Amendoim...

...means "peanut" in Portuguese.

Kindly observe the following video:

Eggs and Sausage from Jackie Lay on Vimeo.

Good, eh?

Apart from these digressions i have been up to the usual tricks. I'm sure you'll have seen the Facebook frenzy about my having driven a car 200 metres along a deserted suburban street, sounds naff but it was grand! I only stalled that bad boy once (or twice)...

This weekend was rather cultured, on Friday night i went to another concert at Los Andes (I recall mentioning the previous one and being worried it would be mime, it was actually opera and quite good as far as i can tell, none of this is really my are of expertise. Carranga now, that's another matter) which this time was a baroque dream team banging out the tunes on a recorder and an instrument called a laud (crassly referred to as a banjo at one point by one of the assembled company). What can ye say about 2 hours of chamber music really? The boy behind me was snoring pretty heavily from about 40 minutes in onwards, and the most entertaining thing about the concert was the whispered discussion about whether the duo were a ROMANTIC duo in real life and were off afterwards to whoop it up in one of the less salubrious nightspots along the Avenida Caracas. It was interesting to see right enough, the amount of time and effort needed to become a laud expert is pretty amazing, but in general i probably shouldn't be invited to these type of events for being a philistine.

After the baroque n' roll we went for some GOOD empanadas (on the road that leads to the Quinta de Bolivar i believe), they rocketed straight into the Bogota Empanada Top 5 that i'm mentally compiling. Uyy there's a place in Usaquen that does swanky ones with fillings like Serrano ham and tapenade, and let's not forget the incredible delicatessen on the Septima (with 14? 15? Between the Avianca buliding and the 19, Rolo readers) known as the Colombian Harrods for its brutal tackiness and sale of totally pointless overpriced gubbins. Hidden in this temple of crap dried fruit, flavoured tea and funny shaped rolls are the most incredible empanadas, respectively the Argentine variety (with chicken and a kind of pinkish tomato sauce) and my absolute favourite the Uruguayan effort (meat with olives, hard-boiled egg and raisins!), both sublime with a bottle of skoosh. Mmm. Here are some empanadas:
They are magic. That green stuff is aji, about the only hot sauce you can easily find in Colombia. It is also magic. To make it, take

2 hot red chilies
3 finely chopped spring onions
1 ripe tomato, finely chopped
finely chopped coriander, in the same proportion as the onion (likes, if the onion all cut up is half a cups worth then you want half a cup of coriander as well)
1/4 cup vinegar (it says fruit vinegar but i happily have never seen it in Scotland so choose another kind)
1/2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp vegetable oil
salt

Cut up the chilies (ajies) really, really small and mix them well with the vinegar and salt. Elsewhere mix the spring onions, coriander and tomato. Add it all together with the lemon juice and oil and see if it's hot enough, if not get some more ajies on the go.

Other news: learned about Mexican gastonomy at the Bogota Book Fair and got a cheeky sample of pescado a la veracruzana which is totally getting cooked in the hoose as soon as i finally get paid, this has been a rather long month in terms of dough and lack thereof.

Also saw a Mexican film about wee chaps in Chihuauhua riding horses around and eating Pot Noodles in rainy shacks, not a bad Sunday afternoon's entertainment really. Mexico-a-rama around here.

AIIIEEE yawn yawn it's not even that late but i'm knackered, i'm off to my Kip Keino. Tomorrow i've got a delightful Portuguese class in the morning followed by a horrible meeting with the Social Communication faculty to see if they'll design us some nice logos for the Languge Centre followed by a meeting about an online Masters (might do it if it's interesting) at some uni that has an agreement with my uni followed by class until 8. Yikes! At least i know the word for "peanut" in Portguese...

A weekend in Boyaca

Boyaca is a department to the north of Bogota which has lots of mythical lakes, very cold weather and towns with such delicious names as Siachoque, Iza, Tibasosa and Gachantiva. I visited none of these, instead heading for Sogamoso (home of hunners of cement factories and consequent amounts of pollution) and then Mongui.

Sogamoso is about 3 hours outside of Bogota on the bus. The bus journey is excellent, passing through the Sabana of Bogota and lots of wee towns and rolling plains. Thanks to said rolling plains i whipped out the camera to take a few scenic shots and somehow LEFT IT ON THE BUS LIKE A BIG EEJIT. Poor show. So you will just have to imagine the glories of Boyaca until i go on the rob from Mark's photos. In Sogamoso we stayed in a classic crappy 70's hotel with horrendous bedspreads and ancient telly, with no hot water in the showers and lots of odd figurines of fruit-sellers and things dotted around the lobby. Time spent in this hotel was kept to a bare minimum. We arrived quite late so spent the evening in a cafe tanning beers, i got IDed again which was undignified especially considering the vast droves of underage teens swanning about with Del Boy cocktails in hand, FLAUNTING the age of consent while perfectly innocent, positively decrepit 24 year olds get mercilessly asked for proof of age. Anyway the next morning we rounded up the delights of Sogamoso with breakfast in another superb 70's establishment, wood panelling and red melamine tables and sad pictures of Jesus accompanied our eggs with spring onion and tomato.

Cheerio Sogamoso (original Chibcha name Suamox meaning "City of the Sun"), hellaw Mongui. Mongui rocketed straight in there as once of the loveliest towns i've visited in Colombia. It's away up in the mountains, with steep cobbled streets and whitewashed houses with balconies dripping with geraniums and campesinos in ruanas (a poncho-esque blanket with hole for heid) leading cows over a crumbling stone bridge over a clear river. The air is clean and pure, and the whole village smells of flowers and eucalyptus trees.

