Cinemas and chandozos

Hello pals!

Well things are looking up around here. It`s the Bogotá film festival at the moment so i have been at the pictures twice a day every day at a bizarre cultural centre beside my house to see bleak documentaries about shattered personal relationships among people trying to escape from East Germany and hysterical French capers about perverse TV execs.

Is there anything better then going to the pictures? Something about the ritual of the thing, the way it`s fundamentally the same even if you`re sitting on a rooftop watching something projected onto a crumbly wall, or in the most luxuriously Miami-esque cinema in an opulent commercial centre, or in some scabby university auditorium with uncomfy creaky seats and a faint smell of old coffee in the air. When the lights go down, and the projector hums into life and you see those strange crackly dots and lines that appear over the picture momentarily, and the way that if you look back you see all the light spilling out of this little hole in the back wall, laser beams of stories. Cinematic overload magic.

There are no students at uni this week as they have a recess week, unfortunately the course i teach is an extra-curricular course for whoever wants to do it and consequently i get nae holidays. Quite hysterical atmosphere at work though, the fact of having no students gives the place a bit of a party vibe, especially yesterday which was the culmination of the "Secret Friend" business. This was a name out a hat, buy that person a present thing for the day of Love and Friendship which is the last Saturday in September (we were late, as always. Sometimes i love my disorganised work). I got a friend of mine which was nice, rustled up some hipster gear at the market in Usaquen on Sunday (i also got a belter cardigan last week, RED with a black and silver fair isle yoke and shiny black plastic buttons, yes please) and i think she was pleased with it. I asked mine for an interesting book and she gave me an unexpected but not unwelcome (Spanish) copy of Angela`s Ashes and an orange t-shirt that says "I`M A GREAT CATCH" on the front of it. Then we cracked out the Tetrapak rum and the boss wired up this crap karaoke game, the one that rates your performance (NOTE TO PARENTS: I know you know what this is, i heard all about Donaldo´s magical "No Woman No Cry"). I`ve mentioned before that i´ve got a reputation at work for being really into rancheras, so my colleagues of course fell upon this like vultures and they all started chanting "Katherine, Katherine!" until i sidled up and murdered Vicente Fernandez´s classic "Estos Celos", complete with shady dancing and AYAYAYAYAAYYYYYs!!!!
Needless to say the game was fairly harsh with my performance, lots of little red "Horrible!" and "Pésimo!" (=dismal) floating up the side of the screen. PERSONALLY i think it was rather good...

Some facts and other news:

1. I am going to learn to dance. Hopefully i´ll be teaching a pal to write very elegant and well-structured English essays and in return the dancing lessons will allow me to quit the shameful shackles of being a shit dancer. Cherie´s sister, brother-in-law and nephew are coming to Colombia in December and the plan is to go south, down to San Augustín and Cali (!), and there is NO WAY i´m going to Cali with these dancing skills. Cherie is on the Septima at this moment, and has been ordered to pick up an mp3 CD stuffed with salsa hits. (I´m in the internet cafe beside the office).

2. The word "chandozo" means mongrel dog but can also be used to greet pals, e.g: "Quibo chandozo! Que me cuentas?" (="Hiya pal! How´s tricks?").

3. The best corrientazo (set lunch place) in La Candelaria is the bakery on Carrera 5a, in front of the famous "Doña Cecilia" tienda where all the hippies get rattled at night time (incidentally, about this tienda, they sell shots of tequila to the street, so if you`re jsut trapising about looking for somewhere to go you can have a swift shot then continue on your way. It´s delicious but lethal). I had lunch there today and for two pounds ($6,000) i got a bowl of ajiaco (typical Bogota soup with chicken, potatoes, sweetcorn and special herbs called guascuas), a plate of salad then the main plate - chicken, rice, patacón (flattened, fried plantain YES PLEASE) and yuca with two massive glasses of lulo juice (lulo is a green fruit that looks a bit like a cucumber, it´s very refreshing). Corrientazos are great.

4. I´ve got to go to work now :(

5. BUT i´ll be back soon with my weekend holiday plans, i think we are returning to Boyacá with Cherie´s pal Lauren who just arrived from England to get a wee snook aboot Villa de Leyva which is a town i don´t know much about apart from they filmed a telenovela about ZORRO there once! Which reminds me of "A Confederacy of Dunces" where he leaves a note for someone saying "I declare that you be hung from your underdeveloped testicles until dead - ZORRO", which phrase was once the entire text of an e-mail from Leckie, who really writes a mean e-mail.

