Push the boat out compañeros

At Eighty

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

Edwin Morgan

Two years and it seems like two minutes

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

One week left!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming up: Colombia to Caledonia...

Apt driving pun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mondays - crap everywhere in the world

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:

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

Hot dog let down

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

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

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

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

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: