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.

Cake face

Here's me impersonating a cake:
Bogota has been braw of late, particularly in culinary terms since they paid me on Friday and already $100,000 of my wage has gone on scran. It was all worth it though. Last night me and Cherie went to the tapas bar behind our house for calamares, albondigas, tortilla and patatas bravas which were crunchy roast potatoes sprinkled with paprika and salt. Mmm. I don't think there's any chance of getting anyhting similar to the Spanish ones but in their own way these ones were pure delicious. Then last night i went to a restaurant called Darpapaya in the city's "Zona G", supposedly the gourmet area but really 2 streets stuffed with overpriced wine bars and similar horrors. This place was grand though, we had ceviche with mango and red onion and then i troughed a plate of mero (some kind of fish) with fried yucca, papaya, sweet pesto and prawns. What a pig. Then i followed that rather sophisticated din dins up with a trip to a crap Irish pub (called The Monkey!) for 2 brutally expensive pints of snakebite and blackcurrant. I just got a notion for it when i saw it on the menu, and it wasn't far off the real think, except for having a a massive slug of Ribena in it as the blackcurrant part.

I'm still studying Portuguese, man what a great language. The verb "to be" in the preterite tense (1st person) sounds like "Stevie". As in "Estive no bar" (I was in the pub). Magic.
Apart from that yesterday i went to Soacha which used to be a village to the south of the city but which has now been swallowed up by the city. There me and some pals taught a bit of English to some cheeky local kids (obviously me and Cherie bagsied the adolescents, the others who didn't have the foresight to do so were left singing "heads, shoulders knees and toes" and trying in vain to stop a small girl from wetly licking the owl hand puppet that had been rolled out for the occasion.). It was grand though, the kids were a good laugh and it was a nice way to spend Saturday morning. Although it took me and hour and a half to get back to the city centre, the bus took me on a massive tour round the south of Bogota while an endless succession of reformed drug addicts got ton the bus and told their sad stories and how they had been saved by Christ. One guy warned parents of the pitfalls awaiting their adolescent children like drug addiction, alcoholism and homosexuality. Brutal state of affairs, and there's nothing you can do since they're total tragic cases just trying to make a living. But i didn't buy any stationery off that one because of the homosexuality comment. A far superior bus performance was the chap with Snoop-esque braids who got on later with a CD player that tinkled out a jangly backbeat while he did a pure amazing freestyle about all the passengers on the bus, he was a total superstar!

Today i'm heading to the flea market at San Alejo to buy some haggard 2nd hand books and perhaps a few pirate films from some shady guy on the Septima, then maybe to the pictures since i'd like to see this Slumdog Millionaire. Although I watched Benjamin Button last week (50p copy from the street, thanks Colombian pirate film industry) and i thought it was shocking, what a shite film!

I love living in Colombia, but i must say after 7 months i'm really starting to miss baths, having an oven, the shit indie disco at the Woodside Social, Glaswegian accents and bacon rolls. Although in Glasgow there's no Club Colombia (best beer ever, it even won some kind of prize at a beer festival), no ciclovia, no granadillas (fruit with revolting looking pulpy innards with black seeds that give it the nickname "miner's snot", it's pure delicious), no good salsa, no men selling coffee out of thermos flasks on the street for 20p a cup and nobody ever comes on the bus and sings you a song, so i suppose they're about even. Look these are some pictures from my holibags, there's hunners more though...

Stuck on a bus with a goat and a wee boy being sick - Colombia que linda eres

Hi pals!

Happy 2009 to all, hope Hogmanay was a belter wherever you may have spent it. Mine was spend in the Parque Tayrona by the Caribbean coast, crowded round a table by candlelight drinking cachaca (the Brazilian spirit that goes in caipirinhas, more to do with this later) with lots of holidaying Bogotanos. Muggins here was a bit free with the bevvy and had to go to bed (hammock) at 2am, i tell you it´s a nasty business getting into a hammock when you´ve had one dodgy cocktail too many. Then i fell asleep without taking the precaution of covering my face and woke up the next day with one half of it covered in mosquito bites. It was deeply embarassing, it swelled up and went all bumpy and i looked like the elephant man for most of the holiday. And i didn{t even have my fringe to hide the top part of it since while i was in Aracataca (birthplace of big Gabriel Garcia Marquez) i got a dubious haircut which left me with a really short fringe which makes me look permanently startled. Aracataca is grand though, a wee sleepy hot town in the middle of miles and miles of banana plantations with lots of old guys sitting out on the steps of their houses chatting and wee kids briling about on bikes.

After Tayrona and the mosquito bite horror i went to the Guajira, the desert region on the border with Venezuela. It´s beautiful with big dusty plains and blue lizards and incredible sunsets. I liked the whole region, travelling around in the back of shoogly trucks with women in big flowery smocks and people trying to put goats on the van ("You can´t put that thing on the truck! There isn´t a seat for it!" the lady beside me cried in horror) you see boys by the side of the road selling knock-off Venezuelan gasoline in old Coke bottles, and some of the cars have these strange green and white licence plates which mean they´ve been stolen in Venezuela, smuggled across the border then registered and legalized in Colombia where they sell them for knock down prices. All very shady and exciting, these are total border towns where a man accosts you as soon as you get out of your rattly truck and offers to take you across the border in another one, with documents or without. In one such town i had a plate of fried goat for breakfast, the cafe was a block away from the goat market where rows of sad goats sit on the ground with all their legs tied together waiting for someone to buy them, so i though that at least it´d be nice and fresh because it was probably alive an hour earlier. Nae luck though, frankly i don´t think that deep frying it is the best way to cook the stuff, and i mean if anybody´s going to like it deep freid it´d be me.

Then we went on to Valledupar, home of vallenato where there was a Peter Manjarres concert to celebrate the birthday of the city, lots of sculptures in the streets and much time spent tanning tintos and sitting on walls. From Valledupar we went to Pueblo Bello and to visit and Arhuaco village called Nabusimake which is 2 of the most unimaginably uncomfortable hours going up and down steep rocky hills and through rivers and over huge boulders. Whiplash-a-rama. I don{t think foreigners hang around Pueblo Bello too much because our arrival caused some hilarity among the local population, endless questions about where we were from and what we were doing there, and the night we went to play pool in a pool hall with huge paintings of Vicente Fernandez and Hugo Chavez on the walls we attracted a crowd of people on motorbikes and wee kids who stood around openmouthed as me and Mark rattled the balls around the table and resolutely failed to pot the black. Luckily two dogs got stuck together in the heat of passion so this took the heat off us, as the unfortunate couple took a turn at being the subject of speculation and hilarity.

Next stop San Gil, Colombia´s adventure sports capital where we went rafting on the Rio Fonce and i fell in, and more time was spent in pool halls and tanning tinto on park benches and visiting waterfalls and swimming in freezing rivers. On the last day we went to the natural park and discovered that their open air swimming pool has a resident pair of ducks who glide around as wee kids push each other in and people float along in rubber tyres. Needless to say there are some undignified photos of me and Cherie in the pool with the ducks, which i will be sharing with the world as soon as i get the holiday pics organised.

Back in Bogota now! It´s as grey and rainy as when we left, but now i feel colder because i´ve been swanning about in hot weather for the past month. Despite unpleasant weather it´s good to be back, and me and Cherie and Adam are going to learn Portuguese from a Brazilian friend who´s running classes, if we keep it up for 5 months we´ll be able to have a decent conversation, how exciting! We went to his house last night to meet everyone that´s doing it, they seem like a very excellent bunch and we all learned how to make, and then tanned a lot of, caipirinhas.

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.

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!

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.

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...

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".

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!