Nietzche, bacalao & the disease of travel

SLACK with the blog updates, i do apologise!

Today i came into work at 3.30 for a "meeting" that never transpired, then the 6.15 class cancelled it so i´ve to hang around til 8.30 before i even start work, what a load of absolute nonsense. And Minuto de Dios is pure tiny so there´s a disctinct lack of thrilling activities with which one can fill 5 free hours. Might try and find a cinema, there´s a promising looking commercial cenre on the other side of the motorway which might be worth a look...

This week has been rather long, and it´s still only Wednesday. Work is getting more fun since i´m trying to weed out the "introduction to Scotland" pish i´ve been trotting out for the past 9 months, it´s all getting rather tiresome so i´m introducing activities revolving around disgusting laminates of U.K food which always provoke strong reactions. The fish and chips one is particularly horrific.

I recently discovered that there´s a cinema beside the Hotel Tequendama that shows free films every day at 11am, i`ve already been 3 times this week and the people in the pictures are starting to recognise me. Today´s was a quite good Fassbinder one, tomorrow i believe it´s a depressing Russian family saga, belter. Brutal though, yesterday i wanted to see Maradona by Kusturica and through a mistake with the times i in fact got one about Nietzche, and even worse it included el muy hijueputa Freud as well, and in the end everyone was in love with their mothers, aaargh!

During Semana Santa i went with the bold Cherie, Mark and Paula to the Eje Cafetero where i went round coffee fincas with auld geezers, went to a coffee themed theme park, went up a volcano dressed as a pimp and generally had a gay old time all week. Average tinto consumption was about 7 per day but that`s normal holiday coffee intake, although i did bring some really nice coffee back to continue the caffeination. This region is totally beautiful, all green mountainsides covered in coffee bushes and banana trees, the houses all have lovely wide wooden porches running around the outside all full of flowers spilling out of hanging baskets and climbing around banisters and there are always birds singing. At night in one town called Salento there were fireflies hovering around the trees and you could sit in a hammock and watch the sunset while the wee specks of light appeared and disappeared. If you hunt them down and look at them when they aren`t lit up they just look like beetles, i wish i knew why it was that they glow. How can they do it?

Recently i´ve had a lot of quality reading material, last weekend i found a book stall ("stall" as in a tarpaulin on the pavement with the merchandise neatly laid out over it) which had several inexplicable English books, one being John Peel`s autobiography. I always wonder how this kind of stuff gets here, like how on earth did it end up in the middle of a Colombian street, who brought it here? Anyway i didn`t fancy Peely but i got one about the history of cod instead which is a pure cracker, it told me that the Catalans have a myth that the cod was the kind of the fish and was dead arrogant and always talking, and one day God had had enough and told him "Va callar!" ("shut it!") and from there it got the name bacalao. Amazing!

Even better than this are the Kapuscinski books my da sent me, my word the man is a pure genius and his books are the best thing ever, what a great life he had and he writes so well about it that you somtimes have to put the book down for a bit to think about it, and it seems strange to you that you`re on a bus in the middle of Bogotá and not trying to sneak out of Zanzibar in a boat in the dead of night. Says our man Kapuscinski, "Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is esentially incurable." Guy´s bang on!

I wonder if i might get out of my 8.30 class as well here, if the 6.15 one has exams then chances are they all do... Hmm hopefully some timetable jiggery-pokery could do the trick...

It´s my birthday in 2 weeks, ah how exciting is this impending decrepitude! I want to have a wee Russel Harty and invite everyone i`ve met in the past 9 months, i think it would be a recipe for pure hilarity. But then after that it´s only 3 weeks til i´ll be home (for a visit, if all goes according to plan)!! Think of seeing everyobody! The scran! It not getting dark at 6pm every night! Aaaahhh other people who have the same accent as me! I canny wait! Around about the start of June kindly keep in mind a wee piss-up in the Halt Bar for those of you who´re still in the ´GOW. !!!

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...