Caledonia to Colombia

Push the boat out compañeros

2010-05-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-25T20:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-10T19:47:00.000-07:00

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.

Mondays - crap everywhere in the world

2010-04-19T07:07:00.000-07:00

There's something quite nice about waking up at 6.30 and hearing rain battering down on the tarmac outside. Only when you have to go to work in it does it lose some of its charm. Bogota is in full rainy-season mode, torrential downpours every afternoon and a distinctly dreich Glaswegian drizzle the rest of the time. This type of weather is excellent for sitting in bars drinking mulled wine, or maybe taking in a flick at the European Cinema festival but MAN it is garbage when you need to go to work. This morning i was supposed to have class at 7 and i got the times mixed up and came in at 8.30, the colleague whose class i missed (understandably) did not look terribly happy. And i've got another class with her at 10.

The worst of all this is i'm sitting typing this in the university coffee shop, excellent chain Oma with wi-fi and delicious cakes and coffee. The scent of coffee floats in thhe air, tantalisingly mixed with a hint of chocolate cookie and cinnamon rolls. And muggins here left her wallet in the house. Thanks Monday!

However, in general things are good here. Me and my colleague Annie wrote an article for the English language paper here about my favourite Sunday morning activity, the San Alejo flea market. I was there yesterday with Sergio and we spent about 40 minutes chatting to the old geezer who runs the currency stall, selling extravagant bills from around the world. He was getting right into it, telling us that the most sought-after Euro coin is the one from Vatican City because they hardly make any, and that it's hard to get wads of small-denomination currency out of Cuba because the customs guys are so corrupt that they take it all off you. I'm taking my 50ps there next week and we'll see what he'll swap me for them. Anyway we wrote an article about this market and they published it in the paper! I'm doing another one for the May edition about the hidden cinemas of Bogota, stay tuned for that one.

On Saturday we had a work BBQ in the apartment of the magically named Jasbleidye. Colombian barbeques are always amazing because the menu never varies, it's always slabs of meat and chorizo with potatoes, platano and guacamole. Since it's always the same food it's been honed to perfection, inevitably washed down with a cold Poker and some inadvisable post-lunch shots of aguardiente. I'd a great time at this barbeque, doing a spot of Julieta Venegas in the karaoke and then gettinng the old salsa moves on the go. Colleagues were on top form, best revelation of the night was the wee chap who told me he had once done a full striptease at his aunt's hen night in order to win a bottle of rum. Respect.

Yesterday i went to see a couple of films at the Euro film festival. First up was a slice of French toss about some bearded chap becoming infatuated with young girls at some lakeside summer resort, it was a total turkey and i fell asleep at one point it was so rubbish. Next one was much better, in the gigantic auditorium of the Universidad Central we saw a creepy number about a bunch of people in Oslo ruining their own and each others' lives, creepiest of all was the scene in which a baby was eaten by seagulls, ouch. It's on til the end of April so hopefully i'll get to see a good number of films.

http://www.festivaleurocine.com/2010/

My mother's response to the hot dog incident:

2010-04-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

Hope you are feeling OK now and perhaps contemplating a life of vegetarianism.

Hot dog let down

2010-04-05T23:07:00.000-07:00

My time in Bogota is nearly up. In 2 months i'll be on a plane back to Glasgow, crippled under the weight of the portion of two years worth of books stacked into the hand luggage. Preposterous to think i've been here for two years.

Since the holidays I have been generally sooking up the atmosphere in Bogotá, not too much travelling save for a weekend in Villa de Leyva with cheeky colleague Annie during which we tanned a lot of wine while writing articles for the English language paper and went to visit an archaeological site of giant stone phalluses. Villa de Leyva has one of the largest main plazas in Latin America and very nice it is too, especially in that syrupy 5pm light that Colombia does so well:

During Easter I decided to make the most of Bogota without the hassle of having to go to work interefering. The Iberoamerican theatre festival was in full swing and I caught a champion Macbeth in the Parque Bolivar.

So that's a bit of a catch-up, now on to the main topic: scran.

I find the food in Colombia to be endlessly fascinating. From the comforting Boyacense stodge served up by Sergio's gran to the thrilling discovery of a Kola Roman milkshhake in delicious restaurant Diana Garcia (Kola Roman is VERY sweet pink fizzy juice, something in the ballpark of Panda Kola), Colombian scran is a constant adventure. I've eaten fried (unwashed) pig intestines, deep-fried ants, udder, lungs, bizarre root vegetables, goat, shark, stingray, puffer fish, dodgy arepas and other pastry delights from greasy street stalls, haute cuisine Carribbean style and thousands of slabs of mantecada - similar to Victoria sponge but with a hint of aniseed through it (recipe's coming home with me) – from the bakery in front of the staffroom.

And throughout those two years of gluttonny, of eating anything and everything that came my way with never a thought of food hygiene crossing my mind, I never got sick. The iron stomach laughed in the face of pizza left sweating under a heat lamp for endless afternoons, it spat at the feet of Peruvian shellfish rice in a sweltering market stall.

Ironic that this beast of digestion should be derailed by something as prosaic as a hot dog. A hot dog! And not even one of the many dubious hot dogs callejeros i have chomped on in my time - not the limp pink slice of grimmness handed over withh a flourish outside crap amusement park Salitre Magico, nor the crisp-encrusted brute sold outside a nighttime staduium vallenato extravaganza in Valledupar (evidently prepared hours in advance and laughably “heated up”by a 30-second stint on a greasy hot plate).

No, it was a hot dog from respected cinema chain Procinal! I repeat, an establishment hot dog, innocently disguised as part of a combo, its retro gloriousness as it sat there glistening beside the popcorn and the Coke totally obscuring the bacterial holocaust contained within its entrails. And mine too, shortly after. Im sure we can spare ourselves the ghastly details, but ghastliest of all is for the old iron stomach to lose its two year deveoping country gold medal winning streak to a fucking hot dog. The indignity.

Ecuador D.I.S.C.O

2010-01-03T16:16:00.000-08:00

Hullo pals! Happy xmas, Hannukah and New Years likes!

I´m in an internet cafe in Quito, jouked down here from Pasto to see what the old Ecuadorean chat is. The centre of Quito´s a belter, beautiful old colonial buildings and churches and old theatres with peeling paint and faded gilt lettering inlaid in the floor spelling out "Teatro Bolívar". And they have a trolleybus system! The wires make that amazing whaaang noise that those type of wires always make and the drivers invite you onto the bus in a kind voice at every station, sigan, por favor. I keep getting lost and ending up in strange stations with names like "La Ye" or up hilly side streets with unexpected parks and huge grey churches.

To arrive here i jammed my way onto a very hot and crowded bus from the Colombia border, stuffed full of crying weans, indigenous ladies in frilly blouses and strings of gold beads and guys selling crisps, water, ice lollies (tamarind flavour, magic) or"bizcochos" which in Colombia are cakes (or nice looking men, depends on the context) but here are a very delicious buttery biscuit. I decided to stop in a town called Otavalo to check out the market but as i stepped off the bus in the dark to find myself in the midst of panorama of motorway and petrol stations i began to question the sanity of this choice, especially since like a classic eejit i didn´t bring a guidebook, names of hotels, nada.

However, help was at hand from a large and welcoming family of Colombians who upon being asked if they knew any hotels immediately shepherded me into a taxi with them and whisked me off to a cute wee hostel where i was rapidly installed in a tiny but cosy wooden cabin with a view of a VOLCANO and a huge bed with one of those soft sinky mattresses that make you want to stay in it forever. The family were a family of anthropologists and i spent the whole day wandering round the market with them talking about Andres Caicedo and salsa joints in Bogotá and where to get good cameras. They were such a decent bunch of people, so kind and welcoming to a total stranger, and when we went our separate ways they invited me to go back to Popayan any time i wanted and stay with them. This is why i love Colombia chaps, the people are seriously grand.

The market itself was unbelieveable, a huge maze of stalls draped in beautiful woven cloth in vivid stripes, bags, jewellery, fruit, chess sets, dolls, shirts, apparently animals somewhere but i didn´t make it to that point. Throngs of people milling around the stalls haggling, tourists taking photos of everything and locals carrying huge bales of cloth strapped on their backs or selling cool watermelon slices. I bought a big swathe of cloth, stripes of red and purple and orange with odd designs woven into it, ah it is magic just to look at this thing it´s so colourful and beautiful.

Last night i bumped into some guys who work with Mark in la Sabana, horribly small world but the upside was we went out to an ECUADORIAN DISCO!! A dark, sweaty wee room with pounding music, flashing lights and smoke machine. Up on the stage several tight-shirted men prance around as the gruesome techno cumbia booms away in the background, before the DJ announces that there´s to be a contest for the best dancer and would all the men clear off the stage. Our dancers peevishly slink off while girls, "only the most daring ladies" according to the Dj, start to gyrate wildly and swing their hair seductively in time to the music. The stakes are upped when it is announced that the sexiest couple will win the bottle of horrible local alcohol, and several excited men bound up to the stage where everyone then begins gyrating and then some t-shirts come off, exhibiting comedy male love handles. Hilarious. The couple who win are a small chap with 90´s boyband curtains who won them the drink by picking up his partner, a hefty lassie with a brutally low-cut top, and jiggling her around for an unfeasably long time. While this was going on everyone else was dancing around wildly, a spattering of foreigners sticking out because of their brutal dancing. I saw a really short Haitian chap being shown the salsa ropes by a glamorous high-heeled woman, and the poor guy tripping over his feet and all his friends watching with tears of laughter running down their faces.

Quito today has been good but a little lonely, the city is deserted because it´s Sunday and Mark and Cherie forgot their passports so i´m here by myself. It´s half brilliant and half awful, travelling alone. I think you get to talk to more people and probably have more interesting expereiences (anthropology family, for example) if you´re alone, but then on the other hand sitting in a restaurant sadly wiring into lasagna for ONE while all around you people are having a good time is garbage.

However, back to Colombia tomorrow to go to the carnival in Pasto and chuck flour around, and then probably back to Bogotá! I miss Bogotá. Although it´s nice to come for a visit i have to say that Colombia is MUCH better than Ecuador and the men are better dancers, well mine is at least.

Cementerio central

2009-12-14T15:15:00.000-08:00

Ah and another thing, here´s a wee article about the Cementerio Central, which can also be found on http://www.colombiareports.com/ alongside many other fascinating things...

The Cementerio Cenral is by the 26, a huge road that stretches through the city past the Universidad Nacional to the airport. In the past it was the place to be for deceased Bogotanos, but these days it's fallen into disrepair and the affluent bury their relatives in grassy graveyards outside the city. The cemetery opened its doors in 1832 and houses some of the biggest names of Colombian politics including Luis Carlos Galan, Carlos Pizarro (both assassinated) and a whole slew of presidents. Also present are entrepreneurs and members of Bogota's ruling families, mingling with 19th-century bourgeois and modern-day working class city residents.

At the entrance a guard with an unnerving shotgun waves you through the high gates with a stony Father Time perched on top. Inside there is a central area which contains presidents and suchhlike, and an outer part with slightly less eminent members of Bogota society, fading into and area of normal people packed into walls of small boxes with names and crucifixes in endless rows. Narrow avenues of crumbling mausoleums draw you deeper into the cemetery, while the roar of incessant traffic on the 26 fades to a murmur.

This outer part of the cemetery is still in use, and generations of families end their days in these little boxes festooned with gaudy flowers carefully arranged in cut-off Coca Cola bottles filled with greenish water. You may bear witness to a funeral in process, often of young men killed in gang violence. While the mother wails over the coffin and begs for things to be different, the grim-faced cousins and friends slowly transport their friend towards his final destination while a somber group of mariachis trumpet a last serenade. On the fringes of the funeral party two men with shifty eyes adjust the revolvers that are stuffed into the waistband of their trousers.
Further away from the raw reality of 21st-century death is the central section of the cemetery, a walled oval filled with ornate mausoleums and presidential memorials. An impressive central avenue takes you past a number of businessmen, political figures and cultural leaders of the past two centuries. Galan's incongruous Modernist monument resides amongst the faux-Baroque tombstones and saccharine statues of angels and virgins, made even more poignant by its simplicity and clean lines.

