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.

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