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...