Do you like golf?

Tonight i´m visiting a pal´s classes at the Universidad Santo Tomas, out with the repulsive food laminates again...

Oh my god, blog, you will not imagine the horror that occured today. I had a "Culture Club" all prepared (by prepared i mean robbed from Cherie´s vast stack of English materials) and the DVD wouldn´t work, so i stuck on one that i happened to have on me that the ma sent me of a concert in the Art Gallery to celebrate 50 years of the Clyde Tunnel. Let´s say right out that Colombia is NOT ready for the Eurydice socialist choir and taiko drummers. Poor students looked a bit shell-shocked til I hurriedly stopped it and distracted them with the chance to ask overly personal questions (today they bizarrely paired up the classic "do you have BOYFRIEND?" with a new one, "do you like golf?". A big fat no to both, students), but what an absolute disaster. And tomorrow i´ve got a sickening run of class right through from 7am to 1pm, no time even to stop for a tinto with that disgusting schedule.


Still, life is grand in Bogotá. Yesterday i got an entertaining book called "I Love You Putamente" in a booksale at the Luis Angel Arango (library) which unfortunately only lasted me a day, it was a very entertaining Transmilenio read although this morning i got a seat in the midst of a crowd of old biddies so i had to read it a bit surreptitiously as it was chock full of sex, literary references and hysterical Colombian slang like "gonnorea" (the worst name you can call someone here) "bacán" (cool dude) or "chimba" (variously "pure braw", "total babe" or "cock"). I love you Español.


Here´s hoping nobody gets swine flu around here, i saw on the news in the cigarrería that they´re quarantining cruise ships coming into Santa Marta but i think everyone in Bogotá is immune to all disease due to continual exposure to the microbes of a million other people daily on the public transport system. Every single day, crammed in the bus with hunners of people sniffing away and breathing on each other, our immune systems are rock solid - BRING IT ON SWINE FLU!


Right i`m off to the Santoto to propagate Scottish culture, but just to keep yous going inbetween Colombian updates here´s a wee holibags photo of me with a donkey, ye canny beat it it´s classic holiday material:

Public transport

Hello blog,

I just wanted to tell you that i still don´t know anything about my future, but thanks to too many exciting travel books i´m formulating all kinds of plans mostly involving irresponsibly living in different countries for as long as possible.

I´m in the internet cafe (again - i keep the internet cafe economy of Bogotá afloat) as i have no classes today and am free to take leisurely strolls around the famous Librería Lerner and have lunch with the charming Cherie in the bakery down the road which does a shit-hot almuerzo for $6,000 pesos (2 quid). I don´t know why everyone in Colombia isn´t obscenely fat since your average lunch comes with a massive bowl of soup containing chicken, beans, platano and potatoes, then a slab of meat or chicken with rice, more platano and either beans, inexplicable spaghetti or chips. And a pint of juice. And maybe a cheeky empanada a few hours later, just to stave off hunger...

It´s a beautiful day today, strange for it not to rain at least once during the day but at the moment it´s blazing sunshine and a nice warm city atmosphere. The thing i like best about this type of weather is very late afternoon, when the sun lights up the mountains and they look very fake and painted on, and all the streets have this delicious warm smell of hot bricks and dust, and they radiate out the heat of the day and you hopefully think that tonight you might be able to sleep with something less then your customary five blankets (FIVE) but it gets to 11pm and everything´s freezing and back to normal.

A bit more about Kapuscinski - when he returned to Poland after years as that country´s only foreign correspondant he had lived through 27 revolutions and coups, been jailed 40 times and survivied 4 death sentences. Also he mentioned in "The Shadow of The Sun" a guy that spent years travelling around the Sahara who one, dying of thirst in the middle of the desert, cut open his veins and drank his own blood in order to survive. Can you believe that!

Nothing quite so thrilling going on around here, tonight i will be translating a presentation for work which the chancers only sent me 5 minutes ago and want it for Sunday morning, cheeky bastards. The last one i did was for the World Bank and resulted in the uni getting given a loan of some unimaginable sum of money in order to construct new buildings, which is certainly something.

Here are me and Cherie enjoying a tinto in the National Coffee Park near Manizales:

