Chiguiros

The chiguiro (or capybara) is the biggest rodent in the world. It apparently has good eating on it and in the Llanos they spit roast it over a big bonfire. Probably the most interesting thing about this bad boy: the meat is very popular in this neck of the woods during Lent, because supposedly in the 16th century the Catholic church classified it as a fish thereby making it allright to eat. How informative is this blog by the way. Here is a picture of a chiguiro eating an ice lolly:

In other news, yesterday i visited the infamous San Andresito which is a whole neighbourhood full of shops and stalls selling every kind of junk under the sun. It`s in the Zona Industrial among grim grey warehouses and the skeletons of old train tracks. Gun holsters, hair straighteners, pink satin bedsheets, Japanese toys, weight gain powder, you name it and it can be found here. The main market is for contraband goods. I was on the hunt for a pair of trainers and so spent two hours traipsing from stall to stall while the proprietors pounced desperately on us as we arrived, asking what we were after, who was wanting the trainers, for the lady or for the gentleman, what style what brand try some on! No compromise! I sometimes get a bit Scottish about it all and wish they would just beat it and leave ye to look at the trainers but i got into the swing of things, going into the shops and gazing at the wall of trainers before picking some up and footering about with them before moving on to the next one, where an identical wall of trainers confronts ye except in this one there`s a wee chap in a lurid trackie having his lunch, a big slab of meat and a few desultory potatoes rolling about the plate as he saws his way through what looks like a medium-rare boot but you have to admit it smells delicious.

Finally i found a pair of absolute crackers (dear reader, if you´re into trainers they´re brown leather Nike ones, from the new collection according to the man, with a GOLD swoosh. Elegante como el pegante!) and it was over to Sergio (he of the salsa lessons) to work some Colombian bargaining magic on the shopkeepers. If i try and do this i can get them to take about $20,000 (8 pounds) off the price, but my accent just says "Hello my whole house is wallpapered with dollars so charge me double, please!". Needless to say with a Colombian bargaining legend on the scene the chaps knocked much more off, cheers pal! Must work on bargaining skills. As they are all contraband trainers they don`t pay any taxes so they buy them for $40,000 a pair anyway. Observe:

Also glass cases with rows and rows of watches, and all the wee guys who work in the shoe shops huddled round a TV shouting at A.C Milan vs. Real Madrid, and people in the street watching a heated chess game between two auld buffers, and banged-up cars with the boot full of suspicious Levis or bejewelled roasary beads. Hint of the Barras about the place, wafts of cheap cigarettes and the smell of fried food, car horns, people shouting, the heavy slate Bogotá sky hanging above your head as tinny salsa pounds out of shops and car radios. Ah Colombia i love you all over again.

After San Andresito we went to eat empanadas up at Las Aguas (see post on empanadas for more information about both the place and the foodstuff) and then to a piano concert. I didn`t pay that much attention to the music because i was too busy looking at my new trainers, arf.

At the weekend i will be ripping up dancefloors with my shiny new trainers and shiny new salsa skills, finally i got the trick of the thing! Plenty of practicing in my house while the parrot looks on disdainfully and "Todo Tiene Su Final" blares out the stereo, soon i will be a salsa master!! That song (Hector Lavoe, also done by Marc Anthony) ("Everything has its end") is the soundtrack around here recently, i`ve even got this sort of Zen/salsa theory of life worked our around its lyrics, but saldy it will have to wait til next time since i`m off to class.

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!

Smarties

Good morning!

It`s a sunny day in Bogotá and beside this internet cafe they are painting the radio station building. From a drab streaky grey it`s being gradually transformed into a radiant yellow and blue beacon of colour in the main street. Every day as i walk to work from the motorway where i get off the bus (hello mad Colombian traffic laws, it`s the beginning of the road that connects Bogotá and Medellin yet it´s fine for the bus to screech to a halt and let me stumble out the back door, giant patent red handbag and folders of disorganised bits of paper flying in the wind) there´s an old geezer sitting on the wall outside this building, a right smart old buffer in a suit and a hat that makes him look like a Texan. Who is the auld dude? Maybe he´s an old school preacher on the radio, i can imagine him being quite into gospel music. On the other hand maybe he´s on the run from the law and it hiding out in sleepy Minuto de Dios neighbourhood. Next stop - getting the truth from the auld buffer...

