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!