And this is the Valle de Cocora near Salento, full of the national palm tree of Colombia and complete with rather out-of-place cow in the bottom right hand corner. The place was also filled with equally out-of-place soliders with big guns, you´d just be sitting there getting tucked into a plate of the local speciality (trout with patacón, a big crispy pancake made out of platano and deepfried, needless to say we had this delectable dish for four days on the trot) and suddenly everything´s gone a bit military. Everything was very calm though, for the most part the soldiers seemed to be enjoying the crap lounge music being sung to guests of a swank restaurant (not the one we were eating in, needless to say) by an unspeakably suave chap in a white suit, or cracking on to nice local girls. Perhaps the best thing about this day was catching a Jeep (traditional mode of transport in the Eje Cafetero, there´s even a town somewhere (whose name escapes me) where every year they have a big procession of Jeeps all loaded up with sacks of coffee and flowers and proudly drive them through the streets) back to Salento and me and Mark getting to ride on TOP of that bad boy! The road was amazing as well, quite a lot of it was in very good nick and you just flew along beside this windy river among rolling green mountains and little farms painted red and green with flowers all over the verandas, wee boys on bikes sailing along beside excited dogs and overhanging trees that you had to watch out for and duck at the appropriate moment. Life in Colombia means a life of extremely interesting public transport. During the course of this holiday i travelled on Jeeps, buses (tiny and enormous), chiva (a big van with benches that fit 6 people, all painted brightly coloured and with no glass in the windows, just coffee sacks you could roll down if it rained, and the driver had two Virgin Marys positioned on either side of the rear view mirror, noe that lit up when he accelerated and one that lit up when he braked. Those Virgins were going like strobe lights as the guy sped along the alarmingly windy road, braking every 2 minutes to let more people on, to avoid motorbikes, simply to admire the view at some points...), cable cars, busetas, taxis, everything!

Nietzche, bacalao & the disease of travel

SLACK with the blog updates, i do apologise!

Today i came into work at 3.30 for a "meeting" that never transpired, then the 6.15 class cancelled it so i´ve to hang around til 8.30 before i even start work, what a load of absolute nonsense. And Minuto de Dios is pure tiny so there´s a disctinct lack of thrilling activities with which one can fill 5 free hours. Might try and find a cinema, there´s a promising looking commercial cenre on the other side of the motorway which might be worth a look...

This week has been rather long, and it´s still only Wednesday. Work is getting more fun since i´m trying to weed out the "introduction to Scotland" pish i´ve been trotting out for the past 9 months, it´s all getting rather tiresome so i´m introducing activities revolving around disgusting laminates of U.K food which always provoke strong reactions. The fish and chips one is particularly horrific.

I recently discovered that there´s a cinema beside the Hotel Tequendama that shows free films every day at 11am, i`ve already been 3 times this week and the people in the pictures are starting to recognise me. Today´s was a quite good Fassbinder one, tomorrow i believe it´s a depressing Russian family saga, belter. Brutal though, yesterday i wanted to see Maradona by Kusturica and through a mistake with the times i in fact got one about Nietzche, and even worse it included el muy hijueputa Freud as well, and in the end everyone was in love with their mothers, aaargh!

During Semana Santa i went with the bold Cherie, Mark and Paula to the Eje Cafetero where i went round coffee fincas with auld geezers, went to a coffee themed theme park, went up a volcano dressed as a pimp and generally had a gay old time all week. Average tinto consumption was about 7 per day but that`s normal holiday coffee intake, although i did bring some really nice coffee back to continue the caffeination. This region is totally beautiful, all green mountainsides covered in coffee bushes and banana trees, the houses all have lovely wide wooden porches running around the outside all full of flowers spilling out of hanging baskets and climbing around banisters and there are always birds singing. At night in one town called Salento there were fireflies hovering around the trees and you could sit in a hammock and watch the sunset while the wee specks of light appeared and disappeared. If you hunt them down and look at them when they aren`t lit up they just look like beetles, i wish i knew why it was that they glow. How can they do it?

Recently i´ve had a lot of quality reading material, last weekend i found a book stall ("stall" as in a tarpaulin on the pavement with the merchandise neatly laid out over it) which had several inexplicable English books, one being John Peel`s autobiography. I always wonder how this kind of stuff gets here, like how on earth did it end up in the middle of a Colombian street, who brought it here? Anyway i didn`t fancy Peely but i got one about the history of cod instead which is a pure cracker, it told me that the Catalans have a myth that the cod was the kind of the fish and was dead arrogant and always talking, and one day God had had enough and told him "Va callar!" ("shut it!") and from there it got the name bacalao. Amazing!

Even better than this are the Kapuscinski books my da sent me, my word the man is a pure genius and his books are the best thing ever, what a great life he had and he writes so well about it that you somtimes have to put the book down for a bit to think about it, and it seems strange to you that you`re on a bus in the middle of Bogotá and not trying to sneak out of Zanzibar in a boat in the dead of night. Says our man Kapuscinski, "Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is esentially incurable." Guy´s bang on!

I wonder if i might get out of my 8.30 class as well here, if the 6.15 one has exams then chances are they all do... Hmm hopefully some timetable jiggery-pokery could do the trick...

It´s my birthday in 2 weeks, ah how exciting is this impending decrepitude! I want to have a wee Russel Harty and invite everyone i`ve met in the past 9 months, i think it would be a recipe for pure hilarity. But then after that it´s only 3 weeks til i´ll be home (for a visit, if all goes according to plan)!! Think of seeing everyobody! The scran! It not getting dark at 6pm every night! Aaaahhh other people who have the same accent as me! I canny wait! Around about the start of June kindly keep in mind a wee piss-up in the Halt Bar for those of you who´re still in the ´GOW. !!!