Travels

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!

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

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

(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

Medellín and a nice bridie

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

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

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

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

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

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

... 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

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

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

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

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!

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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.