Off to work! But first, to the bakery for a bun! Yes it´s a dirty job this 18 hours a week (half of which i spend eating buns) Language Assistant business, but someone´s got to do it!

Public transport

Hello blog,

I just wanted to tell you that i still don´t know anything about my future, but thanks to too many exciting travel books i´m formulating all kinds of plans mostly involving irresponsibly living in different countries for as long as possible.

I´m in the internet cafe (again - i keep the internet cafe economy of Bogotá afloat) as i have no classes today and am free to take leisurely strolls around the famous Librería Lerner and have lunch with the charming Cherie in the bakery down the road which does a shit-hot almuerzo for $6,000 pesos (2 quid). I don´t know why everyone in Colombia isn´t obscenely fat since your average lunch comes with a massive bowl of soup containing chicken, beans, platano and potatoes, then a slab of meat or chicken with rice, more platano and either beans, inexplicable spaghetti or chips. And a pint of juice. And maybe a cheeky empanada a few hours later, just to stave off hunger...

It´s a beautiful day today, strange for it not to rain at least once during the day but at the moment it´s blazing sunshine and a nice warm city atmosphere. The thing i like best about this type of weather is very late afternoon, when the sun lights up the mountains and they look very fake and painted on, and all the streets have this delicious warm smell of hot bricks and dust, and they radiate out the heat of the day and you hopefully think that tonight you might be able to sleep with something less then your customary five blankets (FIVE) but it gets to 11pm and everything´s freezing and back to normal.

A bit more about Kapuscinski - when he returned to Poland after years as that country´s only foreign correspondant he had lived through 27 revolutions and coups, been jailed 40 times and survivied 4 death sentences. Also he mentioned in "The Shadow of The Sun" a guy that spent years travelling around the Sahara who one, dying of thirst in the middle of the desert, cut open his veins and drank his own blood in order to survive. Can you believe that!

Nothing quite so thrilling going on around here, tonight i will be translating a presentation for work which the chancers only sent me 5 minutes ago and want it for Sunday morning, cheeky bastards. The last one i did was for the World Bank and resulted in the uni getting given a loan of some unimaginable sum of money in order to construct new buildings, which is certainly something.

Here are me and Cherie enjoying a tinto in the National Coffee Park near Manizales:

And this is the Valle de Cocora near Salento, full of the national palm tree of Colombia and complete with rather out-of-place cow in the bottom right hand corner. The place was also filled with equally out-of-place soliders with big guns, you´d just be sitting there getting tucked into a plate of the local speciality (trout with patacón, a big crispy pancake made out of platano and deepfried, needless to say we had this delectable dish for four days on the trot) and suddenly everything´s gone a bit military. Everything was very calm though, for the most part the soldiers seemed to be enjoying the crap lounge music being sung to guests of a swank restaurant (not the one we were eating in, needless to say) by an unspeakably suave chap in a white suit, or cracking on to nice local girls. Perhaps the best thing about this day was catching a Jeep (traditional mode of transport in the Eje Cafetero, there´s even a town somewhere (whose name escapes me) where every year they have a big procession of Jeeps all loaded up with sacks of coffee and flowers and proudly drive them through the streets) back to Salento and me and Mark getting to ride on TOP of that bad boy! The road was amazing as well, quite a lot of it was in very good nick and you just flew along beside this windy river among rolling green mountains and little farms painted red and green with flowers all over the verandas, wee boys on bikes sailing along beside excited dogs and overhanging trees that you had to watch out for and duck at the appropriate moment. Life in Colombia means a life of extremely interesting public transport. During the course of this holiday i travelled on Jeeps, buses (tiny and enormous), chiva (a big van with benches that fit 6 people, all painted brightly coloured and with no glass in the windows, just coffee sacks you could roll down if it rained, and the driver had two Virgin Marys positioned on either side of the rear view mirror, noe that lit up when he accelerated and one that lit up when he braked. Those Virgins were going like strobe lights as the guy sped along the alarmingly windy road, braking every 2 minutes to let more people on, to avoid motorbikes, simply to admire the view at some points...), cable cars, busetas, taxis, everything!