Cinemas and chandozos

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!

Unhand me, you cad!

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.