Travels

Hello! Feliz navidad and all that, hope yous all had a gid day. Me and Cherie went to an island off the coast and lazed about all day, swam in the sea and i had the world´s most well travelled tin of Bru - it went from Glasgow to Bogota (via New York), then overland through Medellin, Monteria and Cartagena before it finally got tanned on Puente Arena on the Isla de Tierrabomba, Caribbean. And pretty damn good it was too.

Travels have been a riot so far, in Medellin we went dancing to a tiny sweaty salsa club where the most incredible dancers strutted their stuff, at one point everyone cleared the dancefloor for a solo demonstration by this suave guy in white flares, whirling and spinning round but making it all look totally effortless. One of Adriaan´s pals kindly taught me some moves and for the length of "La Pantera Mambo" by La 33 i didn´t quite own the dancefloor but certainly held my own. We also went to sit on the doorstep of some pals´ house away up on the hillsides of the city, everywhere was strung with fairy lights and we sat under the eaves of the house in the bucketing rain drinking rum and hearing stories of wild gang life in the barrios of Medellin.

Then we headed to Monteria on an interesting overnight bus, the woman behind us was quetly but regularly sick as the driver wove his way through a series of endlessly brutal bends in the road, i´m really glad it was dark because it was probably totally terrifying. Monteria is very hot - i bouhgt apair of REALLY tight Colombian jeans and we saw huge iguanas running throuhg the park as we went to take a shoogly wee ferry across the wide, coffee colored river to have a cheeky beer in a scruffy bar.

Cartagena is HOT and really touristy, i can´t really be arsed with it although it is really beautiful. Last night we went to an incredible Cuban bar, covered in black and white photos of son cubano heroes and all mojitos and cigars and old guys in white shirts. Magic. As soon as i pay up in this internet cafe me and Cherie are off to Santa Marta for more seaside fun and perhaps some jungle fun into the bargain. More to follow soon, til then this is your Caribbean correspondent K. >Mackinnon signing off xx

Unhand me, you cad!

Hello!

It´s been a while since we`ve had these wee electronic chats but now i`m back in the internet cafe, talkative as ever. I`m researching Scottish identity and literature of all things, because tomorrow me and Cherie are delivering a conference (!) on "British culture" at the Universidad Nacional. I`m not quite sure how i fell into doing this but it`s nice to wade through pages and pages of Edwin Morgan and Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead and all the rest.

Yesterday was rather unfortunate as i got robbed an absolute cracker on the Transmilenio. First my beloved going-away-present ipod and then my wallet rapidly disappeared from about my person between Avenida 68 and Escuela Militar. I realised what was going on after they were both gone and kicked up a huge fuss, shouting and accusing the people beside me and demanding to see inside their bags and everything. I knew who it was but they had of course passed my stuff on to someone else or hidden it well and there was no sign of anything, and then they stopped the bus for ages and then got the police on who ineffectually patted down a few people before depositing me on the platform of the next station in an extreme fit of rage while some useless teenage cadet took my name down spelled the most wrongly imaginable and said that they´d call me if they found anything.

In order to cheer things up after all this me and Cherie went for a rake around the second hand bookshops on Calle 45 and bought lots of Colombian poetry and talked to all the weird young geezers who also like hanging around bookshops. While i was loitering in the culinary section half-heartedly leafing through some classic 70`s home economics textbooks a girl phoned me to say that she`d found my wallet in another Transmilenio station, complete with bank cards both Scottish and Colombian, my ID card, and even a sticker that came free with a bar of Jet chocolate of a big fish (bagre rayado) all present and correct! Went to meet her and got it all back (minus the dosh of course), what an absolute delight! Faith in Bogotá completely restored, after a few hours of suspicion and paranoia.

I`m nearly finished uni for the year, holiday plans are now well underway with lots of lists of places and leafing through guidebooks and so on, i can`t wait to be sitting about in some tropical town sipping cold beers and talking shite about poetry probably.

Apart from some very dubious karaoke performances at the Minuto de Dios English Day, Thanksgiving pig-out at the hoose of some American pals and a lot of riotous Colombian nights out things have been pretty quiet around here. On Friday i returned to the glorious MiniMal where this time i had chicken in a sauce of some mysterious herbs, some weird small yellow fruits and rose petals, my god this has to be one of the greatest restaurants i`ve ever been to.