This morning i had a string of rather nice classes, one was in the other building of the uni which is a 30 minute hike away from the usual place. It`s in an old school building and has those kind of draughty classrooms with shoogly chairs and a view of a playing field which my school had. However it does have a cosy wee shed where an old couple sell tiny sweet cups of tinto, empanadas and cheese toasties to the chilled staff and students. I went in with my colleagues to sneak a tinto between classes and the old man greeted me in English, shook me by the hand for 5 minutes straight and then gave me a wee packet of Smartie-like sweeties of the most patriotic variety, the ones that only come in red, yellow and blue (like the Colombian flag, pop-pickers!). It´s something that happens a lot here, people are so intrigued to meet a foreigner and so proud of their country that they treat you unbelieveably well, partly i think because Colombians are very hospitable people in general, and also because they want you to feel welcome. It was lovely, to experience that hospitality again after a few months of a pretty joyless slog getting back into everything, it´s lightened my heart again. Thanks Señor Tinto and your patriotic Smarties.

Ships/rooms

Though I love this travelling life and yearn
like ships docked, I long
for rooms to open with my bare hands,
and there discover the wonderful, say
a ship's prow rearing, and a ladder
of rope thrown down.
Though young, I'm weary:
I'm all rooms at present, all doors
fastened against me;
but once admitted I crave
and swell for a fine, listing ocean-going prow
no man in creation can build me.

- Kathleen Jamie

Liberal ladies love Galan!

Yesterday i was off work with a sort of low-level flu, today i feel better but i'd quite like another day off work. Not happening but. Yesterday was quite relaxing, i spent the day in with Patty the parrot reading daft articles on how to train parrots to ride bicycles and the like. She sat on my shoulder for a while and we watched a documentary about the linguistic abilities of parrots. Best was finding Sparky (Youtube that bad boy), an African Grey parrot who lives in Kilmarnock and can say "I'll kick your baws son" and "Sparky wants a chocolate biscuit and an Irn Bru". Superb.

Colombian news is rather thin on the ground, i've not been up to much due to some cash-flow issues on behalf of those stingy priests my employers. However i did go to see an excellent exhibition of Mexican art and its relation with Colombian art at the Museo Nacional, they had lots of murals and woodcuts and sculptures, excellent stuff.They also had a tiny but interesting room stuffed full of memorabilia relating to Luis Carlos Galan, a politician who was assasinated at a rally in 1989 in Soacha (a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bogota that used to be a village before being swallowed up by the city, also you may remember the place where i went sometimes last year to teach wee guys a bit of English and have my owl hand puppets licked by wee lassies). They have the suit he was wearing when he was shot, and lots of election propaganda (he was the Liberal presidential candidiate at the time and apparentlhy a sure thing to win the election) among which my favourite by a mile was the sticker showing him all wavy haired and charming with the slogan "Liberal ladies love GALAN!". Definetely worth a visit, Bogota readers. The building famously used to be a jail and a convent (not at the same time, obviously):
This weekend i will hopefully have the finances under control and will have rather more interesting things to report than that i sat in the hoose all day chatting up a parrot (who behaved extremely well until a pal dropped in to see me and then shat on my nice maroon jumper) (of course, the parrot shat on me, not the pal) and eating Chocoramo, glory of the Colombian snack industry. It's a sort of rectangle of cake covered in chocolate, a lunchbox classic for 50 years (but only in cold areas of the country otherwise they melt). I really do not know what i'm going to do when i live in a country where Chocoramos are not easily available. It doesn't bear thinking about. Maybe you can get them imported?

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer — Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Hiya. I've been reading up on the shipping forecast after an afternoon's waiting for a tedious visa related meeting with a Cuban colleague led to the mutual nostalgia for coastlines getting cracked out. I love the shipping forecast more than many other things. More than toast and jam, for instance, and more than going into the close in my old house on a hot day and it being all cool and quiet and tiled, however less than a cup of coffee in a small yellow cup that says "Koffie" on the side and less than finding very wee and sweet mangoes in the fruit shop beside the park.

