Unhand me, you cad!

Hello!

It´s been a while since we`ve had these wee electronic chats but now i`m back in the internet cafe, talkative as ever. I`m researching Scottish identity and literature of all things, because tomorrow me and Cherie are delivering a conference (!) on "British culture" at the Universidad Nacional. I`m not quite sure how i fell into doing this but it`s nice to wade through pages and pages of Edwin Morgan and Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead and all the rest.

Yesterday was rather unfortunate as i got robbed an absolute cracker on the Transmilenio. First my beloved going-away-present ipod and then my wallet rapidly disappeared from about my person between Avenida 68 and Escuela Militar. I realised what was going on after they were both gone and kicked up a huge fuss, shouting and accusing the people beside me and demanding to see inside their bags and everything. I knew who it was but they had of course passed my stuff on to someone else or hidden it well and there was no sign of anything, and then they stopped the bus for ages and then got the police on who ineffectually patted down a few people before depositing me on the platform of the next station in an extreme fit of rage while some useless teenage cadet took my name down spelled the most wrongly imaginable and said that they´d call me if they found anything.

In order to cheer things up after all this me and Cherie went for a rake around the second hand bookshops on Calle 45 and bought lots of Colombian poetry and talked to all the weird young geezers who also like hanging around bookshops. While i was loitering in the culinary section half-heartedly leafing through some classic 70`s home economics textbooks a girl phoned me to say that she`d found my wallet in another Transmilenio station, complete with bank cards both Scottish and Colombian, my ID card, and even a sticker that came free with a bar of Jet chocolate of a big fish (bagre rayado) all present and correct! Went to meet her and got it all back (minus the dosh of course), what an absolute delight! Faith in Bogotá completely restored, after a few hours of suspicion and paranoia.

I`m nearly finished uni for the year, holiday plans are now well underway with lots of lists of places and leafing through guidebooks and so on, i can`t wait to be sitting about in some tropical town sipping cold beers and talking shite about poetry probably.

Apart from some very dubious karaoke performances at the Minuto de Dios English Day, Thanksgiving pig-out at the hoose of some American pals and a lot of riotous Colombian nights out things have been pretty quiet around here. On Friday i returned to the glorious MiniMal where this time i had chicken in a sauce of some mysterious herbs, some weird small yellow fruits and rose petals, my god this has to be one of the greatest restaurants i`ve ever been to.

Stormy Tuesday

Hello there chaps!

I must apologise for any shocking typing errors today, i´m on computer number 7 at the local internet cafe and it´s rubbish, number 8 is much better because all the keys actually function, whereas sad #7 is distinctly shaky around the caps lock and shift key area.

This weekend was a lovely puente so quite a lot has been packed into it. On Friday night there was a cheeky Halloween party.To which i went as a really shoddy Alice in Wonderland, i tell you trying to find a blonde wig in Bogota the day before Halloween is a deeply unpleasant and ultimately unfruitful experience. Party was quite a laugh, heard chaps were slagging the tunes blaring out of my boogaloo-riddled ipod though which is totally NOT ON.

On Saturday i staggered into class and made the students talk about the merits of a healthy lifestyle, while we all ate the huge arequipe-stuffed doughnuts i´d brought in as penance for arriving an hour and a half late the previous week. Then me and Adam and Cherie had mince and tatties for lunch, can you believe it, before going out on a delightful tour of some local bars. Here are the chaps in question, without a doubt Bogota´s finest:The weekend was quite a lazy one, the weather was absolutely foul so we didn´t go to the big free rock festival in the Parque Simon Bolivar, frankly i got enough standing in a wet field in the pissing rain watching a band miles away play a tune you think you once heard on the radio but can´t really remember the time i went to Glastonbury and am not really interested in repeating the experience, Colombian style. Instead we went to see a crap film, ate out a LOT, sat in dark bars listening to tortured singer-songwriters and drinking rum, walked along the Ciclovia in the bucketing rain and just generally lived it up.

The weather continues to be really depressing, the clouds hang low and it´s pitch black all the time, and you get drenched just running across the road for a bag of milk (Colombian milk comes in bags, not cartons or bottles) and everyone´s always got wet feet. It would be really shite if i didn´t have such excellent pals with whom to hole up in cozy bars full of mismatched furniture and big French windows looking out onto a drizzly plaza, or to laze about someone´s bed watching stupid films and eating Jet chocolate bars which have free stickers of animals inside them, or to go to ancient bowling alleys with and slide around the polished floor on haggard bowling shoes and cry with laughter when someone (no names) fell over in mid-bowl. Aye those two really are ten out of ten pals.