To the right hand side of the avenue sits one of the most interesting monuments of the cemetery. A shining golden statue laden with brash flowers gleams amongst the cracked concrete paths and dusty overhanging trees. This is the tomb of Don Leo Kopp, a Geman immigrant who founded the Bavaria brewery. Don Leo and his company were responsible for the construction of the La Perseverancia, originally a neighborhood for the workers at Bavaria. Gaitan was born in La Perseverancia, and there is a statue honoring him in this still staunchly working-class area of the city. Don Leo was famed for his decency and for helping his workers to construct their own houses. Upon his death a strong cult developed around his monument, and every day people come to ask favors of the city's most beloved Jewish Mason. Two transvestites resplendent in eye-poppingly short Lycra dresses show off the kind of curves that only silicone can achieve, while they tenderly whisper their heart's desires in the ear of Don Leo, caressing his wavy gilt hair. The statue's shine is maintained by its devotees, who visit mainly on Mondays to repay their helper by way of a little spit and polish and some pink chrysanthemums.

The Cementerio Central is little-known among Bogotanos and as result of this is in a lamentable state of disrepair. However, a visit to this most fascinating of monuments to Colombia's tumultuous history is most definitely worthwhile. During the week the cemetery can be very empty, so the best days to visit are Saturday, Sunday or Monday as these are the days with most visitors.

Pal travels

2009-11-13T09:36:00.000-08:00

Let`s never mention English Day again. Total shambles. Frankly i`m avoiding work because the boss was RAGING and on the warpath and i hope that after this puente (3 day weekend) she might have cooled down a bit. Erk.

Today i saw a policeman on a motorbike run a red like and smash into another biker on the Caracas, luckily the boy wasn`t going very fast but his bike still went flying. When he hauled himself back up the polis had come back to check on him and a massive crowd of pedestrians who were crossing the road at this point had gathered round to shout at the policeman, "Straight through a red light! That young man had right of way! I don`t know where they teach these polis to drive these days" etc etc.

At the moment i`m in an internet cafe waiting to go at 1pm to the Central University to be the judge of some kind of presentation, frankly i`ve had enough of English events after unmentionable E.D but it`s a favour for a lovely colleague. Later me and Cherie are going to get some delicious scran in town, canny wait i just got paid so i see red wine on the horizon.

The other day i got an e-mail from Mia, a pal of mine from uni who`s off on a magnificent expidition on a sailing boat from Singapore across half the world. What an amazing journey! I like thinking about my pals and what they`re all up to, adventurous bastards are never away from the Trans-Siberian Express or cycling to Andalucía or gallavanting around mysterious African countries getting dysentry. Another champion traveller is young Jo from the Monkey, whose European cycle tour antics can be found here: www.jobellvelo.blogspot.com She is a much better blogger than myself and writes stuff up constantly, hats off Jo!

Isn`t it grand to think about all the things you could do with yourself? Move to a different continent or study something strange or go to Germany and become a master baker or cycle across Canada or have lots of love affairs or learn to speak Japanese or join a band or sail across the world or thousands of other things. A comforting thought, i always find, thinking about all the possibilities.

Roight i`d better go and get geared up for this English gubbins, more to follow...

English Day HELL

2009-11-10T09:45:00.000-08:00

Greetings pals, just a quick communication today to say HULLO before i`m off to English Day, the horrific uni event that last year was the reason for me out-of-tunely singing "La Camisa Negra" in front of 500 people. This year round will be little better as i`ve been lumped with the job of MC, if anything even more embarassing than belting out old Juanes hits. However, armed with a vile silver lamé shirt i bought in a small town market, lots of brutal gags and hopefully the blind love and devotion of the students who over the past year have learned lots of useless facts about Scotland i will make it out the other side. Severe day of delight tomorrow to commemorate the end of English Day. I`ll let you know how i got on.

This internet cafe smells strongly of cheese toasties! Lunch time...

Here to finish are Anna, Cherie and me hamming it up at Halloween:

Socks

2009-11-04T06:13:00.000-08:00

Good morning pals!

Time for the classic weekly trip to the internet cafe in Minuto de Dios in order to avoid the mind-numbing tedium of sitting in the office trying to do crosswords in the free paper (only clues i ever get are the ones that ask the name of something in English).

Monday there was a glorious holiday (thanks, Catholic countries) so the weekend was a 3 dayer. On Friday the other language assistant arrived at the uni, a fact leading to two fancy lunches with people this week for us happy scroungers. Unfortunately they are with some kind of deans, heads of faculties or something like that. The last time the uni gave me free scran it was breakfast, an ornate plate of ripples of cheese and ham with bits of papaya and mango Jackson Pollocked on top. Interesting.

This week i`ve got loads of work, several unpleasant days where i have class at 7am and finish at 10pm with hours and hours of hanging around in between. Thank god for the Panificadora Continental, the glorious bakery across the road from the office.

Friday night i attended a partah in Hannah and Anna`s house with Cherie and Sergio. Cherie had a dragonish look about her and i was dolled up like a flamenco dancer but Sergio`s stripey t-shirt, permie marker `tash and crap French accent stole the show. None of us won the costume competition though, we was robbed! A never-ending stoner-rock set by the very stoned Costeño pals drove us out, but not before we talked to a man dressed as a postie. A POSTIE! Royal Mail shirt and everything!! Even had a wee discussion about Glasgow postcodes.

Saturday we went to a BBQ in Suba in someone`s back garden where i got eaten alive by insects even through my purple Primark tights. The host`s da is apparently a big-shot lawyer who defends narcos, no mention of that but i did have a misty-eyed chat about the deliciousness of Spanish calamares, mmm. Our host, resplendent in a stained MacDonalds apron, served up plate after plate of slabs of meat, ribs, sausage, black pudding, tatties, guacamole... Colombian barbeques are a total institution, they always have excessive amounts of scran and bevvy invariably accompanied by high volume vallenato or salsa. Although a disposable number and a packet of Lidl snags in Kelvingrove park has its charms...

!!! I went to a commercial centre to see the new Tarantino film on Sunday and in the time before the film started went to buy some socks because mine are shameful and have big holes in them. In the sock shop, get this, you give them your old manky holey socks and they give you $4,000 pesos off sock purchases! These chumps gave me MONEY for my ancient, decrepit not to mention dirty socks! Dirty as in i was wearing them, one sneaky trip to the lavvy later and they went flying into the sock bin. Next stop - new socks with patterns on them like flowery teapots. 10 points Colombia! What a country. Where else would stuff like that happen?!

Excellent weekend - all i did was eat, watch films and lie in bed all day like a pig. This is the life!

Chiguiros

2009-10-22T14:22:00.000-07:00

The chiguiro (or capybara) is the biggest rodent in the world. It apparently has good eating on it and in the Llanos they spit roast it over a big bonfire. Probably the most interesting thing about this bad boy: the meat is very popular in this neck of the woods during Lent, because supposedly in the 16th century the Catholic church classified it as a fish thereby making it allright to eat. How informative is this blog by the way. Here is a picture of a chiguiro eating an ice lolly:

In other news, yesterday i visited the infamous San Andresito which is a whole neighbourhood full of shops and stalls selling every kind of junk under the sun. It`s in the Zona Industrial among grim grey warehouses and the skeletons of old train tracks. Gun holsters, hair straighteners, pink satin bedsheets, Japanese toys, weight gain powder, you name it and it can be found here. The main market is for contraband goods. I was on the hunt for a pair of trainers and so spent two hours traipsing from stall to stall while the proprietors pounced desperately on us as we arrived, asking what we were after, who was wanting the trainers, for the lady or for the gentleman, what style what brand try some on! No compromise! I sometimes get a bit Scottish about it all and wish they would just beat it and leave ye to look at the trainers but i got into the swing of things, going into the shops and gazing at the wall of trainers before picking some up and footering about with them before moving on to the next one, where an identical wall of trainers confronts ye except in this one there`s a wee chap in a lurid trackie having his lunch, a big slab of meat and a few desultory potatoes rolling about the plate as he saws his way through what looks like a medium-rare boot but you have to admit it smells delicious.

Finally i found a pair of absolute crackers (dear reader, if you´re into trainers they´re brown leather Nike ones, from the new collection according to the man, with a GOLD swoosh. Elegante como el pegante!) and it was over to Sergio (he of the salsa lessons) to work some Colombian bargaining magic on the shopkeepers. If i try and do this i can get them to take about $20,000 (8 pounds) off the price, but my accent just says "Hello my whole house is wallpapered with dollars so charge me double, please!". Needless to say with a Colombian bargaining legend on the scene the chaps knocked much more off, cheers pal! Must work on bargaining skills. As they are all contraband trainers they don`t pay any taxes so they buy them for $40,000 a pair anyway. Observe:

Also glass cases with rows and rows of watches, and all the wee guys who work in the shoe shops huddled round a TV shouting at A.C Milan vs. Real Madrid, and people in the street watching a heated chess game between two auld buffers, and banged-up cars with the boot full of suspicious Levis or bejewelled roasary beads. Hint of the Barras about the place, wafts of cheap cigarettes and the smell of fried food, car horns, people shouting, the heavy slate Bogotá sky hanging above your head as tinny salsa pounds out of shops and car radios. Ah Colombia i love you all over again.

After San Andresito we went to eat empanadas up at Las Aguas (see post on empanadas for more information about both the place and the foodstuff) and then to a piano concert. I didn`t pay that much attention to the music because i was too busy looking at my new trainers, arf.

At the weekend i will be ripping up dancefloors with my shiny new trainers and shiny new salsa skills, finally i got the trick of the thing! Plenty of practicing in my house while the parrot looks on disdainfully and "Todo Tiene Su Final" blares out the stereo, soon i will be a salsa master!! That song (Hector Lavoe, also done by Marc Anthony) ("Everything has its end") is the soundtrack around here recently, i`ve even got this sort of Zen/salsa theory of life worked our around its lyrics, but saldy it will have to wait til next time since i`m off to class.

Cinemas and chandozos

2009-10-06T14:28:00.000-07:00

Hello pals!

Well things are looking up around here. It`s the Bogotá film festival at the moment so i have been at the pictures twice a day every day at a bizarre cultural centre beside my house to see bleak documentaries about shattered personal relationships among people trying to escape from East Germany and hysterical French capers about perverse TV execs.

Is there anything better then going to the pictures? Something about the ritual of the thing, the way it`s fundamentally the same even if you`re sitting on a rooftop watching something projected onto a crumbly wall, or in the most luxuriously Miami-esque cinema in an opulent commercial centre, or in some scabby university auditorium with uncomfy creaky seats and a faint smell of old coffee in the air. When the lights go down, and the projector hums into life and you see those strange crackly dots and lines that appear over the picture momentarily, and the way that if you look back you see all the light spilling out of this little hole in the back wall, laser beams of stories. Cinematic overload magic.

There are no students at uni this week as they have a recess week, unfortunately the course i teach is an extra-curricular course for whoever wants to do it and consequently i get nae holidays. Quite hysterical atmosphere at work though, the fact of having no students gives the place a bit of a party vibe, especially yesterday which was the culmination of the "Secret Friend" business. This was a name out a hat, buy that person a present thing for the day of Love and Friendship which is the last Saturday in September (we were late, as always. Sometimes i love my disorganised work). I got a friend of mine which was nice, rustled up some hipster gear at the market in Usaquen on Sunday (i also got a belter cardigan last week, RED with a black and silver fair isle yoke and shiny black plastic buttons, yes please) and i think she was pleased with it. I asked mine for an interesting book and she gave me an unexpected but not unwelcome (Spanish) copy of Angela`s Ashes and an orange t-shirt that says "I`M A GREAT CATCH" on the front of it. Then we cracked out the Tetrapak rum and the boss wired up this crap karaoke game, the one that rates your performance (NOTE TO PARENTS: I know you know what this is, i heard all about Donaldo´s magical "No Woman No Cry"). I`ve mentioned before that i´ve got a reputation at work for being really into rancheras, so my colleagues of course fell upon this like vultures and they all started chanting "Katherine, Katherine!" until i sidled up and murdered Vicente Fernandez´s classic "Estos Celos", complete with shady dancing and AYAYAYAYAAYYYYYs!!!!
Needless to say the game was fairly harsh with my performance, lots of little red "Horrible!" and "Pésimo!" (=dismal) floating up the side of the screen. PERSONALLY i think it was rather good...

