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.