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
Showing posts with label salsa bars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label salsa bars. Show all posts
Friday, 26 December 2008
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
I love this city
(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.
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.
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