Converts

After five or six weeks of living in a dormitory I´ve now moved into my own room at Platypus Two, a house a few doors down the street where the owner offers rooms on a long-term basis. Despite being a nice big room in the middle of the city the rent is only seventy quid per month. Staying in the main hostel for so long had begun to get a bit wearing, partly because of an influx of lunatics recently. I think I mentioned an English bloke who used to work for my grandad in the plum orchards of Evesham. Well, it turns out he´s fallen into the sinister clutches of Christians back at home. Every night he gets roaring drunk and starts haranguing people about how much Jesus loves us all. "I don´t care if yer hates me, it´s J-J-Jesus, man, he´s, he´s . . . he loves me. I don´t care what you think, or any of yer. . .yer bastards. Bastards. Jesus. He loves me, even if you think I´m an arsehole." What is most remarkable is how he can keep this up for hours on end. Some people have demonstrated a remarkable lack of patience with him, in particular one English girl who interupted one of his slurred sermons to tell him that Jesus had visited her bedroom the night before and performed the sort of sexual acts upon her that cannot be described in family newspapers. By way of apology she added: "It´s not that I want to be blasphemous, particularly, I just wish you´d shut your face." But compared to a Swiss hippy I met last night, this chap is the very model of good sense of moderation. I just happened to ask about his travel plans. "I must get to San Juan in Bolivia by June the sixth," he said. "So you have a flight back home from there?" I asked. "No." "Oh, so why do you need to be there on that day? Is it a special occasion?" "Yes." "Some sort of anniversary?" "No." "Oh. So why is the date significant?" "It is the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year. Six, six, six. I cannot say any more." "So you need to be in this town in time for the birth of the antichrist?" "Yes." I didn´t get to question him further, as he flung his long hair over his shoulders, rubbed his bald spot and slinked out of the room. As I see it there are two possible reasons why he´d want to witness the arrival of Satan´s spawn. The first is that he is a satanist who wants to praise his dark master. I imagine this would involve running naked through the town sprinkling chicken blood over pushchairs. The other, more sinister, possibility is that he´s a deranged Christian who´s going to attack the town´s maternity ward and slaughter the infants. I´ll try to find out more. Another interesting nugget of information from my students. I had remarked on how clean and free of litter the streets were in Bogota. The told me that this was thanks to a former mayor, a man famous for his bright ideas. At that time the city was famous for being the dirtiest in the world, so to turn this around he formed a crack unit of sinister clowns. These would hide around the town centre watching and waiting for someone to drop something. Then they would strike; mocking and harrassing the litterbug while a film crew recorded the humiliation for the evening news bulletin. Apparently it only took a couple of months for Bogota to become one of the cleanest places on the continent.

Oosami

The above, my students tell me, is a popular name in some of the backwaters of Colombia. So is Oosnavi. Even in areas where the American government denies having ever sent its military. Of course, the names are spelt USARMY and USNAVY. Apparently the peasant girls who get pregnant by the soldiers read the badges on their uniforms and assume that they are naming the babies after their fathers.

Bavaria

I know it´s only been three days, but I think I´m going to enjoy teaching here for a few months, despite having to get up at five in the morning. My students are middle and senior management at the giant brewery here, which has now been taken over by South African Breweries (Miller) and so is part of the world´s second largest beer producer. They are all really keen to learn because they know that good English could earn them business trips to almost anywhere in the world.

At the moment I´m only doing three-and-a-half hours a day, but that´s more than enough to cover all my expenses and save as much as I did in England on my journalist´s wage. It really is like the ´olden days´here. With a 20,000 peso note in your pocket (which by today´s exchange rate is four pounds and 79p) you can buy dinner, a packet of smokes, catch a taxi into town, have several beers and catch a taxi home. And you´ve still got enough money left for a swivelling luminous Virgin Mary.

Now I´m working a bit I´m getting to grips with the city´s public transport system, which is great, particularly as you can get from one side of the city to the other for about 25p. The main means of getting about are known as collectivos, which are minibuses of various sizes, ages and degrees of comfort which stop whenever they see somebody waving an umbrella. In contrast to Central America, these vehicles are actually designed for adults to sit in, rather than for eight-year-old 1950s American children. My favourite thing about these buses are the direction signs in the front windows, which despite looking hand-painted are incredibly consistent throughout Bogota. At first glance they look like some devilish alphanumeric bastard son of Soduku, but with patient observation an incredibly logical and thoroughly integrated transport system emerges from the jumble of words, letters and numbers. On top of the collectivo fleet is the city´s Transmillenio service, which was built for the year 2000 as some sort of overland underground, if that makes sense. You buy your 25p ticket and pass through barriers into covered platforms in the middle of the city´s wide avenues. Then, within minutes, an immaculate bendy bus appears alongside the glass walls and automatic doors open. I´m not sure if the drivers have some electronic help, but the platform doors are always perfectly lined up with the entrance to the bus. On top of these various buses are the yellow taxis, which magically appear within seconds of you deciding to catch one. Unlike most places outside london they have meters which the drivers never fiddle with. Unlike London they tick along in pence, not pounds.