Some facts and other news:

1. I am going to learn to dance. Hopefully i´ll be teaching a pal to write very elegant and well-structured English essays and in return the dancing lessons will allow me to quit the shameful shackles of being a shit dancer. Cherie´s sister, brother-in-law and nephew are coming to Colombia in December and the plan is to go south, down to San Augustín and Cali (!), and there is NO WAY i´m going to Cali with these dancing skills. Cherie is on the Septima at this moment, and has been ordered to pick up an mp3 CD stuffed with salsa hits. (I´m in the internet cafe beside the office).

2. The word "chandozo" means mongrel dog but can also be used to greet pals, e.g: "Quibo chandozo! Que me cuentas?" (="Hiya pal! How´s tricks?").

3. The best corrientazo (set lunch place) in La Candelaria is the bakery on Carrera 5a, in front of the famous "Doña Cecilia" tienda where all the hippies get rattled at night time (incidentally, about this tienda, they sell shots of tequila to the street, so if you`re jsut trapising about looking for somewhere to go you can have a swift shot then continue on your way. It´s delicious but lethal). I had lunch there today and for two pounds ($6,000) i got a bowl of ajiaco (typical Bogota soup with chicken, potatoes, sweetcorn and special herbs called guascuas), a plate of salad then the main plate - chicken, rice, patacón (flattened, fried plantain YES PLEASE) and yuca with two massive glasses of lulo juice (lulo is a green fruit that looks a bit like a cucumber, it´s very refreshing). Corrientazos are great.

4. I´ve got to go to work now :(

5. BUT i´ll be back soon with my weekend holiday plans, i think we are returning to Boyacá with Cherie´s pal Lauren who just arrived from England to get a wee snook aboot Villa de Leyva which is a town i don´t know much about apart from they filmed a telenovela about ZORRO there once! Which reminds me of "A Confederacy of Dunces" where he leaves a note for someone saying "I declare that you be hung from your underdeveloped testicles until dead - ZORRO", which phrase was once the entire text of an e-mail from Leckie, who really writes a mean e-mail.

Off to work! But first, to the bakery for a bun! Yes it´s a dirty job this 18 hours a week (half of which i spend eating buns) Language Assistant business, but someone´s got to do it!

Smarties

2009-09-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

Good morning!

It`s a sunny day in Bogotá and beside this internet cafe they are painting the radio station building. From a drab streaky grey it`s being gradually transformed into a radiant yellow and blue beacon of colour in the main street. Every day as i walk to work from the motorway where i get off the bus (hello mad Colombian traffic laws, it`s the beginning of the road that connects Bogotá and Medellin yet it´s fine for the bus to screech to a halt and let me stumble out the back door, giant patent red handbag and folders of disorganised bits of paper flying in the wind) there´s an old geezer sitting on the wall outside this building, a right smart old buffer in a suit and a hat that makes him look like a Texan. Who is the auld dude? Maybe he´s an old school preacher on the radio, i can imagine him being quite into gospel music. On the other hand maybe he´s on the run from the law and it hiding out in sleepy Minuto de Dios neighbourhood. Next stop - getting the truth from the auld buffer...

This morning i had a string of rather nice classes, one was in the other building of the uni which is a 30 minute hike away from the usual place. It`s in an old school building and has those kind of draughty classrooms with shoogly chairs and a view of a playing field which my school had. However it does have a cosy wee shed where an old couple sell tiny sweet cups of tinto, empanadas and cheese toasties to the chilled staff and students. I went in with my colleagues to sneak a tinto between classes and the old man greeted me in English, shook me by the hand for 5 minutes straight and then gave me a wee packet of Smartie-like sweeties of the most patriotic variety, the ones that only come in red, yellow and blue (like the Colombian flag, pop-pickers!). It´s something that happens a lot here, people are so intrigued to meet a foreigner and so proud of their country that they treat you unbelieveably well, partly i think because Colombians are very hospitable people in general, and also because they want you to feel welcome. It was lovely, to experience that hospitality again after a few months of a pretty joyless slog getting back into everything, it´s lightened my heart again. Thanks Señor Tinto and your patriotic Smarties.

Ships/rooms

2009-09-22T22:13:00.000-07:00

Though I love this travelling life and yearn
like ships docked, I long
for rooms to open with my bare hands,
and there discover the wonderful, say
a ship's prow rearing, and a ladder
of rope thrown down.
Though young, I'm weary:
I'm all rooms at present, all doors
fastened against me;
but once admitted I crave
and swell for a fine, listing ocean-going prow
no man in creation can build me.

- Kathleen Jamie

Liberal ladies love Galan!

2009-09-10T10:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday i was off work with a sort of low-level flu, today i feel better but i'd quite like another day off work. Not happening but. Yesterday was quite relaxing, i spent the day in with Patty the parrot reading daft articles on how to train parrots to ride bicycles and the like. She sat on my shoulder for a while and we watched a documentary about the linguistic abilities of parrots. Best was finding Sparky (Youtube that bad boy), an African Grey parrot who lives in Kilmarnock and can say "I'll kick your baws son" and "Sparky wants a chocolate biscuit and an Irn Bru". Superb.

Colombian news is rather thin on the ground, i've not been up to much due to some cash-flow issues on behalf of those stingy priests my employers. However i did go to see an excellent exhibition of Mexican art and its relation with Colombian art at the Museo Nacional, they had lots of murals and woodcuts and sculptures, excellent stuff.They also had a tiny but interesting room stuffed full of memorabilia relating to Luis Carlos Galan, a politician who was assasinated at a rally in 1989 in Soacha (a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bogota that used to be a village before being swallowed up by the city, also you may remember the place where i went sometimes last year to teach wee guys a bit of English and have my owl hand puppets licked by wee lassies). They have the suit he was wearing when he was shot, and lots of election propaganda (he was the Liberal presidential candidiate at the time and apparentlhy a sure thing to win the election) among which my favourite by a mile was the sticker showing him all wavy haired and charming with the slogan "Liberal ladies love GALAN!". Definetely worth a visit, Bogota readers. The building famously used to be a jail and a convent (not at the same time, obviously):
This weekend i will hopefully have the finances under control and will have rather more interesting things to report than that i sat in the hoose all day chatting up a parrot (who behaved extremely well until a pal dropped in to see me and then shat on my nice maroon jumper) (of course, the parrot shat on me, not the pal) and eating Chocoramo, glory of the Colombian snack industry. It's a sort of rectangle of cake covered in chocolate, a lunchbox classic for 50 years (but only in cold areas of the country otherwise they melt). I really do not know what i'm going to do when i live in a country where Chocoramos are not easily available. It doesn't bear thinking about. Maybe you can get them imported?

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer — Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

2009-09-07T21:26:00.000-07:00

Hiya. I've been reading up on the shipping forecast after an afternoon's waiting for a tedious visa related meeting with a Cuban colleague led to the mutual nostalgia for coastlines getting cracked out. I love the shipping forecast more than many other things. More than toast and jam, for instance, and more than going into the close in my old house on a hot day and it being all cool and quiet and tiled, however less than a cup of coffee in a small yellow cup that says "Koffie" on the side and less than finding very wee and sweet mangoes in the fruit shop beside the park.

As regards the shipping forecast: in 2002 they changed the name of Finisterre to FitzRoy in honour of the guy who founded the Met Office. I always liked Finisterre, along with Utsires North and South and Malin. Here's a Seamus Heaney poem called The Shipping Forecast for ya:

Dogger. Rockall. Malin, Irish Sea:
Green swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice.
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Off eel-road, seal road, keel road, whale road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L'Etoile, Le Guiliemot, La Belle Helene
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, 'A haven,'
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

Things are a little melancholy around here, the wind is howling against the window and down below the sad dogs in the vet's yard are howling too, and somewhere in the distance a plane's taking off. Bogota feels very empty sometimes, when you know everyone you fancy talking to is in their bed and everyone else you fancy talking to is on the other side of the world and also in their bed. I chose it and i don't regret it but sometimes i wonder about going home because it'll never be the same as it was. Even the shipping forecast isn't the same anymore.

Amendoim...

2009-08-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

...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

2009-08-17T20:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

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!

The RETURN

2009-07-19T13:52:00.000-07:00

Hello.

It´s strange to be back in Colombia. Obviously it´s grand to see everyone again, but i miss home much more this time round. I wish it wasn´t so far, that you could just jouk back for the weekend and not have to think about months and months stretching out ahead of you before you see the people you want to see. Ach but that year there went by ludicrously fast, before we all know it it´ll be ta ta Colombia for good.

So far me and Cherie have found a flat but we don´t move in until the 25th, it´s grand though. It´s up north, on the 4th floor and out the windows you can see over the roofs of the houses up to the mountains. Moving is going to be brutal because of the beds, fridges, sofas which are scattered across the city in various apartments but once it´s all done we can all relax.
At the moment i´m staying in Mark and Paula´s flat in Modelia, it´s a bit of a bummer staying in someone elses flat, i just want to get into my own one and settle in.

However in spite of temporary homelessness i´ve been having a good time seeing all the pals again. Yesterday i´d a cracking English class with Oliver´s girlfriend Ana Maria, she is an art teacher so we worked out how to instruct a class of 15 year olds how to make a plaster cast of their own ear in English. Then i walked about 50 blocks to go to a cheerio BBQ for a chap who´s off to London for a year, just fancied a wee walk but i underestimated the brutal Bogota sun and got rather toasted in the nose region. Nice.

BBQ was a classic Colombian shambles, 5 o´clock rolled around and there was no sight of food, just crowds of men haplessly flapping at a pile of barely smouldering charcoal and the guy who´d been sent out for beer seemed to have disappeared. It was on a terrace on the 12th floor so had an incredible view out over the city, but most of us could only gaze at the people on the terrace to our right which had a family all sitting round a table tucking in to some delicious-smelling slabs of meat, or the terrace to the left which was full of giggly drunk teenagers waving tins of beer and bottles of aguardiente in the air. I gave it up as a dud and went off to meet a pal in Chapinero where we sat in a succession of chusos (crap bars) and drank some well-earned beers.

Today it´s all been a bit of a hungover write-off, however i am smugly celebrating 1 (ONE) week with no fags which i think you will agree is rather astouding. In fact i´m off to the supermarket to buy a pair of JOGGIES (classy) in order to actually do some kind of sports (shock) in the future. Yes it´s all go around here!

Tomorrow me and Cheeky Cherie Elston are off to a free concert in the Parque Bolivar to celebrate the independence of Colombia, hopefully i will be cracking out the dodgy salsa moves and showing these Colombianos what´s what.

I´ll be back with more interesting reports when things have livened up a bit around here, at the moment it´s a tedious quagmire of contracts, bank accounts, ID cards and moving house but in 2 shakes of a lamb´s tail normalk service will be resumed.

Live long and prosper, KM...

Mime revenge and lazy Sundays

2009-05-26T09:10:00.000-07:00

Hello chaps!

Hope all is splendid with ustedes. Here i´m on my last week of work! Not that you can really call it work, i´ve got 2 classes and let´s face it they´ll be a farce, end of term and all that jazz. And then it´s hola Escocia!

This weekend i didn´t eat any udders, however i did buy a BIKE from my pal, wait til you see it it´s PIMPING - matt black with a subtle Bogotá licence plate sticker on it, and i´ve got a slightly kinky looking reflective vest to go with it. Magic. I also accumulated a pair of fake Ray Bans and a red Bakelite telephone, ah flea markets you are the best thing ever.

If you care to visit http://www.colombiareports.com/ you can read my article about the bike tours in the travel section, also in "Colombia News Lite" i am quote of the week! Colombian men have the unfortunate habit of giving you compliments but being unable to prevent themselves from adding "marika" or "guevón" (both insults but commonly used among pals as a kind of "mate" substitute) so you get comments like "eres muy hermosa marika" ("you´re very beautiful, gaylord") or "me fascinas, guevón" ("i really like you, bawbag"). How can anybody take this seriously?

I´m in the midst of getting all my gubbins packed up, horrendous how much garbage you accumulate over a relatively short time, specially boufin´clothing. Why did i ever think it was a good idea to buy a giant orange jumper with llamas marching round the yoke in the first place?

