A weekend in Boyaca

Boyaca is a department to the north of Bogota which has lots of mythical lakes, very cold weather and towns with such delicious names as Siachoque, Iza, Tibasosa and Gachantiva. I visited none of these, instead heading for Sogamoso (home of hunners of cement factories and consequent amounts of pollution) and then Mongui.

Sogamoso is about 3 hours outside of Bogota on the bus. The bus journey is excellent, passing through the Sabana of Bogota and lots of wee towns and rolling plains. Thanks to said rolling plains i whipped out the camera to take a few scenic shots and somehow LEFT IT ON THE BUS LIKE A BIG EEJIT. Poor show. So you will just have to imagine the glories of Boyaca until i go on the rob from Mark's photos. In Sogamoso we stayed in a classic crappy 70's hotel with horrendous bedspreads and ancient telly, with no hot water in the showers and lots of odd figurines of fruit-sellers and things dotted around the lobby. Time spent in this hotel was kept to a bare minimum. We arrived quite late so spent the evening in a cafe tanning beers, i got IDed again which was undignified especially considering the vast droves of underage teens swanning about with Del Boy cocktails in hand, FLAUNTING the age of consent while perfectly innocent, positively decrepit 24 year olds get mercilessly asked for proof of age. Anyway the next morning we rounded up the delights of Sogamoso with breakfast in another superb 70's establishment, wood panelling and red melamine tables and sad pictures of Jesus accompanied our eggs with spring onion and tomato.

Cheerio Sogamoso (original Chibcha name Suamox meaning "City of the Sun"), hellaw Mongui. Mongui rocketed straight in there as once of the loveliest towns i've visited in Colombia. It's away up in the mountains, with steep cobbled streets and whitewashed houses with balconies dripping with geraniums and campesinos in ruanas (a poncho-esque blanket with hole for heid) leading cows over a crumbling stone bridge over a clear river. The air is clean and pure, and the whole village smells of flowers and eucalyptus trees.

Mongui is named after Montjuic, which if i remember correctly is a part of Barcelona reached by cable cars and funiculars and things. It is famous (no joke) for the manufacture of footballs, and supposedly somewhere in the town they have the biggest football in the world. We did not manage to find this. However as a consolation, here is a photo of a really big football made by the people of Mongui:
After such classic pueblo activities as eating a giant set lunch, visiting the museum of religious art and asking irreverent questions about Catholicism

(ah something interesting from the muesum: the extremely youthful member of the tourist police who gave us the tour showed us this giant nativity scene, once opulent and dripping with gilt and obese cherubs but now sitting rather dustily in the corner of a disused convent. For decoration the thing was inlaid with big pearly shells, mirrors and in pride of place at the top six inexplicable blue and white china plates. Our guide explained that the plates were from Japan and Italy respectively, and the mirrors from Arabia or somewhere equally exotic, and the shells from the Caribbean i think. I'm sure you know i'm not a religion hand but i found it quite touching, that the things of greatest value were those that had travelled the furthest from all corners of the globe, and here they were being very carefully plastered into a totlly kitsch nativity scene by some criollo monks in the 17th century. Can you imagine the difficulty involved in transporting a plate from Japan to Colombia in the 1600s?)

and wandering around looking for a hostel in the blazing sun and attaining classic "quemaduras boyacenses" (the Boyaca suntan - a red stripe across the nose and cheeks sported by both locals and visitors alike thanks to the evil Andean sun) we settled in for some beers.

There was a fiesta in the town to celebrate the Virgen del Carmen (virgen of bus drivers, taxistas and all those who labour in the transport trade) and earlier on there had been a procession round the plaza with a Virgin carried on the shoulders of some locals while women sang melancholy songs and flung rose petals around while at the front of the procession a jaunty and extremely elderly brass band belted out the tunes led by a wee boy swinging one of those balls of incence in overenthusiastic 360 degree circles. So later on there was another band cracking out the carranga, typical music of the region. I haven't got the facilities to upload it but i strongly suggest you pap "carranga" into Youtube and experience this for yourself, it's great to dance to.

We'd gone to a shop in search of some empanadas and had bumped into a man who's given us directions to a hotel earlier. Delighted to see a crew of shifty foreigners, the wee dude starts us off on the best night ever and we have a beer with him and his pal before braving the nippy evening to head to the plaza for a spot of dancing. A number of speechless locals look on in horror as we dance away to the musica carranguera, Mark proving a particular favourite with the hilariously lecherous old ladies of Mongui. Hotel man then gets me to go up and speak to the whole town (through a microphone, beside lots of men in ruanas with tiny guitars), telling them i am Scottish and pure love small-town parties. Cue lots of toasts to The Scots! (Cherie and Mark were loving being Scottish for the night) who know how to dance sabroso!!