All in all, getting around this city is a civilised and painless experience. Walking is alright too - barring a few mysterious holes the pavements are wide, clean, well maintained and with less litter and fewer dog turds than in Britain.

By the way, I´ve just been chatting to a middle-aged chap from Bristol who asked me where I was from. I told him the Vale of Evesham. "Ah, I know it," he said. "About 25 years ago I did a season of plum picking there. I worked with a load of Gypsies for these three old brothers . . . Martin, I think they were called."

Semana Santa

Easter here seems to start a day early, on Thursday. They take it very seriously too, and more or less everything is shut while those who can afford it flee the city for the coast or the mountains. I´ve always thought it was quite considerate of Jesus to time his crucifixion and resurrection to make sure that we all got a long weekend off work. I´m sure he could´ve fitted it all into a Saturday afternoon if he´d wanted to. But I can´t help but think that if he´d been Buddha he would´ve done it all in the middle of the week to give us even more time off.

Yesterday I joined thousands of Bogotanos on Monserrat, which is a church on one of the mountains overlooking the city. Many people walk up, but this strikes me as silly because there is a cable car and a funnicular railway running up the slope side by side. At the top the church functions as a shady place to take a break from all the drinking, flirting, eating, shopping and gambling that goes on up there. The food was really odd - for some reason every restaurant was selling offal; long strings of green gut that gave off a smell of urine as they steamed and sizzled on the grills.

There was also a long avenue of religious souvenir shops, selling t-shirts of Jesus and his mum, illuminated wall clocks featuring the dead pope surrounded with disco lights, glow-in-the-dark virgins (some of which rotated if you turned a key that stuck out her bum) and, bizarrely, Rubix Cubes. Perhaps these are given to teenagers to keep their hands in sight and out of mischief. You could also buy live baby chickens, which in keeping with the lack of good taste displayed elsewhere, had been dyed in bright shades of pink, orange, blue and green.

I´m not sure what exactly Monserrat commemorates or is sacred to, but the favoured image of Jesus shows him lying on the ground weakly supporting himself on one elbow while his various stigmata bleed freely. I found it impossible to look at without thinking of a bloke I once saw in Worcester High Street late one Saturday night. He was lying outside a pub in a pool of his own vomit shouting after his retreating mates: "Get me a kebab, I´ll be alright in a minute - but no onions." With this image in my mind I found it difficult to summon up any great sense of reverence, but I bought a Jesus t-shirt, which is something. It has him revealing his heart, which seems to be wrapped in barbed wire and dripping raspberry fool. Perhaps it´s the sight of this strange image of a man showing off his internal organs that gets all the pilgrims hankering after plates of reeking offal.

I´ve not been up to much this week, just preparing myself for starting work on Monday. I´ll be teaching workers at the Bavarian Brewery, giving a two-hour lesson at six in the morning and then another lesson in the late afternoon five days a week. I´m not sure if I´ll be able to adjust my body clock to this regime, I suppose I´ll have to get the knack of siestas.

Working

I had my first class this morning; a woman who works in the oil industry and just needs a bit of practice to to build up her confidence. I´ll be teaching her for two hours a day until the Easter break starts on Thursday and then after Semana Santa, as they call it, I should start to get more hours.

Shortly after I got back to the hostel today the most incredible storms began. Thunder was booming overhead, rain was lashing down and the streets were running deep with water. At the height of the storm an American bloke from Montana (who told me yesterday that he was at school with the creators of South Park and that the real-life Kyle was one of his best friends) burst into the hostel in a state of high excitment. He said he´d just been held up at knifepoint down the road and, in true mountain man style, was hoping to drum up a posse. German (pronounced Herman), the owner of the hostel, one of the most mild-mannered people imaginable, agreed to go along with him. Saying this he opened his desk and pulled out one of those truncheons that riot police use. The American bloke, Dave, didn´t have to look long for a weapon; a French girl happened to be in the process of showing off a machete she´d bought on the north coast.