Stormy Tuesday

Hello there chaps!

I must apologise for any shocking typing errors today, i´m on computer number 7 at the local internet cafe and it´s rubbish, number 8 is much better because all the keys actually function, whereas sad #7 is distinctly shaky around the caps lock and shift key area.

This weekend was a lovely puente so quite a lot has been packed into it. On Friday night there was a cheeky Halloween party.To which i went as a really shoddy Alice in Wonderland, i tell you trying to find a blonde wig in Bogota the day before Halloween is a deeply unpleasant and ultimately unfruitful experience. Party was quite a laugh, heard chaps were slagging the tunes blaring out of my boogaloo-riddled ipod though which is totally NOT ON.

On Saturday i staggered into class and made the students talk about the merits of a healthy lifestyle, while we all ate the huge arequipe-stuffed doughnuts i´d brought in as penance for arriving an hour and a half late the previous week. Then me and Adam and Cherie had mince and tatties for lunch, can you believe it, before going out on a delightful tour of some local bars. Here are the chaps in question, without a doubt Bogota´s finest:The weekend was quite a lazy one, the weather was absolutely foul so we didn´t go to the big free rock festival in the Parque Simon Bolivar, frankly i got enough standing in a wet field in the pissing rain watching a band miles away play a tune you think you once heard on the radio but can´t really remember the time i went to Glastonbury and am not really interested in repeating the experience, Colombian style. Instead we went to see a crap film, ate out a LOT, sat in dark bars listening to tortured singer-songwriters and drinking rum, walked along the Ciclovia in the bucketing rain and just generally lived it up.

The weather continues to be really depressing, the clouds hang low and it´s pitch black all the time, and you get drenched just running across the road for a bag of milk (Colombian milk comes in bags, not cartons or bottles) and everyone´s always got wet feet. It would be really shite if i didn´t have such excellent pals with whom to hole up in cozy bars full of mismatched furniture and big French windows looking out onto a drizzly plaza, or to laze about someone´s bed watching stupid films and eating Jet chocolate bars which have free stickers of animals inside them, or to go to ancient bowling alleys with and slide around the polished floor on haggard bowling shoes and cry with laughter when someone (no names) fell over in mid-bowl. Aye those two really are ten out of ten pals.

I love this city

(thanks, Fedde Le Grande)

Some things i love about this city:

People sell minutes on mobile phones in the street, so as long as you have a wee bit of paper with a few important numbers on it you never have to worry about having nae credit or reception or whatever technological nonsense impedes your communication. Also they wear rather smart fluorescent tabards which is always a bonus.

Sometimes you unintentionally end up at really strange parties. Last Friday i wound up in an old office building absolutely covered in graffiti, with a plastic cup on a string round my neck which allowed me to crack into a free bar, and everyone there was wearing either a hat or a wig. Then i went to a disco on the 9th floor of a very tall building which played loads of crap music in English, hunners of Kiss and shady British indie and the Ghostbusters theme. Readers, for one glorious moment i was dancing in the middle of an empty dancefloor, with a view out over the city lights spattered across the mountains and "Rhythm Is A Dancer" blaring out of the speakers. Perfect. Unfortunately i had my Saturday class the morning after and i slept in an absolute belter and arrived an hour and a half late. Erk.

The bookshop round the corner from our flat is a thing of great joy, it has 2 huge rooms and one of those is entirely devoted to Colombian books, novels and poetry and sociology and big glossy art books and a whole shelf of books about Bogotá. A lot of my wage goes to Librería Lerner.

Everyone at my work is really nice and we go and sit in the bar across the road from the staffroom and tank tintos and teach each other crass phrases in our respective languages, and one of them´s invited me to a wee village for the forthcoming puente which will surely be a vallenato & aguardiente riddled party of the highest order.

My neighbourhood is covered in graffiti and it changes all the time, every time you leave the house there´s a new drawing of a cat or some criticism of the government scrawled across a wall and it makes the walk to the bus stop like visiting an art gallery.