Yikes then we went to the bakery which had been transformed into a den of dancing and iniquity, all set to the background of twangy, incessant carranga. Here we were introduced to half the town and set about dancing with as many of them as possible, in between getting given free drink left right and centre. This went on until the police (among them our cheery guide from the religious art museum) arrived and turned the music off and suggested it was time for bed, but not before we had stggered our way up a cobbled street to a pizza parlour where Cherie's spirited argument with a chap (the cousin of the owner of the bakery, i believe) provided much late-night entertainment for the waiting customers. Finally we fall into bed, drunk and happy and adopted Boyacenses to the core.

Next morning, hangovers and bus journeys back to Bogota await, but before that we are treated to a cheery wave from one of our pals from last night, an old buffer who seems to have been in the pub non-stop and beckons us in to begin it all again. But like the responsible (and hungover) kids we are we had for the bus stop, via the baakery for some breakfast where everyone greets us as los escoceses and demands that we return as soon as possible. Mongui and Boyaca - i think i'm in love with you.

Another lucky break

Ah all is well in Locombia. Finally i've got a nice flat, with wee couches and radios and a coffeemaker and pals, this is what sharing a flat should be. Cherie and Mark are away to work so i'm sitting around listening to Paulina Rubio's tinny voice blaring out of the radio and working on coffee # 4 of the day. Gloriously enough there is free wireless floating in the air as well, cheers neighbours. I've spent all morning looking up recipes on websites like this and this. Mmm. It's a sunny day and light is pouring in the window now that i've dealt with the horrific net curtains, the walls are covered in photos and postcards and maps of the world and i feel right at home.
Our new neighbourhood is called Batan and is in the north of the city, beside a big avenue that has Ciclovia on Sundays so you can go out running past Plaza Garibaldi, a famous Mexican nightclub with mariachis and drug lords and what have you. It's a bit of a culture shock after a year in La Candelaria (good points: "The Auntie" who runs the shop opposite my old flat and who, whenever i go in for a quiet beer, leans over the counter and proudly gazes at me as if i was her ACTUAL niece, also the decrepit old buildings and plaza with hippies and cake shops. Bad points: crack addict-a-rama, walk home after work not pleasant, folk who came to visit sometimes got robbed, constantly hearing a sharp intake of breath when telling people where i lived) as it's really quiet and residential and you can walk home at night listening to music which is not something i would do in many areas of Bogota. All we need to do is find a pool hall in the vicinity and we're laughing.

Also i am now a REAL teacher since i've got my own class! They are total beginners from the neighbourhood around the uni and are going to finish the course with brutal Glaswegian accents. Gaun yersel wee man!

The RETURN

Hello.

It´s strange to be back in Colombia. Obviously it´s grand to see everyone again, but i miss home much more this time round. I wish it wasn´t so far, that you could just jouk back for the weekend and not have to think about months and months stretching out ahead of you before you see the people you want to see. Ach but that year there went by ludicrously fast, before we all know it it´ll be ta ta Colombia for good.

So far me and Cherie have found a flat but we don´t move in until the 25th, it´s grand though. It´s up north, on the 4th floor and out the windows you can see over the roofs of the houses up to the mountains. Moving is going to be brutal because of the beds, fridges, sofas which are scattered across the city in various apartments but once it´s all done we can all relax.
At the moment i´m staying in Mark and Paula´s flat in Modelia, it´s a bit of a bummer staying in someone elses flat, i just want to get into my own one and settle in.

However in spite of temporary homelessness i´ve been having a good time seeing all the pals again. Yesterday i´d a cracking English class with Oliver´s girlfriend Ana Maria, she is an art teacher so we worked out how to instruct a class of 15 year olds how to make a plaster cast of their own ear in English. Then i walked about 50 blocks to go to a cheerio BBQ for a chap who´s off to London for a year, just fancied a wee walk but i underestimated the brutal Bogota sun and got rather toasted in the nose region. Nice.