I went with them down the street, armed only with my umbrella and wondering how much protection my tweed jacket would provide if anything kicked off.

It didn´t, of course, the kids who´d tried to rob Dave (he fended them off and ran away) were long gone. But it was funny to watch these two armed blokes strut down the street watched by the Bogotanos sheltering in doorways from the rain. Presumably they must have seen the attack as well. There was also quite a touching moment among all this machismo. About half way down the street German pointed with his cudgel to the side of the pavement, and there was a little bedraggled sparrow waiting for the rain to pass. It was amazing how something so small could so completely distract two men from thoughts of inflicting bodily mischief.

I´m still trying to find out about some bombs that blew up in a couple of buses here on Thursday. I´ve been asking people what happened exactly but none of them seem very interested. "Oh, yes, that. I think a boy died. I´m not sure, I´ve not seen the news," is the sort of response I get. The only reason I found out about it was because a lot of the buses are driving around now with white flags flying out of the windows. It´s hard to imagine a terrorist saying: "Oh, look, that driver has tied a dishcloth to a broom handle, we´d best not blow his bus up."

The weekend, was quite eventful. On Friday night I went with a couple of people from the hostel to see DJ Mina from Argentina. Our tickets told us it was to be held on top of a multi-storey carpark to the west of the city. When we arrived we were told the venue had moved, and the event was now being held in one of Bogota´s busiest clubs, far to the north of the city. We took a taxi there and found that the inevitable had happened; the club had already filled up with regular punters before hoards of wristband-wearing ticket holders arrived demanding entrance. Realising there was no hope of getting in, we went elsewhere. Eventually, at gone three, we went back to the club on the off-chance and this time we were successful. Stubbornly, we stayed until the very end to get our money´s worth.

After a long sleep on Saturday I was woken by a call from Lina, the English teacher I went out with the other night. She asked if I wanted to meet in half an hour to see an Australian circus troop who are in town for the Theatre Festival. This is quite an amazing event, there are productions from all over the world here along with about 80 Colombian groups. What makes it particularly amazing is that all the shows seem to be packed to capacity or sold out well in advance. This particular show was in a park, and free. After waiting for a friend of her´s to arrive (like all Latin people Colombians are habitually late) we got a taxi to the park where an audience of thousands surrounded the stage. The show was underway, and seemed very silly. We saw two ladies dressed in giant lampshades twirling around with umbrellas before a woman in a top hat came on and sang a song about her bottom. Then it ended. We had arrived exactly seven minutes before the end of the show. Thank God. If they were a British company no power on earth would have prevented me from angrily mounting the stage and, as an erstwhile British taxpayer, demanding a refund from their Arts Council subsidy.

After this Lina and I went for a bite to eat, a Colombian favourite called arepas. Horrible stuff. Imagine taking a crust of stale bread, adding rubber, grease and an unpleasant taste of old maize and there you have it. They´re usually eaten with the tasteless white stuff that passes for cheese here. While I was labouring my way through this unleaven purgatory I noticed that Lina had her eyes shut. I asked her why. "I always eat with my eyes shut. It helps me taste better," she said. Then she apologised, and fell asleep in the cafe. I left soon after, telling her I had to go out with some people leaving Bogota in the morning.

This was actually true, and a large group of us went to a cafe bar up the road that was hosting a concert by Colombia´s ´coolest´ new band. The ten members of the group obviously took this tag very seriously, and all wore 1950s sunglasses and ladies´overcoats over 1970 floral shirts. Despite looking like a Dame Edna Everage convention they were actually very good.

Jobseeker

I´ve got a job. I start on Monday as an English teacher. The interview was really a formality - the only qualification needed here is a native tongue. I think they were quite surprised to have somebody wander in with a degree in English, a TEFL course, a year´s experience and a background as a print journalist. I´ll be paid about five pounds an hour, which may not sound much, but it´s enough for two nights accommodation or a evening out in Bogota. I should be able to cover my living expenses on about twelve hours a week. Any more I can save for later in my journey.

I went on the date with the Colombian English teacher yesterday, it was quite an odd evening really. I didn´t think she was going to turn up. I´d missed a call from her earlier in the week and as the appointed hour appproached the skies opened and hailstones the size of peas began battering the city.