Apparently in a recent survey, Bogotanos said that the colour they most associate with the city is yellow, as opposed to grey a decade ago. They think the reason for this is the Ciclovías, where the attendants wear yellow and all the signs and stuff are yellow. There is a song that goes "Bogota doesn´t have a beach, but it has ciclovías", and apparently these cycle routes and the massive amountof vallenato you hear everywhere contribute to Bogota´s image of itself as somehow a Caribbean city, although it´s 20 hours on the bus to the nearest body of water.

One of my favourite bars is a poky salsa place near the Javeriana Uni called Salomé, which feels totally tropical and not like being in Baltic Bogotá at all. The walls are lined with posters of old boogaloo artists and adverts for salsa festivals, and you cram in around a shoogly wooden table and drink nice cold tins of beer and argue with your pals about the state of the world, and then when a song you like comes on you saunter up to the dancefloor and spin round and round in an atrociously uncoordianted manner, but the place has such a nice atmosphere than nobody looks twice at a bit of shoddy Scottish dancing.

I went there on Saturday night with Cherie and Adam after a wide range of tropical fruit daquiris in Michael´s house beforehand. I´m not sure if i mentioned this chap before, the owner of 2 very nice rabbits called Bernard and Albert. (A wee aside here, earlier that day i had bought a very nice t-shirt specifically to wear to go to the lovely salsa place.) So i´m sitting on the sofa, wearing my nice new shirt, daquiri in hand and rabbit on lap, giving him a wee pat (it was Albert) and i´m sure you can imagine what happened. I had to go to the dancing in an admittedly stylish but rather oversized man´s shirt while my new shirt languished in the bathroom, sadly dripping rabbit urine into the sink. Undignified.

One last thing i love about it here: putting wax on the floor of our flat. It´s got sort of dull polished floorboards and the thing to do with them is coat them with strond-smelling wax using a brush. I don´t know why it´s so satisfying but i always feel a bit French when the time comes to do it, as if i live beside the Sorbonne in an apartment with parquet floors.

National strike, Bogotá 23rd October 2008

Medellín and a nice bridie

Hi pals! How´s tricks?

Bogotá continues to be delightful, although last week i finally managed to leave the city for a cheeky trip to Medellìn, city of eternal spring. Journey was rather eventful - 11 hours on a bus watching violent, crap films and talking to an inexplicable Irishman in the seat across from me who used to work in the Hamptons as a golf caddy and once carried the bag of Hugh Grant, and then outside of Honda the bus hit a car (but just a wee bit). However i arrived intact and went to Adriaan´s house to meet all his pals who are of course complete classics, and they really do have a private waterfall in their flat!

I did a spot of toursim, went to see a very excellent exhibition about displaced people in the Museo de Antioquia before heading up in the cable cars that form part of the metro system and which are absolutely the greatest method of transport ever. Imagine swaying on a thin cable in this wee pod high above the city so that there´s the most incredible view out over the hills and the buildings encroaching up the slopes, but the best thing is to look down and see all the lives being lived out below, kinds in playparks and people doing their shopping and funeral processions and adverts for bars painted on roofs. Amazing.

One day i went out of town to a wee village called San Jeronimo:It´s an hour on the bus but the climate is totally tropical, all palm trees in the main square and a chilly church with lots of Virgin Marys and everyone sitting outside shooting the breeze. I went for a wander around and some total strangers invited me to sit with them outside the house and have a really braw chat about Colombia, they gave me a tinto in the best china and invited me to stay the night and everything, they were so unbelieveably hospitable. Lovely stuff. Unfortunately on the way back the main road was closed and the bus had to take a windy back road through the Andes, in the middle of a violent tropical thunderstorm. Muggins here had sat on the side of the bus with the good view so as to get a good look at the mountains, unfortunately this also meant i got a good look at the abysses being illuminated with every flash of lightning which the bus was seemingly inches away from plummeting into. I´m sure it wasn´t genuinely that dangerous but all i could think of was sad statistics about earnest young foreigners dying in pointless bus crashes. However i survived to endure another 11 hour journey back to Bogota where i spent last weekend variously going on ferris wheels, visiting botanical gardens, eating lasagne with the world´s worst hangover, buying thousands of pirate vallenato and salsa CDs on the Septima and just generally living it up.

