finally got a flat!! It took nearly 3 weeks of thankless trudging round apartments, every time being told that we needed 3 months bank statements, or were to leave a disgustingly large deposit, or that we had to rent it for a year and not 10 months, or basically that they just didn't like foreigners much and weren't giving us their nice flat to mess up with our outlandish foreign ways, no senor.
BUT, someone finally relented and kindly rented us their flat, in La Candelaria which is the old colonial centre of Bogota, the bit with all the different coloured houses and steep cobbled streets. My house is of course a wee 60's apartment effort, but it has a massive patio inside for BBQ action and a nice kind of wood-panelled sauna effect in all the rooms. And it's on Calle 13. Like the band! It's round the corner from the Luis Arango library which is the most visited library in the world, i'll be iin there like a rat up a drainpipe as soon as i get the business of buying a bed, a fridge, a washing machine and all that sorted out. I'm currently in what is probably Bogota's only kosher internet cafe which is down the stairs from the flat, this keyboard is a total belter and has the letters in Hebrew on it.

Aside from all this flat excitement i've been having a very excellent time, although the Saturday morning class (who were made to sit through 2 episodes of Still Game, incidentally) scuppered my holiday plans i've had a belter of a weekend in Bogota. On Sunday i went to see a free salsa concert in the Plaza Bolivar, ate some kind of fish which had been deep-fried whole (mmm), got my picture taken wearing a t-shirt that says "Tengo la camisa negra" and a pair of disgusting red sunglasses in front of the que of people waiting to pay their respects at the coffin of Fanny Mikey, a renowned Colombian-Argentinian actress who just died, then i went for a look at the Botero museum and topped it all off with a night on the coctails in the swanky northern part of the city. Asking for a martini in this city basically gets you half a pint of gin, needless to say some abysmal Scottish dance moves were cracked out before too long.

Yesterday once we'd finished the flat gubbins we went to get some food on the Avenida Jimenez, which is where all the trade in emeralds goes on. The cafe was in the building which used to be the headquarters of El Espectador, the paper Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote for when he lived in Bogota. We ate in the basement and there were lots of black and white photos of Bogota full of big chrome trimmed cars and men in hats. Later on i got a lift back up to the penthouse, and it was just getting dark and the city was totally deserted. When the clouds are low they cover the tops of the mountains which you can always see in the city, a big cold blanket of grey over the whole city. Since it was a Monday night and a public holiday as well everyone was in their houses or out of town, and you'd drive past these desolate streets strung with telephone wires and full of potholes, with nobody around except a man in the distance carrying a suitcase. There's a strange kind of melancholy about the place at times, it doesn't seem like a big city at all but a ghost town, or lost relic from a black and white film.

Inept teaching and penthouse living

Ah i've got the day off work, how delightful. Unfortunately they've got me working EVERY Saturday at 8 (eight) am! Even at the Monkey you at least got a moderate lie-in on Saturdays, and a cheeky roll and sausage. Here i get 4 straight hours, alone, with a bunch of chaps who have passed all the available English courses but still want to learn more. These poor individuals have actually paid for the pleasure of me rocking up at 8am, half-dead and clutching a massive coffee, and inflicting my, shall we say idiosyncratic in place of non-existent, teaching methods on them. My first class is tomorrow so i've decided they're going to get Scottish culture full blast, total 8am haggis chat followed by a cheeky episode of Still Game. No, really.

This unexpected Saturday work has scuppered my plans to go to Medellin for the weekend, it is rather shite because i'm never going to get more than 2 days off in a row now (i get a day off during the week to make up for the Saturday), and most places are 10 or 20 hours away by bus. Thanks, university. I can't really complain about it since i've got such a sweet deal here, i'm only giving 14 hours of classes a week, and all of the other teachers work full time and most of them are doing their Masters at night school as well. Colombians are incredibly hard-working, aye they might be late all the time but once they actually get started they all work so hard, it totally puts the U.K to shame.

I've finally got shot of the creepy house i was staying in beside the university! I hated it because there are never any foreigners in Minuto de Dios and everybody's dead interested in what you're doing, which is fine if you're going to class, actually doing some work, not so good when you're slinking back to your sad wee house with nothing but a hot dog for company. Now, can you believe this, i'm staying with a pal who's house-sitting a massive palace of a flat in the swankiest area of Bogota, it has a balcony and 2 levels of plush loveliness AND a proper kitchen. I'm going to make a massive din dins tonight to celebrate my first access to cooking equipment in about a month. Magic. It isn't actually a penthouse but it's certainly the closest thing i've experienced, tonight i have the added luxury of washing my horrific clothing in an actual washing machine, how good is this?! Arf i've taken to buying cheap pairs of jeans from the supermarkets here, this isn't quite as naff as it might be in Scotland since the supermarkets are these vast warehouses with every concieveable product for sale, but the fashion for jeans here is really tight, often with horrific spangly embroidery on the arse cheeks...

Joe le taxi

Today´s illuminating report on Bogota methods of transport will be on the taxi. The city is heaving with little zippy yellow taxis, and the only times when you can´t find one are 8 in the morning (don´t know why, there just never are any) and whenever it rains. They don´t really have meters in the strict sense of the word, sometimes they have a little counter that slowly counts up til 114 or whatever, and then theoretically you look up how much 114 should be on a kind of fares table that they have hanging up, but in practice they usually just say "What do you want to pay me, ten thousand?" and everyone just ignores the meter.

