Push the boat out compañeros

At Eighty

Push the boat out, compañeros,
push the boat out, whatever the sea.
Who says we cannot guide ourselves
through the boiling reefs, black as they are,
the enemy of us all makes sure of it!
Mariners, keep good watch always
for that last passage of blue water
we have heard of and long to reach
(no matter if we cannot, no matter!)
in our eighty-year-old timbers
leaky and patched as they are but sweet
well seasoned with the scent of woods
long perished, serviceable still
in unarrested pungency
of salt and blistering sunlight. Out,
push it all out into the unknown!
Unknown is best, it beckons best,
like distant ships in mist, or bells
clanging ruthless from stormy buoys.

Edwin Morgan

Two years and it seems like two minutes

That's such an old bastard thing to say. It seems like only yesterday i was wolfing down chunchuyos and tannind aguardiente like there's no tomorrow, i mutter decrepitly to myself in 50 years time...

One week left!

It's been an interesting couple of years. I wrote a wee article about my time here for the Language Centre blog and was almost getting teary eyed at the thought of Colombian scran and tunes, had to insert a totally unnecessary Terminator quote AND photo just to cheer myself up a bit.

I'm writing this in my room (where the kind neighbours are providing me with unusually high speed internet) which is even more of a shambles than usual, with a battered suitcase overflowing with books, clothes and all the unclassifiable tat i've amassed over the years and can't bear to part with. Said tat includes a really nice wooden spoon, a vast stack of highly illegal pirated DVDs, assorted crochet hooks in various metallic colours and a green alarm clock which has a chicken who pecks at seeds as the minutes tick by. Hello giant excess baggage fine! When i have a prog rock band it's going to be called Giant Excess Baggage Fine.

Selling all our furniture has been another interesting experience. Try offloading a giant 1920's parrot cage, the world's most elderly red velvet sofa or a paint-splattered and excessively creaky bed on the unsuspecting Bogota public. Actually the ladies i teach at the nuns school have been magic, there's even a parrot fan among them! Serendipitous.

At the weekend we had a bit of a cheerio party in Galerias with some of the colleagues and assorted pals, air conditioning faults and serious overcrowding meant i spent the whole night sweating and worrying that there would be a fire and we would all get crushed trying to get to the exits before realising that the brutal humidity would make a laughing stock out of any unexpected fires. My photos the next day contained an enthusiastic series of unidentified hands giving the air vents the thumbs up in a vain attempt to flatter them into life.

On balance they've been a great two years. The second one was a thousand times more difficult than the first, for a variety of reasons. One of the many things i've realised here is perhaps not to trust people so much, aye they might be out to rip you off which is fairly easy to pick up on but more heartbreaking is when they turn out to be different from who you thought they were. Hard ways to learn things.

However, most learning experiences have been braw. Learning to drive was a laff and a half, and with a week of classes under my belt i am now the proud and totally legal holder of a bona fide Colombian driving license. Get in! Learning to dance salsa was crackin' as well, not that i'm any expert but at least i can enjoy whirling around to Grupo Niche or the godly Marc Anthony without worrying about where my feet are landing. Although i give all the credit for anything i may have picked up to the brave and persistent Sergio, who after countless afternoons of bruised feet and hissy fits finally managed to have me enjoying myself instead of worrying about crap footwork. Learning to speak like a true Bogotano with a mixture of old buffer language and total youthful slang was a joy, as was learning how to coax a class of 45 bored 17 year olds into chatting away in English.

At work i learned a lot of incredibly useful things like how to use Excel and how to organise film festivals which hopefully will come in handy in the ongoing search for gainful employment...

I tried a huge variety of bizarre food, swam in rivers under leafy canopies of vines, drove across deserts in the back of trucks and explored the length and breadth of Bogota. I saw El Pibe Valderrama waddle up and down the pitch at El Campin and got teargassed at the Mayday march. I was interviewed on breakfast television and sang crap karoke in front of far too many people. I got a tattoo, did some volunteering, went to the oldest bowling alley in Latin America, turned 25 on a very depressing and rainy day, made some great pals and lost a few along the way. Aye its been good while it lasted but i'm ready to go home.