Tonight someone invited me to the theatah at Los Andes which is a very swank uni, hope it´s not shocking experimental gubbins...or mime...gads the possibilities are quite horrible. Although speaking of mime i was waiting for a friend yesterday outside the Museo Nacional and there´s a mime artist who plies his trade there, i´m not such a fan of them in general but the guy was a pure genius, had imitating people´s walks down to a fine art. So along comes this guy who was God´s gift to the mime artist, a big guy with a distinctive swaggery walk carrying two paper grocery bags. So them mime falls into step beside him and does a belter impression for a bit, til the man suddenly stops in his tracks. The mime stops too. The man takes a step backwards, as does the mime. Then the guy starts to take steps forwards and backwards in such a jerky odd sequence that the mime can´t follow it, so he throws up his hands in silent defeat and makes his way on to the next victim. Priceless.

ARF in a similar vein i was on the Septima in the middle of the Ciclovia when my parents called, so i gave my shopping bag with the red telephone to Karen to hold ( i may have also been eating some kind of dessert at the same time, what else are Sundays for if not cake and rummelling around second hand shops?) and she whips out the big red plastic reciever and starts talking into it, "No waaaay! No me diiiigaas!!" and all the Colombians practically falling off their bikes gawping at her, arf hilarious. Hah and we went to see the Life of Brian at the Uni Central, needless to say some of us were in tears at the Biggus Dickus bit, which was "Pito Largo" in Spanish and his wife Incontinentia Buttocks (ARF) was Incontinencia Trasero, i tell you they were rolling about the aisles when that subtitle flashed up. Magic.

Other weekend highlights included cheap beers in the terrace of the pizzeria in La Macarena with Adam, trilingual torrents of abuse being hurled at a shite Shreck Playstation racing game by me and Oliver (Pinocchio was getting it particularly tight, the wee bastard), Champions League final (´mon Barca) plans being laid for another glorious bout of afternoon drinking, a party at Tamara(Spanish pal)´s house with horrible wine and "La Pantera Mambo", and generally lots of fun.

ARF (this post is unusually arf-filled, think we´re going on number 5 here) one of my students just called me to have a picada for lunch before Conversation Club, hilarious. Picadas are plates of bits of meat, sausage, wee tatties, arepas, etc etc and usually imply chunchuyos, eugh, but there´s always a spot of black pudding in there as well to soften the blow. As long as it´s udder free i´ll be happy. The problem with this type of food is it really demands a beer to accompany it, and i´ve to whip up enthusiasm for English conversation immediately afterwards, probably not the best idea in the world to get started on the old Aguilas.

Ah well keep the heid readers, i´ll keep you posted as to whether the picada was delicious or a nightmarish chunchuyo-fest.

Dejémonos de vainas

2009-05-18T10:28:00.000-07:00

The fruits of this weekend:

1. A bag of neatly wrapped barbequed udder and unwashed intestines.
2. Oil stains on my favourite checked trousers.
3. Sore feet.
4. A date.
5. The best birthday present ever.
6. A deeper understanding of the following words and phrases: derramar, roupa cheguei, cangrejear, comprar la tiquetera, no joda, lámpara.

Let´s start at the start. Number one is thanks to the vast portions served at "El Viejo" Argentine restaurant in La Macarena. A supposed picada for 2 people was too much for 3 hungry individuals, so we got it wrapped up ("pa´l perrito") and took it on our travels. This was the start of an absolutely disgraceful Sunday afternoon in the company of the ever braw Cherie and a pal called David, who i believe made an appearance in these pages PURE months ago. True to form we met this chap when we were doing a spot of impromptu mid-week boozing in a bar near the house. Cherie and him are good pals but i´d not seen him for months, given the borracheras of catastrophic proportions that occurs when we see each other this is perhaps not entirely a bad thing.

Anyway so we had the picada which was unspeakably delicious, big steaks and ribs and chicken with chimichurri (hot herby sauce) and garlic mayonnaise, unfortunately the udders aren´t up to much (tastes like stinkin´cheese, Roquefort or something. Bleugh) and i think i may have already made my feelings clear about the unwashed intestines. Chinchulines the Argentines call them, which i think is quite a pretty name for something so rank. Number one bottle of wine of the day (you can see where this is going can`t you) accompanied this feast, followed by 2 bottles more in a hilarious old man bar on the 19 where the locals sat tanning red wine and cracking dirty jokes all afternoon. We were ejected from this bar at 6pm (closing time, not for unruly behaviour) and so went up to Bardo with Mark and Paula where a number of other pals were reading out extracts from some nihilistic Bogotá novel. Cherie had by this time sensibly stopped drinking, some others however were not so sensible and started on the tequila... and then went back to our flat for even more booze, what an absolute disgrace.

Number two! The oil stains were caused by the chain of a rather pimping bike i was riding across the old train tracks by Paloquemao (the gigantic and marvellous food market) falling off at an inopportune moment. I was riding the bike on Friday afternoon as part of a tour of the city about which i´ll shortly be writing an article for Colombia Reports. It was crackin´, zooming around the city through parks and round the back streets til we reached the Uni Nacional where there was Cafe Tacuba tunes blasting out a stereo and lots of hippy types sitting around campfires making huge vats of stew and drinking cheap wine.

3! Sore feet from going out with my hilarious colleagues on Saturday night in inappropriate boots to a crappy student bar where they played inexplicable techno and me and Cherie danced like a pair of total eedjits. Much hilarity regarding the incredible Colombian habit of pointing with the lips, this is absolutely the greatest facial movement in the world and is most commonly used to explain where the toilet is. The next time you see me in person i´ll demonstrate, it´s kind of difficult to convey in writing.

Four... arf last night some chap i met while i was sitting in the park (nothing better than sitting in the park in the sun talking to all the folk that arrive, tinto vendors, hippes making wire sculptures, general nutters) called me to see if i wanted to go out, poor guy phoned at 7pm and i was brutally steaming (after the 2nd shot of tequila) but i think i managed to arrange to meet up during the week. Hilarious.

FIVE FIVE FIVE Cherie gave me for my birthday this incredible book all decorated and filled with poems about knitting, onions, friendship, vergas and many other thngs besides, full of photos and drawings and pictures and it´s so excellent that it made me cry because i´m a sentimental old bastard. Braw!

The phrases collected under Number 6 were accumulated over the course of the weekend, first one on Friday night when i went out with Oliver (my pal who is teaching me to speak Portuguese with a Sao Paulo accent and who is being taught in return to speak English with a Glaswegian accent, guy´s a total champ although he rips the piss something awful) to his pal´s wee flat in La Macarena all full of weird paintings of Colombian icons done on toilet seats (i mean that they were actually painted onto toilet seats rather than the icons were on the toilet, just to clarify matters). There (what a surprise) we drank load of rum and listened to Calle 13 and shouted a lot, it was all extremely good fun. During the night i learned that derramar is to spill or to have an orgasm (whoa calm down, not from actual experience but because their band is called Derramoncito which is a mixture of that verb, some allusion to The Ramones said in a Colombian accent, and a character from a telenovela (called "Dejémonos de Vainas" which means something like "Let´s stop all this nonsense" but is a thousand times funnier in Spanish) called Ramoncito who apparently was a child star who turned to drink and drugs).

I also learned that roupa cheguei is loud embarassing clothing ("I´ve arrived clothes"), as in you get to a party and your clothes shout "I´ve arrived!". The equivalent in Colombian Spanish is to be una lámpara, someone who´s a bit embarassing and wears brutal clothes. I´ve been getting ripped a lot recently for being a lámpara.. Last week i bought a tan leather jacket with turquoise suede bits and silver stripes, it looks like the kind of thing Evel Knievel would be into so maybe the piss ripping is justified. Lámpara pride, entonces!

Cangrejear is to break up with your boyfriend or girlfriend then sheepishly get back together with them. No joda is just the best thing ever, a Costeño phrase which means "away ye go" or "aye right" or many other things besides. Comprar la tiquetera is to make an absolute arse of yourself, to just be the most embarassing thing ever. To say "How undignified" here you say "Que boleta" (What a ticket!), so it follows that if you´ve reached maximum levels of undignifiedness then you aren´t just a ticket, you´ve bought the whole damn ticket machine.

What a great weekend! One thing i´ll say about Bogotá, it´s never EVER boring.

Do you like golf?

2009-04-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-22T15:06:00.000-07:00

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. !!!

Cake face

2009-03-01T07:43:00.000-08:00

Here's me impersonating a cake:
Bogota has been braw of late, particularly in culinary terms since they paid me on Friday and already $100,000 of my wage has gone on scran. It was all worth it though. Last night me and Cherie went to the tapas bar behind our house for calamares, albondigas, tortilla and patatas bravas which were crunchy roast potatoes sprinkled with paprika and salt. Mmm. I don't think there's any chance of getting anyhting similar to the Spanish ones but in their own way these ones were pure delicious. Then last night i went to a restaurant called Darpapaya in the city's "Zona G", supposedly the gourmet area but really 2 streets stuffed with overpriced wine bars and similar horrors. This place was grand though, we had ceviche with mango and red onion and then i troughed a plate of mero (some kind of fish) with fried yucca, papaya, sweet pesto and prawns. What a pig. Then i followed that rather sophisticated din dins up with a trip to a crap Irish pub (called The Monkey!) for 2 brutally expensive pints of snakebite and blackcurrant. I just got a notion for it when i saw it on the menu, and it wasn't far off the real think, except for having a a massive slug of Ribena in it as the blackcurrant part.

I'm still studying Portuguese, man what a great language. The verb "to be" in the preterite tense (1st person) sounds like "Stevie". As in "Estive no bar" (I was in the pub). Magic.
Apart from that yesterday i went to Soacha which used to be a village to the south of the city but which has now been swallowed up by the city. There me and some pals taught a bit of English to some cheeky local kids (obviously me and Cherie bagsied the adolescents, the others who didn't have the foresight to do so were left singing "heads, shoulders knees and toes" and trying in vain to stop a small girl from wetly licking the owl hand puppet that had been rolled out for the occasion.). It was grand though, the kids were a good laugh and it was a nice way to spend Saturday morning. Although it took me and hour and a half to get back to the city centre, the bus took me on a massive tour round the south of Bogota while an endless succession of reformed drug addicts got ton the bus and told their sad stories and how they had been saved by Christ. One guy warned parents of the pitfalls awaiting their adolescent children like drug addiction, alcoholism and homosexuality. Brutal state of affairs, and there's nothing you can do since they're total tragic cases just trying to make a living. But i didn't buy any stationery off that one because of the homosexuality comment. A far superior bus performance was the chap with Snoop-esque braids who got on later with a CD player that tinkled out a jangly backbeat while he did a pure amazing freestyle about all the passengers on the bus, he was a total superstar!

Today i'm heading to the flea market at San Alejo to buy some haggard 2nd hand books and perhaps a few pirate films from some shady guy on the Septima, then maybe to the pictures since i'd like to see this Slumdog Millionaire. Although I watched Benjamin Button last week (50p copy from the street, thanks Colombian pirate film industry) and i thought it was shocking, what a shite film!

I love living in Colombia, but i must say after 7 months i'm really starting to miss baths, having an oven, the shit indie disco at the Woodside Social, Glaswegian accents and bacon rolls. Although in Glasgow there's no Club Colombia (best beer ever, it even won some kind of prize at a beer festival), no ciclovia, no granadillas (fruit with revolting looking pulpy innards with black seeds that give it the nickname "miner's snot", it's pure delicious), no good salsa, no men selling coffee out of thermos flasks on the street for 20p a cup and nobody ever comes on the bus and sings you a song, so i suppose they're about even. Look these are some pictures from my holibags, there's hunners more though...

Stuck on a bus with a goat and a wee boy being sick - Colombia que linda eres

2009-01-16T12:41:00.000-08:00

Hi pals!

Happy 2009 to all, hope Hogmanay was a belter wherever you may have spent it. Mine was spend in the Parque Tayrona by the Caribbean coast, crowded round a table by candlelight drinking cachaca (the Brazilian spirit that goes in caipirinhas, more to do with this later) with lots of holidaying Bogotanos. Muggins here was a bit free with the bevvy and had to go to bed (hammock) at 2am, i tell you it´s a nasty business getting into a hammock when you´ve had one dodgy cocktail too many. Then i fell asleep without taking the precaution of covering my face and woke up the next day with one half of it covered in mosquito bites. It was deeply embarassing, it swelled up and went all bumpy and i looked like the elephant man for most of the holiday. And i didn{t even have my fringe to hide the top part of it since while i was in Aracataca (birthplace of big Gabriel Garcia Marquez) i got a dubious haircut which left me with a really short fringe which makes me look permanently startled. Aracataca is grand though, a wee sleepy hot town in the middle of miles and miles of banana plantations with lots of old guys sitting out on the steps of their houses chatting and wee kids briling about on bikes.

