Mime revenge and lazy Sundays

Hello chaps!

Hope all is splendid with ustedes. Here i´m on my last week of work! Not that you can really call it work, i´ve got 2 classes and let´s face it they´ll be a farce, end of term and all that jazz. And then it´s hola Escocia!

This weekend i didn´t eat any udders, however i did buy a BIKE from my pal, wait til you see it it´s PIMPING - matt black with a subtle Bogotá licence plate sticker on it, and i´ve got a slightly kinky looking reflective vest to go with it. Magic. I also accumulated a pair of fake Ray Bans and a red Bakelite telephone, ah flea markets you are the best thing ever.

If you care to visit http://www.colombiareports.com/ you can read my article about the bike tours in the travel section, also in "Colombia News Lite" i am quote of the week! Colombian men have the unfortunate habit of giving you compliments but being unable to prevent themselves from adding "marika" or "guevón" (both insults but commonly used among pals as a kind of "mate" substitute) so you get comments like "eres muy hermosa marika" ("you´re very beautiful, gaylord") or "me fascinas, guevón" ("i really like you, bawbag"). How can anybody take this seriously?

I´m in the midst of getting all my gubbins packed up, horrendous how much garbage you accumulate over a relatively short time, specially boufin´clothing. Why did i ever think it was a good idea to buy a giant orange jumper with llamas marching round the yoke in the first place?

Tonight someone invited me to the theatah at Los Andes which is a very swank uni, hope it´s not shocking experimental gubbins...or mime...gads the possibilities are quite horrible. Although speaking of mime i was waiting for a friend yesterday outside the Museo Nacional and there´s a mime artist who plies his trade there, i´m not such a fan of them in general but the guy was a pure genius, had imitating people´s walks down to a fine art. So along comes this guy who was God´s gift to the mime artist, a big guy with a distinctive swaggery walk carrying two paper grocery bags. So them mime falls into step beside him and does a belter impression for a bit, til the man suddenly stops in his tracks. The mime stops too. The man takes a step backwards, as does the mime. Then the guy starts to take steps forwards and backwards in such a jerky odd sequence that the mime can´t follow it, so he throws up his hands in silent defeat and makes his way on to the next victim. Priceless.

ARF in a similar vein i was on the Septima in the middle of the Ciclovia when my parents called, so i gave my shopping bag with the red telephone to Karen to hold ( i may have also been eating some kind of dessert at the same time, what else are Sundays for if not cake and rummelling around second hand shops?) and she whips out the big red plastic reciever and starts talking into it, "No waaaay! No me diiiigaas!!" and all the Colombians practically falling off their bikes gawping at her, arf hilarious. Hah and we went to see the Life of Brian at the Uni Central, needless to say some of us were in tears at the Biggus Dickus bit, which was "Pito Largo" in Spanish and his wife Incontinentia Buttocks (ARF) was Incontinencia Trasero, i tell you they were rolling about the aisles when that subtitle flashed up. Magic.

Other weekend highlights included cheap beers in the terrace of the pizzeria in La Macarena with Adam, trilingual torrents of abuse being hurled at a shite Shreck Playstation racing game by me and Oliver (Pinocchio was getting it particularly tight, the wee bastard), Champions League final (´mon Barca) plans being laid for another glorious bout of afternoon drinking, a party at Tamara(Spanish pal)´s house with horrible wine and "La Pantera Mambo", and generally lots of fun.

ARF (this post is unusually arf-filled, think we´re going on number 5 here) one of my students just called me to have a picada for lunch before Conversation Club, hilarious. Picadas are plates of bits of meat, sausage, wee tatties, arepas, etc etc and usually imply chunchuyos, eugh, but there´s always a spot of black pudding in there as well to soften the blow. As long as it´s udder free i´ll be happy. The problem with this type of food is it really demands a beer to accompany it, and i´ve to whip up enthusiasm for English conversation immediately afterwards, probably not the best idea in the world to get started on the old Aguilas.

Ah well keep the heid readers, i´ll keep you posted as to whether the picada was delicious or a nightmarish chunchuyo-fest.

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.