When we had our security briefing from the British Embassy guy he had grave warnings about taking taxis off the street. About half of the taxi drivers in Bogota are unlicensed so this is probably not bad advice, although i think it´s more a concern at night when you can´t see the numbers on the side or if it´s a decent-looking taxi or a total banger. The Embassy guy called them "ill-advised taxis", and an ill-advised taxi almost always has a hilarious driver who likes listening to banging Caribbean music and has the rear view mirror festooned with rosaries and Colombian flags. When you call one at night things are usually a little more subdued, maybe with a sheet of perspex separating you from the driver´s musical choices.

At night taxi drivers always always run the red lights. Gracie told me that this dates back a few years when there were a spate of robbings of cars waiting at the lights, and the government actually advised drivers to cautiously go through red lights in order to avoid stopping in bad areas. I´m pretty sure this kind of thing doesn´t happen a lot these days but they´ve stuck with the habit of just racing right through. The roads are pretty quiet after about 10pm anyway, so it isn´t dangerous.

They have quite an amazing knowledge of the city, you almost never have to give them directions and they don´t have satnav, big respect to the taxistas for this. Although the streets in Bogota are numbered according to what seems to be a very logical pattern - the ones going from east to west are calles going from 1-200 or whatever, and then the north south ones are carreras numbered the same way - but in practice it´s not at all simple and there are calles 26B and 26C and then suddenly 28A with no sign of any 27s. When they do get lost they have an incredibly strong torch which directs a really strong beam at a small area, and then they crawl along the streets in the cab shining the light on all the houses to see the numbers.

Coming soon - bike travel in Bogota! (Don´t hold your breaths for this one since first i need to sort out the flat business, and sine they come unfurnished buying a bed is a marginally higher priority than buying a bike. But only marginally.)

A rat!

I am in what has to be one of the worst internet cafes in existence. This computer is so clapped out that if you open more than one window at a time the whole thing freezes and you have to get the chatty teen who´s manning this pulsating communications hub to turn it off and on again. However there´s a nice lively pawn shop across the road blasting out vallenato, and the teen is bringing great joy into my life by mercilessly firing into my soon-to-be flatmate Chantal, so life is quite good.

We´re in the middle of trying to find a flat, which is a deeply unpleasant business in Colombia. You need a Colombian national who owns a property to stake their whole house as a guarantee that you won´t take the piss. Imagine how delightful it is trying to find someone to do this for you when you´ve only been here a week and admittedly know some wonderful people but more in a "bottle of aguardiente and let´s teach the Glaswegian how to dance" way, rather than them wanting to stake their entire property on my behaving myself properly. Ach well, there´s one that we might be able to get which is a big palace in La Soledad for something like 80 bucks a month, i´ll keep you posted.

Last night i went to the opening of a bar with some chums, they reccommended some kind of typical Colombian cocktail that was the speciality of the bar, and when it arrived i kid you not it was in a milk bottle. A big milk bottle. Aye they´re keen on the old pints of cocktails here. They were all total charmers, i´ve landed on my feet here because there aren´t that many foreigners, so when folk meet you they´re really interested, and then if you say you like Colombian food as well they´re totally in love with you. Although i think they think i´m a bit of a pervert for having eaten the spit-roast guinea pig, citing its revolting ratty appearance as the reason why none of them have ever tried it. Aw talking of rats! I was in the toen centre walking past a really nice looking patisserie, with waitresses dressed in pink and black frilly aprons who were all sweeping the floor and joking around, when suddenly two of them start screaming and clambering up on the chairs, all the time shouting "A RAT! A RAT!!" and hitting the ground with their brooms, it was like being in an episode of Tom & Jerry. Magic.

No sofa stories this time, although yesterday i did see three motorcyclists having a hilarious slapstick punch-up in front of an empanada stall, and because they all have to wear special reflective jackets with their licence plate numbers on them they look like giant Lego men, all pishing themselves laughing and shoving each other around.

Tienes tremedo...CULO

Aw i´m in an internet cafe and i left my camera back in the wee house otherwise i could treat you to some nice pictures of the things i´ve eaten over the past few days, most delightful of all being the unwashed pig intestines which are horribly crunchy on the outside but spurt the pig´s half-digested last meal out into your mouth as you bit down on them. Mmm. I went to a Colombian food fair in a park which was a benefit gig for the police service, and they had the national police band up on a massive stage playing pure amazing music, all salsa and rancheras and mopey love song duets. Imagine the Glasgow police band and how garbage they´d be!

Today i saw a horse pulling a cart which was loaded up with chintzy sofas, all with several people sitting on them arguing loudly and enthusiastically, and the whole entourage was navigating a massively congested motorway junction.

In other delightful Bogota activities this Saturday afternoon i ended up in a the courtyard of an ancient house in La Candelaria which had been turned into a pure bangin´pub where all the students were up dancing and tanning aguardiente at 2.30 in the afternoon, AND they played that timeless classic "Culo"! I´m so glad i came here. Fried pig intestines, police vallenato bands and loads of cheap coffee, i think this may be the best country in the world.

I think i'm in love...

with these buses:Unfortunately i've not been on one in a few days because i've been cooped up with the British Council learning about English teaching. We got a security briefing from an old school chap from the British Embassy, total ex Marine, probably killed hunners of guys with his bare hands and all that. The briefing was totally reasonable, just telling you to keep your wits about you like in any big city, although after discussing kidnapping, drink spiking, robbery and so on he glanced down the list of details for the language assistants and boomed "GLASGOW?! Who's from Glasgow? This is a HOLIDAY for you, girl!". Aye cheers mate.

Some drunken plans were laid last night to learn the accordion, that's something for yous all to look forwards to when i come back.