After Tayrona and the mosquito bite horror i went to the Guajira, the desert region on the border with Venezuela. It´s beautiful with big dusty plains and blue lizards and incredible sunsets. I liked the whole region, travelling around in the back of shoogly trucks with women in big flowery smocks and people trying to put goats on the van ("You can´t put that thing on the truck! There isn´t a seat for it!" the lady beside me cried in horror) you see boys by the side of the road selling knock-off Venezuelan gasoline in old Coke bottles, and some of the cars have these strange green and white licence plates which mean they´ve been stolen in Venezuela, smuggled across the border then registered and legalized in Colombia where they sell them for knock down prices. All very shady and exciting, these are total border towns where a man accosts you as soon as you get out of your rattly truck and offers to take you across the border in another one, with documents or without. In one such town i had a plate of fried goat for breakfast, the cafe was a block away from the goat market where rows of sad goats sit on the ground with all their legs tied together waiting for someone to buy them, so i though that at least it´d be nice and fresh because it was probably alive an hour earlier. Nae luck though, frankly i don´t think that deep frying it is the best way to cook the stuff, and i mean if anybody´s going to like it deep freid it´d be me.

Then we went on to Valledupar, home of vallenato where there was a Peter Manjarres concert to celebrate the birthday of the city, lots of sculptures in the streets and much time spent tanning tintos and sitting on walls. From Valledupar we went to Pueblo Bello and to visit and Arhuaco village called Nabusimake which is 2 of the most unimaginably uncomfortable hours going up and down steep rocky hills and through rivers and over huge boulders. Whiplash-a-rama. I don{t think foreigners hang around Pueblo Bello too much because our arrival caused some hilarity among the local population, endless questions about where we were from and what we were doing there, and the night we went to play pool in a pool hall with huge paintings of Vicente Fernandez and Hugo Chavez on the walls we attracted a crowd of people on motorbikes and wee kids who stood around openmouthed as me and Mark rattled the balls around the table and resolutely failed to pot the black. Luckily two dogs got stuck together in the heat of passion so this took the heat off us, as the unfortunate couple took a turn at being the subject of speculation and hilarity.

Next stop San Gil, Colombia´s adventure sports capital where we went rafting on the Rio Fonce and i fell in, and more time was spent in pool halls and tanning tinto on park benches and visiting waterfalls and swimming in freezing rivers. On the last day we went to the natural park and discovered that their open air swimming pool has a resident pair of ducks who glide around as wee kids push each other in and people float along in rubber tyres. Needless to say there are some undignified photos of me and Cherie in the pool with the ducks, which i will be sharing with the world as soon as i get the holiday pics organised.

Back in Bogota now! It´s as grey and rainy as when we left, but now i feel colder because i´ve been swanning about in hot weather for the past month. Despite unpleasant weather it´s good to be back, and me and Cherie and Adam are going to learn Portuguese from a Brazilian friend who´s running classes, if we keep it up for 5 months we´ll be able to have a decent conversation, how exciting! We went to his house last night to meet everyone that´s doing it, they seem like a very excellent bunch and we all learned how to make, and then tanned a lot of, caipirinhas.

Travels

2008-12-26T08:59:00.000-08:00

Hello! Feliz navidad and all that, hope yous all had a gid day. Me and Cherie went to an island off the coast and lazed about all day, swam in the sea and i had the world´s most well travelled tin of Bru - it went from Glasgow to Bogota (via New York), then overland through Medellin, Monteria and Cartagena before it finally got tanned on Puente Arena on the Isla de Tierrabomba, Caribbean. And pretty damn good it was too.

Travels have been a riot so far, in Medellin we went dancing to a tiny sweaty salsa club where the most incredible dancers strutted their stuff, at one point everyone cleared the dancefloor for a solo demonstration by this suave guy in white flares, whirling and spinning round but making it all look totally effortless. One of Adriaan´s pals kindly taught me some moves and for the length of "La Pantera Mambo" by La 33 i didn´t quite own the dancefloor but certainly held my own. We also went to sit on the doorstep of some pals´ house away up on the hillsides of the city, everywhere was strung with fairy lights and we sat under the eaves of the house in the bucketing rain drinking rum and hearing stories of wild gang life in the barrios of Medellin.

Then we headed to Monteria on an interesting overnight bus, the woman behind us was quetly but regularly sick as the driver wove his way through a series of endlessly brutal bends in the road, i´m really glad it was dark because it was probably totally terrifying. Monteria is very hot - i bouhgt apair of REALLY tight Colombian jeans and we saw huge iguanas running throuhg the park as we went to take a shoogly wee ferry across the wide, coffee colored river to have a cheeky beer in a scruffy bar.

Cartagena is HOT and really touristy, i can´t really be arsed with it although it is really beautiful. Last night we went to an incredible Cuban bar, covered in black and white photos of son cubano heroes and all mojitos and cigars and old guys in white shirts. Magic. As soon as i pay up in this internet cafe me and Cherie are off to Santa Marta for more seaside fun and perhaps some jungle fun into the bargain. More to follow soon, til then this is your Caribbean correspondent K. >Mackinnon signing off xx

Unhand me, you cad!

2008-11-30T11:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

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.

I love this city

2008-10-29T12:24:00.000-07:00

(thanks, Fedde Le Grande)

Some things i love about this city:

People sell minutes on mobile phones in the street, so as long as you have a wee bit of paper with a few important numbers on it you never have to worry about having nae credit or reception or whatever technological nonsense impedes your communication. Also they wear rather smart fluorescent tabards which is always a bonus.

Sometimes you unintentionally end up at really strange parties. Last Friday i wound up in an old office building absolutely covered in graffiti, with a plastic cup on a string round my neck which allowed me to crack into a free bar, and everyone there was wearing either a hat or a wig. Then i went to a disco on the 9th floor of a very tall building which played loads of crap music in English, hunners of Kiss and shady British indie and the Ghostbusters theme. Readers, for one glorious moment i was dancing in the middle of an empty dancefloor, with a view out over the city lights spattered across the mountains and "Rhythm Is A Dancer" blaring out of the speakers. Perfect. Unfortunately i had my Saturday class the morning after and i slept in an absolute belter and arrived an hour and a half late. Erk.

The bookshop round the corner from our flat is a thing of great joy, it has 2 huge rooms and one of those is entirely devoted to Colombian books, novels and poetry and sociology and big glossy art books and a whole shelf of books about Bogotá. A lot of my wage goes to Librería Lerner.

Everyone at my work is really nice and we go and sit in the bar across the road from the staffroom and tank tintos and teach each other crass phrases in our respective languages, and one of them´s invited me to a wee village for the forthcoming puente which will surely be a vallenato & aguardiente riddled party of the highest order.

My neighbourhood is covered in graffiti and it changes all the time, every time you leave the house there´s a new drawing of a cat or some criticism of the government scrawled across a wall and it makes the walk to the bus stop like visiting an art gallery.

Apparently in a recent survey, Bogotanos said that the colour they most associate with the city is yellow, as opposed to grey a decade ago. They think the reason for this is the Ciclovías, where the attendants wear yellow and all the signs and stuff are yellow. There is a song that goes "Bogota doesn´t have a beach, but it has ciclovías", and apparently these cycle routes and the massive amountof vallenato you hear everywhere contribute to Bogota´s image of itself as somehow a Caribbean city, although it´s 20 hours on the bus to the nearest body of water.

One of my favourite bars is a poky salsa place near the Javeriana Uni called Salomé, which feels totally tropical and not like being in Baltic Bogotá at all. The walls are lined with posters of old boogaloo artists and adverts for salsa festivals, and you cram in around a shoogly wooden table and drink nice cold tins of beer and argue with your pals about the state of the world, and then when a song you like comes on you saunter up to the dancefloor and spin round and round in an atrociously uncoordianted manner, but the place has such a nice atmosphere than nobody looks twice at a bit of shoddy Scottish dancing.

I went there on Saturday night with Cherie and Adam after a wide range of tropical fruit daquiris in Michael´s house beforehand. I´m not sure if i mentioned this chap before, the owner of 2 very nice rabbits called Bernard and Albert. (A wee aside here, earlier that day i had bought a very nice t-shirt specifically to wear to go to the lovely salsa place.) So i´m sitting on the sofa, wearing my nice new shirt, daquiri in hand and rabbit on lap, giving him a wee pat (it was Albert) and i´m sure you can imagine what happened. I had to go to the dancing in an admittedly stylish but rather oversized man´s shirt while my new shirt languished in the bathroom, sadly dripping rabbit urine into the sink. Undignified.

One last thing i love about it here: putting wax on the floor of our flat. It´s got sort of dull polished floorboards and the thing to do with them is coat them with strond-smelling wax using a brush. I don´t know why it´s so satisfying but i always feel a bit French when the time comes to do it, as if i live beside the Sorbonne in an apartment with parquet floors.

National strike, Bogotá 23rd October 2008

2008-10-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

Medellín and a nice bridie

2008-10-16T16:22:00.000-07:00

Hi pals! How´s tricks?

Bogotá continues to be delightful, although last week i finally managed to leave the city for a cheeky trip to Medellìn, city of eternal spring. Journey was rather eventful - 11 hours on a bus watching violent, crap films and talking to an inexplicable Irishman in the seat across from me who used to work in the Hamptons as a golf caddy and once carried the bag of Hugh Grant, and then outside of Honda the bus hit a car (but just a wee bit). However i arrived intact and went to Adriaan´s house to meet all his pals who are of course complete classics, and they really do have a private waterfall in their flat!

I did a spot of toursim, went to see a very excellent exhibition about displaced people in the Museo de Antioquia before heading up in the cable cars that form part of the metro system and which are absolutely the greatest method of transport ever. Imagine swaying on a thin cable in this wee pod high above the city so that there´s the most incredible view out over the hills and the buildings encroaching up the slopes, but the best thing is to look down and see all the lives being lived out below, kinds in playparks and people doing their shopping and funeral processions and adverts for bars painted on roofs. Amazing.

One day i went out of town to a wee village called San Jeronimo:It´s an hour on the bus but the climate is totally tropical, all palm trees in the main square and a chilly church with lots of Virgin Marys and everyone sitting outside shooting the breeze. I went for a wander around and some total strangers invited me to sit with them outside the house and have a really braw chat about Colombia, they gave me a tinto in the best china and invited me to stay the night and everything, they were so unbelieveably hospitable. Lovely stuff. Unfortunately on the way back the main road was closed and the bus had to take a windy back road through the Andes, in the middle of a violent tropical thunderstorm. Muggins here had sat on the side of the bus with the good view so as to get a good look at the mountains, unfortunately this also meant i got a good look at the abysses being illuminated with every flash of lightning which the bus was seemingly inches away from plummeting into. I´m sure it wasn´t genuinely that dangerous but all i could think of was sad statistics about earnest young foreigners dying in pointless bus crashes. However i survived to endure another 11 hour journey back to Bogota where i spent last weekend variously going on ferris wheels, visiting botanical gardens, eating lasagne with the world´s worst hangover, buying thousands of pirate vallenato and salsa CDs on the Septima and just generally living it up.

On Saturday i went to watch the Colombia - Paraguay match in the paper shop across the road, and when the other patrons found out we were Scottish Colombia supporters the aguardiente began to flow extremely freely. Things get rather blurry after the match finished but i had a really nice time chatting to all the folk in the pub, plus to make matters even better they played the entire latest Vicente Fernandez album twice in a row. I was up dancing at one point, oh dear. Grand night though.

This week i´ve been working a lot, trying to run the cine club which is inevitably a total disaster - either no-one turns up or like 150 people are forced by the teachers to come and then the film´s all scratched and jumpy, they can´t see the subtitles, the sound won´t go up high enough etc etc etc. Tiresome.

Last night i went to watch the final US presidential debate in (eugh) TGI Fridays, cue lots of comedy outbursts from drunk Democrats and a belter of an invitation to my mate´s house for din dins tomorrow, this chap´s a poet who also cooks up an absolute storm, last time i went round to his house for lunch i ended up staying til 11 at night drinking wine out of cartons and having heated discussions about politics and the general state of the world. Superb.