BBQ was a classic Colombian shambles, 5 o´clock rolled around and there was no sight of food, just crowds of men haplessly flapping at a pile of barely smouldering charcoal and the guy who´d been sent out for beer seemed to have disappeared. It was on a terrace on the 12th floor so had an incredible view out over the city, but most of us could only gaze at the people on the terrace to our right which had a family all sitting round a table tucking in to some delicious-smelling slabs of meat, or the terrace to the left which was full of giggly drunk teenagers waving tins of beer and bottles of aguardiente in the air. I gave it up as a dud and went off to meet a pal in Chapinero where we sat in a succession of chusos (crap bars) and drank some well-earned beers.

Today it´s all been a bit of a hungover write-off, however i am smugly celebrating 1 (ONE) week with no fags which i think you will agree is rather astouding. In fact i´m off to the supermarket to buy a pair of JOGGIES (classy) in order to actually do some kind of sports (shock) in the future. Yes it´s all go around here!

Tomorrow me and Cheeky Cherie Elston are off to a free concert in the Parque Bolivar to celebrate the independence of Colombia, hopefully i will be cracking out the dodgy salsa moves and showing these Colombianos what´s what.

I´ll be back with more interesting reports when things have livened up a bit around here, at the moment it´s a tedious quagmire of contracts, bank accounts, ID cards and moving house but in 2 shakes of a lamb´s tail normalk service will be resumed.

Live long and prosper, KM...

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.

Dejémonos de vainas

The fruits of this weekend:

1. A bag of neatly wrapped barbequed udder and unwashed intestines.
2. Oil stains on my favourite checked trousers.
3. Sore feet.
4. A date.
5. The best birthday present ever.
6. A deeper understanding of the following words and phrases: derramar, roupa cheguei, cangrejear, comprar la tiquetera, no joda, lámpara.

Let´s start at the start. Number one is thanks to the vast portions served at "El Viejo" Argentine restaurant in La Macarena. A supposed picada for 2 people was too much for 3 hungry individuals, so we got it wrapped up ("pa´l perrito") and took it on our travels. This was the start of an absolutely disgraceful Sunday afternoon in the company of the ever braw Cherie and a pal called David, who i believe made an appearance in these pages PURE months ago. True to form we met this chap when we were doing a spot of impromptu mid-week boozing in a bar near the house. Cherie and him are good pals but i´d not seen him for months, given the borracheras of catastrophic proportions that occurs when we see each other this is perhaps not entirely a bad thing.

Anyway so we had the picada which was unspeakably delicious, big steaks and ribs and chicken with chimichurri (hot herby sauce) and garlic mayonnaise, unfortunately the udders aren´t up to much (tastes like stinkin´cheese, Roquefort or something. Bleugh) and i think i may have already made my feelings clear about the unwashed intestines. Chinchulines the Argentines call them, which i think is quite a pretty name for something so rank. Number one bottle of wine of the day (you can see where this is going can`t you) accompanied this feast, followed by 2 bottles more in a hilarious old man bar on the 19 where the locals sat tanning red wine and cracking dirty jokes all afternoon. We were ejected from this bar at 6pm (closing time, not for unruly behaviour) and so went up to Bardo with Mark and Paula where a number of other pals were reading out extracts from some nihilistic Bogotá novel. Cherie had by this time sensibly stopped drinking, some others however were not so sensible and started on the tequila... and then went back to our flat for even more booze, what an absolute disgrace.

Number two! The oil stains were caused by the chain of a rather pimping bike i was riding across the old train tracks by Paloquemao (the gigantic and marvellous food market) falling off at an inopportune moment. I was riding the bike on Friday afternoon as part of a tour of the city about which i´ll shortly be writing an article for Colombia Reports. It was crackin´, zooming around the city through parks and round the back streets til we reached the Uni Nacional where there was Cafe Tacuba tunes blasting out a stereo and lots of hippy types sitting around campfires making huge vats of stew and drinking cheap wine.

3! Sore feet from going out with my hilarious colleagues on Saturday night in inappropriate boots to a crappy student bar where they played inexplicable techno and me and Cherie danced like a pair of total eedjits. Much hilarity regarding the incredible Colombian habit of pointing with the lips, this is absolutely the greatest facial movement in the world and is most commonly used to explain where the toilet is. The next time you see me in person i´ll demonstrate, it´s kind of difficult to convey in writing.

Four... arf last night some chap i met while i was sitting in the park (nothing better than sitting in the park in the sun talking to all the folk that arrive, tinto vendors, hippes making wire sculptures, general nutters) called me to see if i wanted to go out, poor guy phoned at 7pm and i was brutally steaming (after the 2nd shot of tequila) but i think i managed to arrange to meet up during the week. Hilarious.