Coming up: Colombia to Caledonia...

Apt driving pun

Soon to be Colombia to Caledonia when i leave Bogotá in 3 weeks. Strange and horrendous to think about leaving. Ach obviously i canny wait to go home and see everybody and read the papers and eat bacon rolls and whatnot but it's been a long two years here and it feels more like starting again than going home. And the worst thing is this: applying for jobs. I really need to get a (real) job but the whole process is dead depressing.

Observe this obscene but not at all out of the ordinary job description:

Are you the best of the best in sales in your company? Are you always the top achiever? Do you want to earn upwards of £40k+ annually? Then come and speak to me about my city centre client who is seeking business to business sales consultants to join their teams. These roles are 100% outbound telephone sales based where you will be heavily targeted on new business and retentions, growing accounts and revenue with each client . The right person for this role is a hunter, who is extremely money hungry and driven by exceeding their targets.

Christ this sounds like total hell. Phoning folk and selling them expensive and probably unnecessary services while stuck in some grim competitive atmosphere of battle against your colleagues. "Extremely money hungry". Is it naive to want something more out of your job than just money? Sounds preposterous after hours of trawling through the likes of this pish on job websites but i'd like to do something that was of some benefit or at least use to someone else apart from myself. Dosn't have to be full-blown save the world stuff, just something where you could think you were making things marginally better.

Ah, shite office jobs. Probably me thinking that working in the office of the government recycling initiative would be preferable to working in the office of some bland sales horrors is because i've never worked in any office and have no idea about it. Are you a socially-committed, fascinating, half-decent paying employer who provides free coffee in the work environment who is looking for bilingual patter-merchants with expertise in toy shops, high-speed sandwich manufacture and organisation of english-language film festivals to become part of your marvellous team? Aye JOIN THE QUE PAL!

In other news, today i had my first Colombian driving lesson! A bit of background on the system: with a laughable 10 "hours" (actually 50 minute classes) of practice alongside 27 (totally non-existent) hours of theory the Colombian government will gaily slap a driving license into your utterly unfit hands and send you swerving off down the motorway. This explains everything about Colombian traffic.

The interesting thing is that you have to take a really thorough medical exam (had it this morning chaps, passed with flying colours!) including sitting in a soundproof box identifying which ear is hearing high-pitched tones, looking into some 70's metal binoculars reading out numbers and choosing the appropriate tiny shape out of a grid of similar tiny shapes and, most fun of all, a bizarre reflexes test where you press down on pedals when triangles and circles appear on a screen. It seems ludicrous that after such an in-depth test you then go and mess about in a clapped-out banger for a few hours and they give you the license (without a test!), but i'm just putting it down as another reason to love idiosyncratic and preposterous Colombia. Here's another, and go on then, another.

Anyway, the point was that Bogotá is an excellent place to learn to drive, being chaotic and busy and unpredictable. My instructor is called Don Hector and is 5 foot tall with a nice calm manner and an appealing habit of encouraging me to honk back at taxi drivers who aurally suggest that me stalling in the middle of essential transport arteries in full rush hour is not making them happy. Actually i think i've got the hang of this foot off the clutch slowly and carefully business, my days of stalling are (hopefully) behind me!

Despite the fact that it's a special car with separate pedals for Don Hector's watchful wee feet, and the fact that i live in a quiet residential neighbourhood and was only on seriously important roads for about 20 minutes, it still seems farcical that they actually let people who don't know how to drive loose on things like the Autopista Norte.
Next lesson is tomorrow at 8am, should be a joy...

I pure love it though, it's so much fun. Even the constant taxi honking doesn't bother me. Relax, arseholes, life is far too short to be getting stressed about traffic.

Speaking of life, mine is braw although i'm nearly jobless and reversed the car into a hedge. Here i am having a beer in Cafe Pasaje with the mysterious Mr Pedraza who we will be seeing more of in the future...
P.S I really meant it about the job, I actually am moderately useful so if you yourself are a socially-commited and fascinating employer drop us a line, likes.