Also this weekend there is talk of going to someone´s auntie´s farm in Melgar which is a nice HOT town outside of Bogotà. The weather here is doing my nut in - i think it´s actually worse than Scotland. This is the rainy season and it rains every day, often torrentially. Garbage. However it´s not all bad, since i´ve managed to get hold of the Colombian equivalent of both Irn Bru AND bridies! Here is me getting rather misty eyed of such a taste of the old country - sugary orange fizzy juice accompanied by a delicacy of flaky pastry and indiscriminate meat. I need never have left Scotland!Incidentally check out my amazing t-shirt with the Virgin Mary on it - what an absolute belter!

Tallest buildings and mariachis

2008-10-02T11:02:00.000-07:00

Hiya!

Well since we last had this little electronic chat i´ve been quite busy, running around Bogotá seeing interesting things and spending all my money on tarting up the flat. Yesterday Cherie bought a dog bed for use as a sort of scatter cushion, hysterical. It´s ok if you turn it over so you can´t see the wee doggy paw print pattern. Incidentally here´s Cherie and me in the Plaza Che at the Universidad Nacional:

We went there to see a tango concert which was cracking, some old geezers in tuxedos crooning away while pairs of dancers in swanky dresses prowled up and down the stage swinging each other around, all in the middle of this huge university campus with loads of people sitting on the grass around bonfires with cartons of wine and bottles of aguardiente. I wish i worked at that university, although Minuto de Dios is a total riot. I´ve got a rep at work (and probably outside of work too) for being obsessed with mariachi music and in particular this man:

This is Vicente Fernandez and his best song is "Estos Celos", a song so good i was once reprimanded by a member of the language centre management team at uni for singing it too loudly in the staffroom. No, really.

So in between going to see live mariachis and getting stuck on the Transmilenio for TWO HOURS by getting on the wrong bus i also went up the Colpatria tower, the tallest building in Colombia. This is now perhaps one of my favourite things to do in Bogotá, you take a super speedy lift up to the 5o somethingth floor and then there´s a platform running around the outside of the whole building, so you get an amazing 360 degree view of the whole city, AND you can have a tinto up there too! Magic.

After going up that bad boy i inexplicably ended up in the Bogotá Country Club tanning gin and tonics in a marquee, i had a really weird meal of pollo Maryland which was a chicken which came with half a peach, two fried bananas and some crispy strand of bacon balanced on it. The whole experience was rather surreal, after din dins we went and sat beside an enormous swimming pool and continued to abuse the gin, before trying to go to the bowling alley which was closed so we went to the pub where i recall arguing about the pointlessness of the royal family. Life in Bogotá is never boring.

In other news i´m in the planning stages of doing a cheeky wee podcast about Colombian music with a friend - Poporopo lives on both in Glasgow and Bogotá!

Lo peor es que muy pronto comprendí, SI SI

2008-09-22T10:32:00.000-07:00

So, this is the lovely Casa Yankees Go Home. Above we can see a delightful poster of Che Guevara and the view out of the window onto the patio and a car park. Scenic.
This is the living room. All that there is in the room is that couch and my suitcase, but it´s getting cosier. Also i think i scored some garish wicker furniture off another shady contact at the British Council, man these guys are going to furnish my whole house for me!
I went to the football again on Saturday, this is the scene when the players run out onto the pitch, all blue and red smoke and flags and people going crazy. It was good but unfortunately my team got beat by an extremely cruel last minute goal. Hijos de puta Santa Fé.
After the football i went to Zipaquirá which is in the Sabana to the north of Bogotá, to visit the salt mines which have a cathedral carved into them, something like 2 miles below ground. It was amazing but a little spooky, specially because there was a Mass going on and i get a bit unnerved by all that kind of thing, especially if it´s in a cold, echoey, dark cavern. Anyway this is me having a tinto 2 miles below the ground!
After the salt cathedral we went to the above restaurant for lunch, it was a Paisa restaurant (Paisas are people from the region of Antioquena) so we all had huge slabs of meat with frijoles and eggs and pork crackling, AND as if that weren´t good enough there were also guys doing serenades and they played the world´s greatest song, Estos Celos by Vicente Fernandez. It was great to go on a wee road trip, the individual riding shotgun had a bit of an obsession with rancheras so we listened to lots of Mexican yelping and looked at cows and marvelled at a bizarre theme park which boasts a huge, inexplicable model of the Taj Mahal in the middel of a field. All in all it was a grand day out. Incidentally here is a video of the author singing the Bogotá city anthem at the football, arf.

Footie

2008-09-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

Total double whammy blog-a-rama today guys! A few weeks ago i went to the football here and i wrote all about it and then forgot to post it up. It was great fun and i´m going back on Sunday to see the derby, can´t wait. I bought a scarf last time and everything, because they do a red and yellow one which are the Bogotá city colours, so obviously the Jags fan in me absolutely had to get one. I go with my pal who´s a St Mirren fan, flying the flag for crap Scottish football 2,600 metres up the Andes!

So, football:
Bogota´s El Campín stadium is home to both Independiente Santa Fé and Millonarios, as well as the national squad. Games are playes on Wednesday and Saturday at this 40,000 seater ground, with "El Clasico" or the derby between rivals Santa Fé and Millonarios attracting a full capacity and a famously charged atmosphere. The stadium has its own Transmilenio stop and is easily reached by buseta or taxi, and upon arrival on a match day you are quickly surrounded by a vast crowd of fans queing for their preferred seats.

At a Millonarios game the entire area is covered in a sea of blue and white as fans proudly display their team colours on shirts, scarves, hats and jackets. Upon entering the stadium you are faced with rows and rows of shiny plastic seats (those in the know bring inflatable cushions as these seats become rather tiring and uncomfortable during the course of 90 minutes) thronged with vendors selling water, cigarettes, chocolate and long sticks of bread with cheese in them which are a typical match-day food.

The most fanatical fans of Millonarios sit behind the goals on the north side of the stadium, and begin singing and pogo-ing hours before kick-off. The groups of supporters are called "barras" and each one brings an enormous flag bearing the name of their group, some with allegiance to certain areas of the city, others referring to the superior quality of their team´s football, and they drape them over the back walls of the stadium so that nothing in sight isn´t blue and white.
When the home team runs out onto the pitch the whole stadium explodes in a frenzy of whistles, shouts, ticker tape and vast plumes of blue and white smoke, as cheerleaders grin and twirl pom-poms and form themselves into precarious pyramids. While the players battle it out on the pitch the fans shout criticisms of the opposing team and of the unfortunate referee, in between arguing with their neighbours about the forthcoming national team selections, while small boys make the team newsletter into paper aeroplanes and hurl them over the tops of the terraces to glide over the heads of the fans and land at the feet of the never-tiring cheerleaders.

At half time the hot dog stands are mobbed by hungry fans, and the stands become a hotbed of tactical discussion. By the beginning of the second half night has fallen and the huge spotlights render the pitch a glowing green, as the Bogotá drizzle floats down over the players and the lights of the city twinkle in the dark under the illuminated neon gaze of the monastery of Monserrate perched high on the mountainside.

When the whistle blows the sodden players make their way to the dressing room for reprimands or congratulations, and the fans gingerly maneouvre their cars out of the packed car parks among throngs of fans, and they listen to replays and analysis of the match all over again on the drive home.

Diary of a glutton - the journey continues

2008-09-16T08:06:00.000-07:00

Hello. It has been rather a long time since the last dispatch from Bogotá. Since then i have been perfecting my stand up comedy routine for my classes. Nothing is guaranteed to make a class of aloof students pish themselves with laughter than telling them that you like the public transport system in this city and that you don´t like chunchuyos. Chunchuyos are the old unwashed pig intestines, i believe i may have mentioned them previously. They are absolutely vile and i don´t see what´s so screamingly funny about not liking them, but apparently everything down to the way i pronnounce the word (choon-choo-yos) is absolutely hysterical. Ach well it keeps them entertained in between those intrusive personal questions they so enjoy asking me.

Aside from work i have been eating a lot of interesting meals at every opportunity. At work i went a few times to a tiny cafe round the corner from the uni where a crew of hardened old kitchen biddies whip you up a massive plate of home cooking, however i think my days there are over since following a plate of extremely suspect goulash i was violently sick and had to spend the whole next day in bed. Thumbs down, biddies.

Last week i went to a BRAW restaurant called Mini-mal, which for anyone who may live here was on Cr 4A 57-52, where you sit in a tiny wee room on shiny red vinyl seats with lots of strange light fittings made out of cheesegraters and the plastic jugs off blenders and listen to grade A old reggae, think there may even have been a spot of Tenor Saw on the go which instantly raises any establishment to sublime levels in my estimation. I had a dish called "Vamos a la playa" (Let´s go to the beach) which was puffer fish (see photo) in a sauce of caramelised onions and lulo, which is a tart tasting fruit that looks like a tomato, it´s also called naranjilla apparently but i´ve never seen it in Scotland. This had to be one of the best meals i´ve eaten in Colombia, possibly ever. The fish is incredibly meaty because of the muscles it has to puff itself up, so on each side of the spine there´s about an inch and a half of pure white fishy meaty goodness, and the sauce it was in! MAN this is a really great restaurant.

Then, as if that wasn´t enough gastronomical goodness for one week, on Sunday i went to a friend´s house and sat in a gluttonous stupor for 4 hours as he fed us plate after plate of delicious Chinese food; scallion pancakes, a thousand different varieties of dumplings, chicken baked in salt (the key is to liberally anoint the inside of it with spring onions, star anise and brandy mmm), pepper squid, aubergines in some mystery sauce, more chicken in a kind of peanuty sauce, beef in black bean sauce. It was top button of the jeans undone material. All this was washed down with lashings of red wine, some of which may have come out of a Tetra Brik style receptacle but was still rather nice, and the lunch ended up lasting until 11pm. Magic. I also demanded the purchase of a rank half bottle of brandy because it was Domecq brand brandy. Like Borges´s pseudonym!

Our flat continues to contain nothing but a red velvet sofa and an elderly suitcase, although now the walls are starting to fill up with a good assortment of crap. Yesterday me and Cherie liberated this incredible item from the communal area in the apartment block where you leave your rubbish, ok basically we raked it out the bins but it was just lying against a wall, not actually in a bin. Ahem, so we now own this picture which is like a shady reproduction of an oil painting of a cheesegrater, a blender, a funnell, a squeezy mustard bottle and some other culinary gubbins, mounted in a seriously ornate plastic frame, all dripping with gold curly bits. It´s superb. We also have drawings of ourselves done on separate occasions by an artistically challenged tramp, Cherie´s is a bit Jimmy Hill around the chin and mines looks kind of like Jane Austen if she´d had a serious pie habit.

Ah yes in addition to the very serious and worthy business of describing my perfect man to 35 skeptical teens, i have also been writing about Bogotá for Adriaan´s rather good website. The links in the sidebar may not work as well as they should so i recommend a cheeky visit to http://colombiareports.com/ for a lot of interesting news and information about the country as well as some rather genius cultural reports written by an extremely good-looking and talented Glaswegian. I wrote "Coffee and guaro in Bogotá´s Candelaria" (like you wouldn´t have guessed) about two very fine establishments a few streets away from my house. The Cafe Pasaje is an absolute belter, it´s an old literary institution full of eccentric patrons and hilarious Colombian coffee advertising posters. In fact i may go there after this and sit and have a coffee and read Cortazar, what a life! I was there the other night, having a beer and watching people fall off skateboards in the plaza, and you can see the monastery of Monserrate all lit up and neon above the city, and then the moon over the mountains and the lights of all the buildings. It´s up there with the Barbieri and the Grosvenor Cafe.

Photies

2008-09-08T06:03:00.000-07:00

This is La Candelaria, where i live.
These ones are from a big parade which was held on the Septima, a massive road that cuts through the city from North to South.

I like the jaunty angle of this guy´s clarinet.
The Septima is most excellent because every Friday night they close it off to traffic and there are bands, and people selling coffee and canelazo (which is the local aniseedy spirit mixed with hot water, sugar cane, cinnamon and spices), and dancing and guinea pig races. This involved betting on which upturned bucket one reluctant cuy will choose to enter, it´s great because they always stop to wash their whiskers and the crowd get agitated and suggest that the guinea pig handler might like to apply the toe of his boot to the animal´s erse to speed matters up a little.

Glesga pride!

Eres una nota

2008-08-27T16:20:00.000-07:00

... means you're an absoluter belter, a delight of a person. You're a musical note! Colombian spanish is incredible.

