Lo peor es que muy pronto comprendí, SI SI

So, this is the lovely Casa Yankees Go Home. Above we can see a delightful poster of Che Guevara and the view out of the window onto the patio and a car park. Scenic.
This is the living room. All that there is in the room is that couch and my suitcase, but it´s getting cosier. Also i think i scored some garish wicker furniture off another shady contact at the British Council, man these guys are going to furnish my whole house for me!
I went to the football again on Saturday, this is the scene when the players run out onto the pitch, all blue and red smoke and flags and people going crazy. It was good but unfortunately my team got beat by an extremely cruel last minute goal. Hijos de puta Santa Fé.
After the football i went to Zipaquirá which is in the Sabana to the north of Bogotá, to visit the salt mines which have a cathedral carved into them, something like 2 miles below ground. It was amazing but a little spooky, specially because there was a Mass going on and i get a bit unnerved by all that kind of thing, especially if it´s in a cold, echoey, dark cavern. Anyway this is me having a tinto 2 miles below the ground!
After the salt cathedral we went to the above restaurant for lunch, it was a Paisa restaurant (Paisas are people from the region of Antioquena) so we all had huge slabs of meat with frijoles and eggs and pork crackling, AND as if that weren´t good enough there were also guys doing serenades and they played the world´s greatest song, Estos Celos by Vicente Fernandez. It was great to go on a wee road trip, the individual riding shotgun had a bit of an obsession with rancheras so we listened to lots of Mexican yelping and looked at cows and marvelled at a bizarre theme park which boasts a huge, inexplicable model of the Taj Mahal in the middel of a field. All in all it was a grand day out. Incidentally here is a video of the author singing the Bogotá city anthem at the football, arf.

Footie

Total double whammy blog-a-rama today guys! A few weeks ago i went to the football here and i wrote all about it and then forgot to post it up. It was great fun and i´m going back on Sunday to see the derby, can´t wait. I bought a scarf last time and everything, because they do a red and yellow one which are the Bogotá city colours, so obviously the Jags fan in me absolutely had to get one. I go with my pal who´s a St Mirren fan, flying the flag for crap Scottish football 2,600 metres up the Andes!

So, football:
Bogota´s El Campín stadium is home to both Independiente Santa Fé and Millonarios, as well as the national squad. Games are playes on Wednesday and Saturday at this 40,000 seater ground, with "El Clasico" or the derby between rivals Santa Fé and Millonarios attracting a full capacity and a famously charged atmosphere. The stadium has its own Transmilenio stop and is easily reached by buseta or taxi, and upon arrival on a match day you are quickly surrounded by a vast crowd of fans queing for their preferred seats.

At a Millonarios game the entire area is covered in a sea of blue and white as fans proudly display their team colours on shirts, scarves, hats and jackets. Upon entering the stadium you are faced with rows and rows of shiny plastic seats (those in the know bring inflatable cushions as these seats become rather tiring and uncomfortable during the course of 90 minutes) thronged with vendors selling water, cigarettes, chocolate and long sticks of bread with cheese in them which are a typical match-day food.

The most fanatical fans of Millonarios sit behind the goals on the north side of the stadium, and begin singing and pogo-ing hours before kick-off. The groups of supporters are called "barras" and each one brings an enormous flag bearing the name of their group, some with allegiance to certain areas of the city, others referring to the superior quality of their team´s football, and they drape them over the back walls of the stadium so that nothing in sight isn´t blue and white.
When the home team runs out onto the pitch the whole stadium explodes in a frenzy of whistles, shouts, ticker tape and vast plumes of blue and white smoke, as cheerleaders grin and twirl pom-poms and form themselves into precarious pyramids. While the players battle it out on the pitch the fans shout criticisms of the opposing team and of the unfortunate referee, in between arguing with their neighbours about the forthcoming national team selections, while small boys make the team newsletter into paper aeroplanes and hurl them over the tops of the terraces to glide over the heads of the fans and land at the feet of the never-tiring cheerleaders.

At half time the hot dog stands are mobbed by hungry fans, and the stands become a hotbed of tactical discussion. By the beginning of the second half night has fallen and the huge spotlights render the pitch a glowing green, as the Bogotá drizzle floats down over the players and the lights of the city twinkle in the dark under the illuminated neon gaze of the monastery of Monserrate perched high on the mountainside.

When the whistle blows the sodden players make their way to the dressing room for reprimands or congratulations, and the fans gingerly maneouvre their cars out of the packed car parks among throngs of fans, and they listen to replays and analysis of the match all over again on the drive home.