On Saturday i went to watch the Colombia - Paraguay match in the paper shop across the road, and when the other patrons found out we were Scottish Colombia supporters the aguardiente began to flow extremely freely. Things get rather blurry after the match finished but i had a really nice time chatting to all the folk in the pub, plus to make matters even better they played the entire latest Vicente Fernandez album twice in a row. I was up dancing at one point, oh dear. Grand night though.

This week i´ve been working a lot, trying to run the cine club which is inevitably a total disaster - either no-one turns up or like 150 people are forced by the teachers to come and then the film´s all scratched and jumpy, they can´t see the subtitles, the sound won´t go up high enough etc etc etc. Tiresome.

Last night i went to watch the final US presidential debate in (eugh) TGI Fridays, cue lots of comedy outbursts from drunk Democrats and a belter of an invitation to my mate´s house for din dins tomorrow, this chap´s a poet who also cooks up an absolute storm, last time i went round to his house for lunch i ended up staying til 11 at night drinking wine out of cartons and having heated discussions about politics and the general state of the world. Superb.

Also this weekend there is talk of going to someone´s auntie´s farm in Melgar which is a nice HOT town outside of Bogotà. The weather here is doing my nut in - i think it´s actually worse than Scotland. This is the rainy season and it rains every day, often torrentially. Garbage. However it´s not all bad, since i´ve managed to get hold of the Colombian equivalent of both Irn Bru AND bridies! Here is me getting rather misty eyed of such a taste of the old country - sugary orange fizzy juice accompanied by a delicacy of flaky pastry and indiscriminate meat. I need never have left Scotland!Incidentally check out my amazing t-shirt with the Virgin Mary on it - what an absolute belter!

Tallest buildings and mariachis

Hiya!

Well since we last had this little electronic chat i´ve been quite busy, running around Bogotá seeing interesting things and spending all my money on tarting up the flat. Yesterday Cherie bought a dog bed for use as a sort of scatter cushion, hysterical. It´s ok if you turn it over so you can´t see the wee doggy paw print pattern. Incidentally here´s Cherie and me in the Plaza Che at the Universidad Nacional:

We went there to see a tango concert which was cracking, some old geezers in tuxedos crooning away while pairs of dancers in swanky dresses prowled up and down the stage swinging each other around, all in the middle of this huge university campus with loads of people sitting on the grass around bonfires with cartons of wine and bottles of aguardiente. I wish i worked at that university, although Minuto de Dios is a total riot. I´ve got a rep at work (and probably outside of work too) for being obsessed with mariachi music and in particular this man:

This is Vicente Fernandez and his best song is "Estos Celos", a song so good i was once reprimanded by a member of the language centre management team at uni for singing it too loudly in the staffroom. No, really.

So in between going to see live mariachis and getting stuck on the Transmilenio for TWO HOURS by getting on the wrong bus i also went up the Colpatria tower, the tallest building in Colombia. This is now perhaps one of my favourite things to do in Bogotá, you take a super speedy lift up to the 5o somethingth floor and then there´s a platform running around the outside of the whole building, so you get an amazing 360 degree view of the whole city, AND you can have a tinto up there too! Magic.

After going up that bad boy i inexplicably ended up in the Bogotá Country Club tanning gin and tonics in a marquee, i had a really weird meal of pollo Maryland which was a chicken which came with half a peach, two fried bananas and some crispy strand of bacon balanced on it. The whole experience was rather surreal, after din dins we went and sat beside an enormous swimming pool and continued to abuse the gin, before trying to go to the bowling alley which was closed so we went to the pub where i recall arguing about the pointlessness of the royal family. Life in Bogotá is never boring.

In other news i´m in the planning stages of doing a cheeky wee podcast about Colombian music with a friend - Poporopo lives on both in Glasgow and Bogotá!