Since you last heard from me i've moved into a new flat, and am slowly filling it up with gubbins. I bought a load of furniture off this unfortunate English teacher, and travelled across Bogota in the back of a rattly removal man, lying in the pitch black on a red velvet sofa which was rather more haggard after this journey. Now in our living room there is nothing but the sofa in question, a Colombian flag pinned to the wall and my old school leather suitcase sitting in the middle of the floor as a kind of makeshift coffee table. I love it.

I've started classes now and the've all gone well so far, had fun whipping a class of 35 surly 18 year olds into an absolute frenzy over a game of "leisure time bingo", and telling them how much i like Colombian food.

Last night me and a few pals went to this belter of a bar just round the corner from the flat called Casa de Citas. This means "House of dates" (like a night out sort of date, not the dried fruit) and the place used to be a whorehouse, but now it's this big cavernous colonial building with old geezers playing Cuban music and old salsa posters everywhere. As soon as we arrived this guy came up and immediately riled me by asking what we wanted in English, but then when i asked for 2 Agilas (a delightful brand of Colombian beer) he responed in a thick Celtic drawl, "Aggeelaz, aaye?". Needless to say i was a little shocked to hear an accent as melodious as my own here in Colombia, shocked but delighted. He'd lived in Northern Ireland hence the amazing accent, and we ended up sitting boozing with him and his mates all night. The were really interesting, they all worked as political analysts, and one of them was a total big shot in Colombia who used to be a guerrilla but now works with the authorities. This is why i like going out during the week, because if there's only 6 people in the whole pub you're bound to end up talking to them. One of them was a total sports fanatic called Gina, who's going to take us to see a Colombian football match on Saturday! Braw.

Talking of football, one of my pals has just instigated the Bogota branch of the St. Mirren Supporter's Club, i'm not sure i can stand for there not being a PTFC rival to this organization, although we are probably the only two fans of wee rubbish Scottish teams in the whole country.

Scran

2008-08-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday i went out for some cheeky tapas, which was rather a nice change from all the meat, rice and plantain. It was interesting to see what the tapas here are like, i think it´s the same phenomena as some Chinese classics like chop suey (i think) not actually existing in proper Chinese cuisine but having been invented somewhere along the way, similarly there were about 2 things on the menu that you actually get in Spain, one of them being patatas bravas which came in a sort of mayonnaisey cheese sauce. Some tasty snags and a plate of delicious calamares al ajillo later, the grand finale of the meal arrived. In this tapas bar they had a few totally out of place items, like cajun chicken wings, but the best one was blokje kaas. If my Dutch serves me well this means "cubes of cheese" and that´s exactly what it was, about a pound of squeaky orange cheddar cut into huge cubes and served alongside a slick of apricot jam. It was great, although i had some strange dreams last night and woke up feeling really sad. But imagine coming all the way to Colombia to eat some kind of bizarre bastardised Dutch delicacy. Gezellig!

Through some sneaky negotiations with my various shady contacts in the British Council i´ve managed to nab some furniture off an English teacher who´s leaving Colombia, this is a pure godsend meaning that after some unpleasant howfing of furniture in and out of vans, up and down stairs, on Saturday night i´ll have a flat with a bed and a fridge and everything. Top notch. This guy is leaving because he got hit by a taxi, and meeting him has heightened my fear of the same thing happening to me. Road signs are kind of optional here, and i´d be raging if i came all this way and avoided all the other potential dangers of the country (much exaggerated, incidentally) only to be hit by a taxi.

This Saturday we´re having a wee perty in the new hoose, it´s very easy to find the building because it has "Yankees go home" spraypainted on the front of it. No joke. I´´m going to start acting the total Scot so´s nobody thinks i´m a Yank. An old lady asked me for directions in the street yesterday so i can´t look TOO foreign, i tell ye i´m glad i´ve got dark hair in this city, you stand out a mile away if you´re blonde with light eyes. In addition to genetic luck i´m supplementing my Colombian disguise with various disgusting items of clothing, latest two are a bag made out of a record sleeve for a song called "HOT HOT HOT!" with the performer´s grinning face splashed across it in garish colours, and a totally pimped up bomber jacket made of orange fake silk with stripey cuffs and a fur trimmed hood. I haven´t been robbed so far so i think it´s working.

I´m off to work now for a fascinating meeting on the promotion of foreign languages in the university, think i might suggest a wee weekly Still Game showing...

Housing success and empty streets

2008-08-19T10:42:00.001-07:00

Today's buseta was driven by a total frustrated boy racer, blasting out Amy Winehouse at top volume and weaving in and out of huge ques of other buses, honking at everything that moved and appearing to head for motorcyclists on purpose as if he got extra points for giving them the fright of their lives. Greatest method of public transport known to man. Imagine just sitting there, clinging on to the seat in front of you for dear life, your legs all cramped because nothing in Colombia is really made for people over 5 foot 6, while a tiny old lady systematically gives every passenger the evil eye until one of them caves in and gives her a seat, the guy beside you absolutely reeks of onions and every 5 minutes the driver carreers across about 4 lanes to pick up a new passenger, even though there are already about 15 extra people crammed all up the aisle making a delightful mockery of the large sign on the side of the bus that says "No standing passengers admitted". I love it.

In other news, i finally got a flat!! It took nearly 3 weeks of thankless trudging round apartments, every time being told that we needed 3 months bank statements, or were to leave a disgustingly large deposit, or that we had to rent it for a year and not 10 months, or basically that they just didn't like foreigners much and weren't giving us their nice flat to mess up with our outlandish foreign ways, no senor.
BUT, someone finally relented and kindly rented us their flat, in La Candelaria which is the old colonial centre of Bogota, the bit with all the different coloured houses and steep cobbled streets. My house is of course a wee 60's apartment effort, but it has a massive patio inside for BBQ action and a nice kind of wood-panelled sauna effect in all the rooms. And it's on Calle 13. Like the band! It's round the corner from the Luis Arango library which is the most visited library in the world, i'll be iin there like a rat up a drainpipe as soon as i get the business of buying a bed, a fridge, a washing machine and all that sorted out. I'm currently in what is probably Bogota's only kosher internet cafe which is down the stairs from the flat, this keyboard is a total belter and has the letters in Hebrew on it.

Aside from all this flat excitement i've been having a very excellent time, although the Saturday morning class (who were made to sit through 2 episodes of Still Game, incidentally) scuppered my holiday plans i've had a belter of a weekend in Bogota. On Sunday i went to see a free salsa concert in the Plaza Bolivar, ate some kind of fish which had been deep-fried whole (mmm), got my picture taken wearing a t-shirt that says "Tengo la camisa negra" and a pair of disgusting red sunglasses in front of the que of people waiting to pay their respects at the coffin of Fanny Mikey, a renowned Colombian-Argentinian actress who just died, then i went for a look at the Botero museum and topped it all off with a night on the coctails in the swanky northern part of the city. Asking for a martini in this city basically gets you half a pint of gin, needless to say some abysmal Scottish dance moves were cracked out before too long.

Yesterday once we'd finished the flat gubbins we went to get some food on the Avenida Jimenez, which is where all the trade in emeralds goes on. The cafe was in the building which used to be the headquarters of El Espectador, the paper Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote for when he lived in Bogota. We ate in the basement and there were lots of black and white photos of Bogota full of big chrome trimmed cars and men in hats. Later on i got a lift back up to the penthouse, and it was just getting dark and the city was totally deserted. When the clouds are low they cover the tops of the mountains which you can always see in the city, a big cold blanket of grey over the whole city. Since it was a Monday night and a public holiday as well everyone was in their houses or out of town, and you'd drive past these desolate streets strung with telephone wires and full of potholes, with nobody around except a man in the distance carrying a suitcase. There's a strange kind of melancholy about the place at times, it doesn't seem like a big city at all but a ghost town, or lost relic from a black and white film.

Inept teaching and penthouse living

2008-08-15T11:14:00.000-07:00

Ah i've got the day off work, how delightful. Unfortunately they've got me working EVERY Saturday at 8 (eight) am! Even at the Monkey you at least got a moderate lie-in on Saturdays, and a cheeky roll and sausage. Here i get 4 straight hours, alone, with a bunch of chaps who have passed all the available English courses but still want to learn more. These poor individuals have actually paid for the pleasure of me rocking up at 8am, half-dead and clutching a massive coffee, and inflicting my, shall we say idiosyncratic in place of non-existent, teaching methods on them. My first class is tomorrow so i've decided they're going to get Scottish culture full blast, total 8am haggis chat followed by a cheeky episode of Still Game. No, really.

This unexpected Saturday work has scuppered my plans to go to Medellin for the weekend, it is rather shite because i'm never going to get more than 2 days off in a row now (i get a day off during the week to make up for the Saturday), and most places are 10 or 20 hours away by bus. Thanks, university. I can't really complain about it since i've got such a sweet deal here, i'm only giving 14 hours of classes a week, and all of the other teachers work full time and most of them are doing their Masters at night school as well. Colombians are incredibly hard-working, aye they might be late all the time but once they actually get started they all work so hard, it totally puts the U.K to shame.

I've finally got shot of the creepy house i was staying in beside the university! I hated it because there are never any foreigners in Minuto de Dios and everybody's dead interested in what you're doing, which is fine if you're going to class, actually doing some work, not so good when you're slinking back to your sad wee house with nothing but a hot dog for company. Now, can you believe this, i'm staying with a pal who's house-sitting a massive palace of a flat in the swankiest area of Bogota, it has a balcony and 2 levels of plush loveliness AND a proper kitchen. I'm going to make a massive din dins tonight to celebrate my first access to cooking equipment in about a month. Magic. It isn't actually a penthouse but it's certainly the closest thing i've experienced, tonight i have the added luxury of washing my horrific clothing in an actual washing machine, how good is this?! Arf i've taken to buying cheap pairs of jeans from the supermarkets here, this isn't quite as naff as it might be in Scotland since the supermarkets are these vast warehouses with every concieveable product for sale, but the fashion for jeans here is really tight, often with horrific spangly embroidery on the arse cheeks...

Joe le taxi

2008-08-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

Today´s illuminating report on Bogota methods of transport will be on the taxi. The city is heaving with little zippy yellow taxis, and the only times when you can´t find one are 8 in the morning (don´t know why, there just never are any) and whenever it rains. They don´t really have meters in the strict sense of the word, sometimes they have a little counter that slowly counts up til 114 or whatever, and then theoretically you look up how much 114 should be on a kind of fares table that they have hanging up, but in practice they usually just say "What do you want to pay me, ten thousand?" and everyone just ignores the meter.

When we had our security briefing from the British Embassy guy he had grave warnings about taking taxis off the street. About half of the taxi drivers in Bogota are unlicensed so this is probably not bad advice, although i think it´s more a concern at night when you can´t see the numbers on the side or if it´s a decent-looking taxi or a total banger. The Embassy guy called them "ill-advised taxis", and an ill-advised taxi almost always has a hilarious driver who likes listening to banging Caribbean music and has the rear view mirror festooned with rosaries and Colombian flags. When you call one at night things are usually a little more subdued, maybe with a sheet of perspex separating you from the driver´s musical choices.

At night taxi drivers always always run the red lights. Gracie told me that this dates back a few years when there were a spate of robbings of cars waiting at the lights, and the government actually advised drivers to cautiously go through red lights in order to avoid stopping in bad areas. I´m pretty sure this kind of thing doesn´t happen a lot these days but they´ve stuck with the habit of just racing right through. The roads are pretty quiet after about 10pm anyway, so it isn´t dangerous.

They have quite an amazing knowledge of the city, you almost never have to give them directions and they don´t have satnav, big respect to the taxistas for this. Although the streets in Bogota are numbered according to what seems to be a very logical pattern - the ones going from east to west are calles going from 1-200 or whatever, and then the north south ones are carreras numbered the same way - but in practice it´s not at all simple and there are calles 26B and 26C and then suddenly 28A with no sign of any 27s. When they do get lost they have an incredibly strong torch which directs a really strong beam at a small area, and then they crawl along the streets in the cab shining the light on all the houses to see the numbers.

Coming soon - bike travel in Bogota! (Don´t hold your breaths for this one since first i need to sort out the flat business, and sine they come unfurnished buying a bed is a marginally higher priority than buying a bike. But only marginally.)

A rat!