Mongui is named after Montjuic, which if i remember correctly is a part of Barcelona reached by cable cars and funiculars and things. It is famous (no joke) for the manufacture of footballs, and supposedly somewhere in the town they have the biggest football in the world. We did not manage to find this. However as a consolation, here is a photo of a really big football made by the people of Mongui:
After such classic pueblo activities as eating a giant set lunch, visiting the museum of religious art and asking irreverent questions about Catholicism

(ah something interesting from the muesum: the extremely youthful member of the tourist police who gave us the tour showed us this giant nativity scene, once opulent and dripping with gilt and obese cherubs but now sitting rather dustily in the corner of a disused convent. For decoration the thing was inlaid with big pearly shells, mirrors and in pride of place at the top six inexplicable blue and white china plates. Our guide explained that the plates were from Japan and Italy respectively, and the mirrors from Arabia or somewhere equally exotic, and the shells from the Caribbean i think. I'm sure you know i'm not a religion hand but i found it quite touching, that the things of greatest value were those that had travelled the furthest from all corners of the globe, and here they were being very carefully plastered into a totlly kitsch nativity scene by some criollo monks in the 17th century. Can you imagine the difficulty involved in transporting a plate from Japan to Colombia in the 1600s?)

and wandering around looking for a hostel in the blazing sun and attaining classic "quemaduras boyacenses" (the Boyaca suntan - a red stripe across the nose and cheeks sported by both locals and visitors alike thanks to the evil Andean sun) we settled in for some beers.

There was a fiesta in the town to celebrate the Virgen del Carmen (virgen of bus drivers, taxistas and all those who labour in the transport trade) and earlier on there had been a procession round the plaza with a Virgin carried on the shoulders of some locals while women sang melancholy songs and flung rose petals around while at the front of the procession a jaunty and extremely elderly brass band belted out the tunes led by a wee boy swinging one of those balls of incence in overenthusiastic 360 degree circles. So later on there was another band cracking out the carranga, typical music of the region. I haven't got the facilities to upload it but i strongly suggest you pap "carranga" into Youtube and experience this for yourself, it's great to dance to.

We'd gone to a shop in search of some empanadas and had bumped into a man who's given us directions to a hotel earlier. Delighted to see a crew of shifty foreigners, the wee dude starts us off on the best night ever and we have a beer with him and his pal before braving the nippy evening to head to the plaza for a spot of dancing. A number of speechless locals look on in horror as we dance away to the musica carranguera, Mark proving a particular favourite with the hilariously lecherous old ladies of Mongui. Hotel man then gets me to go up and speak to the whole town (through a microphone, beside lots of men in ruanas with tiny guitars), telling them i am Scottish and pure love small-town parties. Cue lots of toasts to The Scots! (Cherie and Mark were loving being Scottish for the night) who know how to dance sabroso!!

Yikes then we went to the bakery which had been transformed into a den of dancing and iniquity, all set to the background of twangy, incessant carranga. Here we were introduced to half the town and set about dancing with as many of them as possible, in between getting given free drink left right and centre. This went on until the police (among them our cheery guide from the religious art museum) arrived and turned the music off and suggested it was time for bed, but not before we had stggered our way up a cobbled street to a pizza parlour where Cherie's spirited argument with a chap (the cousin of the owner of the bakery, i believe) provided much late-night entertainment for the waiting customers. Finally we fall into bed, drunk and happy and adopted Boyacenses to the core.

Next morning, hangovers and bus journeys back to Bogota await, but before that we are treated to a cheery wave from one of our pals from last night, an old buffer who seems to have been in the pub non-stop and beckons us in to begin it all again. But like the responsible (and hungover) kids we are we had for the bus stop, via the baakery for some breakfast where everyone greets us as los escoceses and demands that we return as soon as possible. Mongui and Boyaca - i think i'm in love with you.

Another lucky break

Ah all is well in Locombia. Finally i've got a nice flat, with wee couches and radios and a coffeemaker and pals, this is what sharing a flat should be. Cherie and Mark are away to work so i'm sitting around listening to Paulina Rubio's tinny voice blaring out of the radio and working on coffee # 4 of the day. Gloriously enough there is free wireless floating in the air as well, cheers neighbours. I've spent all morning looking up recipes on websites like this and this. Mmm. It's a sunny day and light is pouring in the window now that i've dealt with the horrific net curtains, the walls are covered in photos and postcards and maps of the world and i feel right at home.
Our new neighbourhood is called Batan and is in the north of the city, beside a big avenue that has Ciclovia on Sundays so you can go out running past Plaza Garibaldi, a famous Mexican nightclub with mariachis and drug lords and what have you. It's a bit of a culture shock after a year in La Candelaria (good points: "The Auntie" who runs the shop opposite my old flat and who, whenever i go in for a quiet beer, leans over the counter and proudly gazes at me as if i was her ACTUAL niece, also the decrepit old buildings and plaza with hippies and cake shops. Bad points: crack addict-a-rama, walk home after work not pleasant, folk who came to visit sometimes got robbed, constantly hearing a sharp intake of breath when telling people where i lived) as it's really quiet and residential and you can walk home at night listening to music which is not something i would do in many areas of Bogota. All we need to do is find a pool hall in the vicinity and we're laughing.

Also i am now a REAL teacher since i've got my own class! They are total beginners from the neighbourhood around the uni and are going to finish the course with brutal Glaswegian accents. Gaun yersel wee man!