FIVE FIVE FIVE Cherie gave me for my birthday this incredible book all decorated and filled with poems about knitting, onions, friendship, vergas and many other thngs besides, full of photos and drawings and pictures and it´s so excellent that it made me cry because i´m a sentimental old bastard. Braw!

The phrases collected under Number 6 were accumulated over the course of the weekend, first one on Friday night when i went out with Oliver (my pal who is teaching me to speak Portuguese with a Sao Paulo accent and who is being taught in return to speak English with a Glaswegian accent, guy´s a total champ although he rips the piss something awful) to his pal´s wee flat in La Macarena all full of weird paintings of Colombian icons done on toilet seats (i mean that they were actually painted onto toilet seats rather than the icons were on the toilet, just to clarify matters). There (what a surprise) we drank load of rum and listened to Calle 13 and shouted a lot, it was all extremely good fun. During the night i learned that derramar is to spill or to have an orgasm (whoa calm down, not from actual experience but because their band is called Derramoncito which is a mixture of that verb, some allusion to The Ramones said in a Colombian accent, and a character from a telenovela (called "Dejémonos de Vainas" which means something like "Let´s stop all this nonsense" but is a thousand times funnier in Spanish) called Ramoncito who apparently was a child star who turned to drink and drugs).

I also learned that roupa cheguei is loud embarassing clothing ("I´ve arrived clothes"), as in you get to a party and your clothes shout "I´ve arrived!". The equivalent in Colombian Spanish is to be una lámpara, someone who´s a bit embarassing and wears brutal clothes. I´ve been getting ripped a lot recently for being a lámpara.. Last week i bought a tan leather jacket with turquoise suede bits and silver stripes, it looks like the kind of thing Evel Knievel would be into so maybe the piss ripping is justified. Lámpara pride, entonces!

Cangrejear is to break up with your boyfriend or girlfriend then sheepishly get back together with them. No joda is just the best thing ever, a Costeño phrase which means "away ye go" or "aye right" or many other things besides. Comprar la tiquetera is to make an absolute arse of yourself, to just be the most embarassing thing ever. To say "How undignified" here you say "Que boleta" (What a ticket!), so it follows that if you´ve reached maximum levels of undignifiedness then you aren´t just a ticket, you´ve bought the whole damn ticket machine.

What a great weekend! One thing i´ll say about Bogotá, it´s never EVER boring.

Do you like golf?

Tonight i´m visiting a pal´s classes at the Universidad Santo Tomas, out with the repulsive food laminates again...

Oh my god, blog, you will not imagine the horror that occured today. I had a "Culture Club" all prepared (by prepared i mean robbed from Cherie´s vast stack of English materials) and the DVD wouldn´t work, so i stuck on one that i happened to have on me that the ma sent me of a concert in the Art Gallery to celebrate 50 years of the Clyde Tunnel. Let´s say right out that Colombia is NOT ready for the Eurydice socialist choir and taiko drummers. Poor students looked a bit shell-shocked til I hurriedly stopped it and distracted them with the chance to ask overly personal questions (today they bizarrely paired up the classic "do you have BOYFRIEND?" with a new one, "do you like golf?". A big fat no to both, students), but what an absolute disaster. And tomorrow i´ve got a sickening run of class right through from 7am to 1pm, no time even to stop for a tinto with that disgusting schedule.


Still, life is grand in Bogotá. Yesterday i got an entertaining book called "I Love You Putamente" in a booksale at the Luis Angel Arango (library) which unfortunately only lasted me a day, it was a very entertaining Transmilenio read although this morning i got a seat in the midst of a crowd of old biddies so i had to read it a bit surreptitiously as it was chock full of sex, literary references and hysterical Colombian slang like "gonnorea" (the worst name you can call someone here) "bacán" (cool dude) or "chimba" (variously "pure braw", "total babe" or "cock"). I love you Español.


Here´s hoping nobody gets swine flu around here, i saw on the news in the cigarrería that they´re quarantining cruise ships coming into Santa Marta but i think everyone in Bogotá is immune to all disease due to continual exposure to the microbes of a million other people daily on the public transport system. Every single day, crammed in the bus with hunners of people sniffing away and breathing on each other, our immune systems are rock solid - BRING IT ON SWINE FLU!


Right i`m off to the Santoto to propagate Scottish culture, but just to keep yous going inbetween Colombian updates here´s a wee holibags photo of me with a donkey, ye canny beat it it´s classic holiday material:

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!

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...

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.