2008-08-09T11:29:00.000-07:00

I am in what has to be one of the worst internet cafes in existence. This computer is so clapped out that if you open more than one window at a time the whole thing freezes and you have to get the chatty teen who´s manning this pulsating communications hub to turn it off and on again. However there´s a nice lively pawn shop across the road blasting out vallenato, and the teen is bringing great joy into my life by mercilessly firing into my soon-to-be flatmate Chantal, so life is quite good.

We´re in the middle of trying to find a flat, which is a deeply unpleasant business in Colombia. You need a Colombian national who owns a property to stake their whole house as a guarantee that you won´t take the piss. Imagine how delightful it is trying to find someone to do this for you when you´ve only been here a week and admittedly know some wonderful people but more in a "bottle of aguardiente and let´s teach the Glaswegian how to dance" way, rather than them wanting to stake their entire property on my behaving myself properly. Ach well, there´s one that we might be able to get which is a big palace in La Soledad for something like 80 bucks a month, i´ll keep you posted.

Last night i went to the opening of a bar with some chums, they reccommended some kind of typical Colombian cocktail that was the speciality of the bar, and when it arrived i kid you not it was in a milk bottle. A big milk bottle. Aye they´re keen on the old pints of cocktails here. They were all total charmers, i´ve landed on my feet here because there aren´t that many foreigners, so when folk meet you they´re really interested, and then if you say you like Colombian food as well they´re totally in love with you. Although i think they think i´m a bit of a pervert for having eaten the spit-roast guinea pig, citing its revolting ratty appearance as the reason why none of them have ever tried it. Aw talking of rats! I was in the toen centre walking past a really nice looking patisserie, with waitresses dressed in pink and black frilly aprons who were all sweeping the floor and joking around, when suddenly two of them start screaming and clambering up on the chairs, all the time shouting "A RAT! A RAT!!" and hitting the ground with their brooms, it was like being in an episode of Tom & Jerry. Magic.

No sofa stories this time, although yesterday i did see three motorcyclists having a hilarious slapstick punch-up in front of an empanada stall, and because they all have to wear special reflective jackets with their licence plate numbers on them they look like giant Lego men, all pishing themselves laughing and shoving each other around.

Tienes tremedo...CULO

2008-08-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

Aw i´m in an internet cafe and i left my camera back in the wee house otherwise i could treat you to some nice pictures of the things i´ve eaten over the past few days, most delightful of all being the unwashed pig intestines which are horribly crunchy on the outside but spurt the pig´s half-digested last meal out into your mouth as you bit down on them. Mmm. I went to a Colombian food fair in a park which was a benefit gig for the police service, and they had the national police band up on a massive stage playing pure amazing music, all salsa and rancheras and mopey love song duets. Imagine the Glasgow police band and how garbage they´d be!

Today i saw a horse pulling a cart which was loaded up with chintzy sofas, all with several people sitting on them arguing loudly and enthusiastically, and the whole entourage was navigating a massively congested motorway junction.

In other delightful Bogota activities this Saturday afternoon i ended up in a the courtyard of an ancient house in La Candelaria which had been turned into a pure bangin´pub where all the students were up dancing and tanning aguardiente at 2.30 in the afternoon, AND they played that timeless classic "Culo"! I´m so glad i came here. Fried pig intestines, police vallenato bands and loads of cheap coffee, i think this may be the best country in the world.

I think i'm in love...

2008-08-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

with these buses:Unfortunately i've not been on one in a few days because i've been cooped up with the British Council learning about English teaching. We got a security briefing from an old school chap from the British Embassy, total ex Marine, probably killed hunners of guys with his bare hands and all that. The briefing was totally reasonable, just telling you to keep your wits about you like in any big city, although after discussing kidnapping, drink spiking, robbery and so on he glanced down the list of details for the language assistants and boomed "GLASGOW?! Who's from Glasgow? This is a HOLIDAY for you, girl!". Aye cheers mate.

Some drunken plans were laid last night to learn the accordion, that's something for yous all to look forwards to when i come back.

Hormigas Culonas

2008-07-29T17:00:00.000-07:00

Or deep-fried ants. They taste salty and spicy and are not at all bad except the bits get stuck in your teeth. In order to prepare these they drown the ants in salty water and then fry them. The bit on the left of the photo is the best bit, the arse of the ant really. The name means "big-ass ants".

Colombian hospitality

2008-07-29T16:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday me and Gracie met up with her pal German, and we hung aboot for a while, went for some food, and then later on we went out with him and loads of his family. Everyone was so kind, the da even paid for our din dins and German and his bro said they'll meet me and show me around and give me a hand with getting settled in and that. What an excellent thing to happen on your first proper night in a city, crashing a family do and meeting loads of great people. Obviously Edgardo the taxista rat from the first night was a one-off since everyone else i've met have been absolute belters.

Case in point: this morning me a couple of other language assistants went out for a wander, dropped into shop for empanadas (tasty fillings folded inside a doughy half moon shape and then deep fried) and started talking to the woman beside us, by the time the empanadas were done she'd given us her daughter's number so that she could show us around, and given Steve (one of the assistants) the number of her friend who lives in the town he's going to live in. People are so polite and friendly here (bar Edgardo), hopefully i'll not find it too difficult getting a flat with all these folk offering to help me.

Today me, Gracie, Steve and Chantal the fellow language assistants tried to go to La Candelaria, the colonial centre of Bogota, unfortunately we didn't know where to get off the space-age bus and ended up climbing these windy potholed roads right up the side of the mountain into a kind of hilltop shanty town. What a view of the place you get from a great height, it's unbelievably big, and the air is very clear because of the altitude. At the top of the hill we just got on another bus and went down again, it costs 30p to take a space-age bus basically anywhere in the city and you just flag them down like taxis and then tell them where you want to get off.

After that detour we found La Candelaria and ate some fried ants (see previous post), and then had a giant plate of food in a diner where they were listening to Micaela by La Sonora Carruseles! (This song is a Poporopo favorito). This is La Candelaria:

Hasty

2008-07-28T10:09:00.000-07:00

Man i really hated Colombia and everyone in it for a couple of hours there. However, now i´m all holed up in this belter hotel with a wee sunny patio and pure nice dude behind the desk with the unpleasant taxi business of last night behind me i feel a lot better about things. That impudent fellow had the temerity to leave me his card in case i wanted to hire him by the hour for tours of the city! Beat it, mate. I´ll post his number up later in case any of you fancy a spot of Trans-Atlantic prankie action. Bastard.

BUT i just went out for a walk round Bogota and it´s amazing. I went to Juan Valdez, which is a big coffee chain, and had a massive tinto (black coffee) and a donut for a quid! There are men in uniforms with guns hanging about everywhere, even at the coffee stands, but the hotel is right in the middle of the business district and there are loads of banks, so it must be becuase of that.
All the buses are clapped-out yet weirdly space-age looking van type things, painted lots of different colours with chrome trim and sometimes with the Virgin Mary on the side. They look like transport vehicles from a 1960´s sci-fi TV show (apart from the old V.M), and beside these are horses and carts, trundling along the streets beside millions of irate yellow taxis and kamikaze motorbike messagers. The houses are strange small cottages with terracotta tiles on the roofs, and all the gardens are full of flowers. Even the hedges are made of some plant that looks like normal hedge material but spattered with yellow flowers.

How not to arrive in a foreign country

2008-07-28T06:41:00.000-07:00

In the midde of the night, 3 hours late due to electrical storms, not having slept in 24 hours and, crucially, with some faith in the reliability of the British Council. This last one was the real killer. Some shmuck was supposed to pick me up at the airport but obviously couldn´t be arsed to ahng around and wait on the flight so i had to get ripped off changing dollars at the airport, then jump in a taxi to the hotel the B.C told us to go to. Of course, the airport people gave me the worng address so the taxi driver says the B.C hotel doesn´t exist, and will he take me to another one? This is such a classic scam, but what are you supposed to do if you don´t even have the address of the place, so he takes me to some overpriced hotel where i was robbed of $100 for a pishy wee room, and THEN i couldn´t sleep at all last night from beating myself up about being such a tourist idiot and letting myself get ripped off. GAH!

However, it´s probably best to get this kind of thing out of the way at the start, at least things can only get better from here on in, although the stupid British Council people have probably conspired so that i´ll have to pay for last night at the other hotel too, even though i wasn´t there. Sigh.

And there weren´t even any Twinkies on sale in Newark! Though i did sit next to some charming hillbilly newlyweds from a tiny town outside Kansas City on the plane from London to Newark and discussed the best way to cook squirrels, what catfish tastes like and how much better stuff tastes when it´s been deep fried.

Twinkies

2008-07-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

Well pals, i'm in London now and the true wisdom of carrying life's essentials in a suitcase with no wheels has manifested itself in some nifty blisters on both hands. Dan and Jack have gone to his sister's engagement party and i'm sitting beside the window looking out over a fox-addled back garden and a belter of a terrace where we sat and had a beer earlier. London is rather sticky at the moment, and the bus journey down was a brutal 9 hours of being sunburnt on one side of my face only, but i'm on my way to Colombia now! All the goodbyes have been said, and all i can do from now on is send you all shite postcards and save up the crap patter for when i see you all again.

Yesterday i was thinking about my 4 hours hanging about Newark and how to spend them. Newark isn't even in New York you know, it's New Jersey. What a swindle. Anyway i think i'll devote those 4 hours to eating American things you always see in films but don't get in Europe. Like Twinkies. What is a Twinkie? Tomorrow we'll find out.

On Monday i'm hopefully meeting Grace, a jammy fellow assistant who's going to hot, Caribbean, home-of-Shakira Baranquilla, and her Colombian pal for a spot of turismo and a few cups of Colombian coffee...

Life, luggage and leaving

2008-07-24T05:05:00.001-07:00

Hello blog.

Another wee preliminary entry as the massive journey to Bogota draws rapidly closer. And i mean massive. The bus into the city centre on Saturday morning, then an 8 hour bus ride to London, some faffing around London with a giant suitcase til i arrive in Finsbury Park to stay with Danielle and Jack (charming pals). A wee doss in their flat and then it's away to Gatwick for a flight to New York, hang about Newark International Airport for a few hours then a final massive flight to Bogota, THEN a hike across town to this hotel i'm staying in. Erk.

I'm not enjoying leaving people, places, my job, my flat, all that kind of thing. I don't want to unleash some horrible tide of internet-borne sentimentality, but it's all pretty hellish.

Then again, it's not like i'll not speak to anybody for a year. I'll probably get sick of the incessant e-mails, pictures of fat animals, love letters and the like. Yeah! See you sad sacks later!

In other news, my noble brother Mike, previously a Royal Mail stalwart, recently packed in the postie racket and gave ME the bag as a going away present. What a gent. It's vast & i'm already shiting it about the baggage allowance but in one year's time NO-ONE's going to miss me when i'm on the bike, with this vast red & fluorescent yellow brute on the go. Superb.

Things i will miss

2008-07-09T05:14:00.000-07:00

These two, obviously. But i hadn't considered the cheese issue. Apparently it's not big in South America. What am i going to do? Obviously i knew there would be things that i eat all the time here that i'd have to go without (see above), but no different and lovely types of cheese? That's brutal!

Setting the scene...

2008-07-02T07:50:00.000-07:00

Background info:

I'm a Glaswegian heading to Bogota for a year. Theoretically i can speak Spanish but in practice i speak a grotesque amalgam of Madrid slang and extremely formal "To whom it may concern" letter-of-complaint type Spanish taught to me at university. I was a teacher in a primary school in Madrid for a year with the British Council, and i'm repeating the same job in Colombia. Thankfully i'm working in a university this time round. Primary teaching was rather unkind to me. I leave for Bogota in a month and i have no idea what i'm letting myself in for.

In terms of preparation, i have a large leather suitcase which my father bought me from the charity shop, a full house of unpleasant tropical vaccinations (Hepatitis A, Typhoid, Polio, Tetanus and Diptheria are already in the bag. Yellow Fever's up this Friday at 5pm, immediately before a gargantuan piss-up celebrating my last-ever DJ night in charming Woodlands institution the Halt Bar as one half of Poporopo Especial, Glasgow's finest/only purveyors of all things musically Latino. Hope i don't faint.), and a copy of Bogota Bizarra, a guite to all things weird and wonderful in the Colombian capital. Those Bogotanos won't know what's hit them.