As regards the shipping forecast: in 2002 they changed the name of Finisterre to FitzRoy in honour of the guy who founded the Met Office. I always liked Finisterre, along with Utsires North and South and Malin. Here's a Seamus Heaney poem called The Shipping Forecast for ya:

Dogger. Rockall. Malin, Irish Sea:
Green swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice.
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Off eel-road, seal road, keel road, whale road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L'Etoile, Le Guiliemot, La Belle Helene
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, 'A haven,'
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

Things are a little melancholy around here, the wind is howling against the window and down below the sad dogs in the vet's yard are howling too, and somewhere in the distance a plane's taking off. Bogota feels very empty sometimes, when you know everyone you fancy talking to is in their bed and everyone else you fancy talking to is on the other side of the world and also in their bed. I chose it and i don't regret it but sometimes i wonder about going home because it'll never be the same as it was. Even the shipping forecast isn't the same anymore.

Amendoim...

...means "peanut" in Portuguese.

Kindly observe the following video:

Eggs and Sausage from Jackie Lay on Vimeo.

Good, eh?

Apart from these digressions i have been up to the usual tricks. I'm sure you'll have seen the Facebook frenzy about my having driven a car 200 metres along a deserted suburban street, sounds naff but it was grand! I only stalled that bad boy once (or twice)...

This weekend was rather cultured, on Friday night i went to another concert at Los Andes (I recall mentioning the previous one and being worried it would be mime, it was actually opera and quite good as far as i can tell, none of this is really my are of expertise. Carranga now, that's another matter) which this time was a baroque dream team banging out the tunes on a recorder and an instrument called a laud (crassly referred to as a banjo at one point by one of the assembled company). What can ye say about 2 hours of chamber music really? The boy behind me was snoring pretty heavily from about 40 minutes in onwards, and the most entertaining thing about the concert was the whispered discussion about whether the duo were a ROMANTIC duo in real life and were off afterwards to whoop it up in one of the less salubrious nightspots along the Avenida Caracas. It was interesting to see right enough, the amount of time and effort needed to become a laud expert is pretty amazing, but in general i probably shouldn't be invited to these type of events for being a philistine.

After the baroque n' roll we went for some GOOD empanadas (on the road that leads to the Quinta de Bolivar i believe), they rocketed straight into the Bogota Empanada Top 5 that i'm mentally compiling. Uyy there's a place in Usaquen that does swanky ones with fillings like Serrano ham and tapenade, and let's not forget the incredible delicatessen on the Septima (with 14? 15? Between the Avianca buliding and the 19, Rolo readers) known as the Colombian Harrods for its brutal tackiness and sale of totally pointless overpriced gubbins. Hidden in this temple of crap dried fruit, flavoured tea and funny shaped rolls are the most incredible empanadas, respectively the Argentine variety (with chicken and a kind of pinkish tomato sauce) and my absolute favourite the Uruguayan effort (meat with olives, hard-boiled egg and raisins!), both sublime with a bottle of skoosh. Mmm. Here are some empanadas:
They are magic. That green stuff is aji, about the only hot sauce you can easily find in Colombia. It is also magic. To make it, take

2 hot red chilies
3 finely chopped spring onions
1 ripe tomato, finely chopped
finely chopped coriander, in the same proportion as the onion (likes, if the onion all cut up is half a cups worth then you want half a cup of coriander as well)
1/4 cup vinegar (it says fruit vinegar but i happily have never seen it in Scotland so choose another kind)
1/2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp vegetable oil
salt

Cut up the chilies (ajies) really, really small and mix them well with the vinegar and salt. Elsewhere mix the spring onions, coriander and tomato. Add it all together with the lemon juice and oil and see if it's hot enough, if not get some more ajies on the go.

Other news: learned about Mexican gastonomy at the Bogota Book Fair and got a cheeky sample of pescado a la veracruzana which is totally getting cooked in the hoose as soon as i finally get paid, this has been a rather long month in terms of dough and lack thereof.

Also saw a Mexican film about wee chaps in Chihuauhua riding horses around and eating Pot Noodles in rainy shacks, not a bad Sunday afternoon's entertainment really. Mexico-a-rama around here.

AIIIEEE yawn yawn it's not even that late but i'm knackered, i'm off to my Kip Keino. Tomorrow i've got a delightful Portuguese class in the morning followed by a horrible meeting with the Social Communication faculty to see if they'll design us some nice logos for the Languge Centre followed by a meeting about an online Masters (might do it if it's interesting) at some uni that has an agreement with my uni followed by class until 8. Yikes! At least i know the word for "peanut" in Portguese...

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...