Lo peor es que muy pronto comprendí, SI SI

So, this is the lovely Casa Yankees Go Home. Above we can see a delightful poster of Che Guevara and the view out of the window onto the patio and a car park. Scenic.
This is the living room. All that there is in the room is that couch and my suitcase, but it´s getting cosier. Also i think i scored some garish wicker furniture off another shady contact at the British Council, man these guys are going to furnish my whole house for me!
I went to the football again on Saturday, this is the scene when the players run out onto the pitch, all blue and red smoke and flags and people going crazy. It was good but unfortunately my team got beat by an extremely cruel last minute goal. Hijos de puta Santa Fé.
After the football i went to Zipaquirá which is in the Sabana to the north of Bogotá, to visit the salt mines which have a cathedral carved into them, something like 2 miles below ground. It was amazing but a little spooky, specially because there was a Mass going on and i get a bit unnerved by all that kind of thing, especially if it´s in a cold, echoey, dark cavern. Anyway this is me having a tinto 2 miles below the ground!
After the salt cathedral we went to the above restaurant for lunch, it was a Paisa restaurant (Paisas are people from the region of Antioquena) so we all had huge slabs of meat with frijoles and eggs and pork crackling, AND as if that weren´t good enough there were also guys doing serenades and they played the world´s greatest song, Estos Celos by Vicente Fernandez. It was great to go on a wee road trip, the individual riding shotgun had a bit of an obsession with rancheras so we listened to lots of Mexican yelping and looked at cows and marvelled at a bizarre theme park which boasts a huge, inexplicable model of the Taj Mahal in the middel of a field. All in all it was a grand day out. Incidentally here is a video of the author singing the Bogotá city anthem at the football, arf.

Footie

Total double whammy blog-a-rama today guys! A few weeks ago i went to the football here and i wrote all about it and then forgot to post it up. It was great fun and i´m going back on Sunday to see the derby, can´t wait. I bought a scarf last time and everything, because they do a red and yellow one which are the Bogotá city colours, so obviously the Jags fan in me absolutely had to get one. I go with my pal who´s a St Mirren fan, flying the flag for crap Scottish football 2,600 metres up the Andes!

So, football:
Bogota´s El Campín stadium is home to both Independiente Santa Fé and Millonarios, as well as the national squad. Games are playes on Wednesday and Saturday at this 40,000 seater ground, with "El Clasico" or the derby between rivals Santa Fé and Millonarios attracting a full capacity and a famously charged atmosphere. The stadium has its own Transmilenio stop and is easily reached by buseta or taxi, and upon arrival on a match day you are quickly surrounded by a vast crowd of fans queing for their preferred seats.

At a Millonarios game the entire area is covered in a sea of blue and white as fans proudly display their team colours on shirts, scarves, hats and jackets. Upon entering the stadium you are faced with rows and rows of shiny plastic seats (those in the know bring inflatable cushions as these seats become rather tiring and uncomfortable during the course of 90 minutes) thronged with vendors selling water, cigarettes, chocolate and long sticks of bread with cheese in them which are a typical match-day food.

The most fanatical fans of Millonarios sit behind the goals on the north side of the stadium, and begin singing and pogo-ing hours before kick-off. The groups of supporters are called "barras" and each one brings an enormous flag bearing the name of their group, some with allegiance to certain areas of the city, others referring to the superior quality of their team´s football, and they drape them over the back walls of the stadium so that nothing in sight isn´t blue and white.
When the home team runs out onto the pitch the whole stadium explodes in a frenzy of whistles, shouts, ticker tape and vast plumes of blue and white smoke, as cheerleaders grin and twirl pom-poms and form themselves into precarious pyramids. While the players battle it out on the pitch the fans shout criticisms of the opposing team and of the unfortunate referee, in between arguing with their neighbours about the forthcoming national team selections, while small boys make the team newsletter into paper aeroplanes and hurl them over the tops of the terraces to glide over the heads of the fans and land at the feet of the never-tiring cheerleaders.

At half time the hot dog stands are mobbed by hungry fans, and the stands become a hotbed of tactical discussion. By the beginning of the second half night has fallen and the huge spotlights render the pitch a glowing green, as the Bogotá drizzle floats down over the players and the lights of the city twinkle in the dark under the illuminated neon gaze of the monastery of Monserrate perched high on the mountainside.

When the whistle blows the sodden players make their way to the dressing room for reprimands or congratulations, and the fans gingerly maneouvre their cars out of the packed car parks among throngs of fans, and they listen to replays and analysis of the match all over again on the drive home.

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.