Diary of a glutton - the journey continues

Hello. It has been rather a long time since the last dispatch from Bogotá. Since then i have been perfecting my stand up comedy routine for my classes. Nothing is guaranteed to make a class of aloof students pish themselves with laughter than telling them that you like the public transport system in this city and that you don´t like chunchuyos. Chunchuyos are the old unwashed pig intestines, i believe i may have mentioned them previously. They are absolutely vile and i don´t see what´s so screamingly funny about not liking them, but apparently everything down to the way i pronnounce the word (choon-choo-yos) is absolutely hysterical. Ach well it keeps them entertained in between those intrusive personal questions they so enjoy asking me.

Aside from work i have been eating a lot of interesting meals at every opportunity. At work i went a few times to a tiny cafe round the corner from the uni where a crew of hardened old kitchen biddies whip you up a massive plate of home cooking, however i think my days there are over since following a plate of extremely suspect goulash i was violently sick and had to spend the whole next day in bed. Thumbs down, biddies.

Last week i went to a BRAW restaurant called Mini-mal, which for anyone who may live here was on Cr 4A 57-52, where you sit in a tiny wee room on shiny red vinyl seats with lots of strange light fittings made out of cheesegraters and the plastic jugs off blenders and listen to grade A old reggae, think there may even have been a spot of Tenor Saw on the go which instantly raises any establishment to sublime levels in my estimation. I had a dish called "Vamos a la playa" (Let´s go to the beach) which was puffer fish (see photo) in a sauce of caramelised onions and lulo, which is a tart tasting fruit that looks like a tomato, it´s also called naranjilla apparently but i´ve never seen it in Scotland. This had to be one of the best meals i´ve eaten in Colombia, possibly ever. The fish is incredibly meaty because of the muscles it has to puff itself up, so on each side of the spine there´s about an inch and a half of pure white fishy meaty goodness, and the sauce it was in! MAN this is a really great restaurant.

Then, as if that wasn´t enough gastronomical goodness for one week, on Sunday i went to a friend´s house and sat in a gluttonous stupor for 4 hours as he fed us plate after plate of delicious Chinese food; scallion pancakes, a thousand different varieties of dumplings, chicken baked in salt (the key is to liberally anoint the inside of it with spring onions, star anise and brandy mmm), pepper squid, aubergines in some mystery sauce, more chicken in a kind of peanuty sauce, beef in black bean sauce. It was top button of the jeans undone material. All this was washed down with lashings of red wine, some of which may have come out of a Tetra Brik style receptacle but was still rather nice, and the lunch ended up lasting until 11pm. Magic. I also demanded the purchase of a rank half bottle of brandy because it was Domecq brand brandy. Like Borges´s pseudonym!

Our flat continues to contain nothing but a red velvet sofa and an elderly suitcase, although now the walls are starting to fill up with a good assortment of crap. Yesterday me and Cherie liberated this incredible item from the communal area in the apartment block where you leave your rubbish, ok basically we raked it out the bins but it was just lying against a wall, not actually in a bin. Ahem, so we now own this picture which is like a shady reproduction of an oil painting of a cheesegrater, a blender, a funnell, a squeezy mustard bottle and some other culinary gubbins, mounted in a seriously ornate plastic frame, all dripping with gold curly bits. It´s superb. We also have drawings of ourselves done on separate occasions by an artistically challenged tramp, Cherie´s is a bit Jimmy Hill around the chin and mines looks kind of like Jane Austen if she´d had a serious pie habit.

Ah yes in addition to the very serious and worthy business of describing my perfect man to 35 skeptical teens, i have also been writing about Bogotá for Adriaan´s rather good website. The links in the sidebar may not work as well as they should so i recommend a cheeky visit to http://colombiareports.com/ for a lot of interesting news and information about the country as well as some rather genius cultural reports written by an extremely good-looking and talented Glaswegian. I wrote "Coffee and guaro in Bogotá´s Candelaria" (like you wouldn´t have guessed) about two very fine establishments a few streets away from my house. The Cafe Pasaje is an absolute belter, it´s an old literary institution full of eccentric patrons and hilarious Colombian coffee advertising posters. In fact i may go there after this and sit and have a coffee and read Cortazar, what a life! I was there the other night, having a beer and watching people fall off skateboards in the plaza, and you can see the monastery of Monserrate all lit up and neon above the city, and then the moon over the mountains and the lights of all the buildings. It´s up there with the Barbieri and the Grosvenor Cafe.

Photies

This is La Candelaria, where i live.
These ones are from a big parade which was held on the Septima, a massive road that cuts through the city from North to South.

I like the jaunty angle of this guy´s clarinet.
The Septima is most excellent because every Friday night they close it off to traffic and there are bands, and people selling coffee and canelazo (which is the local aniseedy spirit mixed with hot water, sugar cane, cinnamon and spices), and dancing and guinea pig races. This involved betting on which upturned bucket one reluctant cuy will choose to enter, it´s great because they always stop to wash their whiskers and the crowd get agitated and suggest that the guinea pig handler might like to apply the toe of his boot to the animal´s erse to speed matters up a little.

Glesga pride!