She did arrive, eventually, and we headed out into the town. The first stop was a little square, called El Chorro, I think, which is the historical heart of the city. We had a drink on the balcony of an ancient Spanish Colonial building that looked out over the skyscrapers of Bogota´s downtown. I left her to choose how we amused ourselves for the evening, so we ended up going to a bowling alley. She was very competitive, and obviously played often, so I was happy to lose in spectacular fashion. The most enjoyable part of the game for me was the fact that it wasn´t a machine that put the skittles back up, but a spotty teenager. He would peer through little eyeholes in the back of the alley, I suppose to avoid being hit by the bowls. What lent a surreal touch was the fact that the peepholes were cut into the eyes of a crudely painted dancing skittle. It was like one of the portraits in old horror films that the baddy would spy through, giving it eyes that really followed you around the room.

After the skittles was a game of pool (again, her idea, not mine). I suppose I won this - or at least I´d potted a single ball when we were thrown out at closing time.

She lived near the hostel and I walked her home. She had a tiny room in a shared flat, which was filled to the ceiling with clothes, books and layer upon layer of clutter. On her wall she had postcards of London, Sydney, New York and (strangely) Hastings. There was also a dog-eared London Tourist Board advert torn from a magazine taped above her dressing table. I wondered how often she had gazed at it and imagined watching the "colourful spectacle" of Trooping the Colour or pictured herself walking across the "gothic splendour" of Tower Bridge. It made me realise just how much educated young Colombians want to get out of their country. They´re very proud of the place, but with half of the countryside out of bounds because of the guerillas and militias, and much of the rest mired in (seemingly) irredemable poverty, they feel trapped in their home cities. In a way, that´s perhaps why I like Bogota. There´s something like a seige mentality here. People very rarely venture beyond the suburbs, so it´s inevitable that there´s always lots of things going on to keep people occupied. But at the same time that so many people want to escape, they know full well that their passports are next to useless. I know that when I´ve met Colombians in London in the past I´ve arched an eyebrow and wondered what they were up to.

Soon after we arrived back at the flat, and I had begun to feel slightly melancholy surrounded by such evidence of unfulfilled dreams, her phone went and she went into a flap because she´d forgotten to deliver a book, or something, to somebody. So the evening ended with me walking her up the road and back and then saying goodnight at the door. Just as well, I had to be up early today for the interview.

There´s been a few robberies near the hostel recently, carried out by homeless people who pull knives on lone walkers late at night. John, the Australian who´s working at the same school as me, escaped from an attack on Wednesday night. We´d been at a nightclub (Wednesday is a big night here for some reason) when he suddenly left by himself. John is travelling with his girlfriend, Nicole (who has also got a job at the same school) but is in fits of agony about the gorgeous girls who won´t leave him alone. He´s a good-looking chap with an open, honest face and is constantly being offered phone numbers and dates. The last time I saw him at the nightclub he was flanked by two stunners, and, with a hunted look on his face, he said: "I can´t cope with this, I´ve got to get out of here. This is too much." He fled, literally, from the club, back to Nicole, who was having an early night back at the hostel. His departure reminded me somewhat of Kenneth Williams running away from Matron. It seems so unfair that in trying to do the right thing by his girl he ended up with a knife in his face. He said he had a surge of adrenaline and pushed the robbers away before running back to the hostel. Last night Aviv, the Israeli umbrella smuggler, was held up right outside the hostel. Luckily he only had about a pound on him, and nobody has been hurt.

It´s nice to know that I´ve got work on Monday because it means that the weekend will be all the sweeter. Tonight I´m off to listen to an Argentinian DJ, who, I´m told, is the biggest thing to come out of her country since the Belgrano.

Free lunch

Not sure what sort of order these pictures will come out in.

First, hopefully, are some pictures from the parade that opened the festival of alternative theatre. See if you can spot the naked lady on the swing. The girls with the painted faces lying on the ground were making a protest against Coca Cola, Nestle and some banana company.

Then, there should be pictures from the rave in the cave - the techno festival in the salt mine. The first is entering the tunnels, with some random Colombian girl who decided I needed to be led by the hand, and then there´s one of the altars that was lit up between the party rooms. As for the people dancing under disco lights; these pictures didn´t really come out, but I´m sure you can imagine it for yourselves.

The mines were an was quite a remarkably fitting venue for an ´underground´ party. First you have to walk through tunnels lined with rough timbers, going down and down at an angle of about thirty degrees. Then you get into the caves themselves, which are the result of thousands of years of mining. Some of them are lit by old-fashioned gas lamps, which, with the salt all around looking like snow, made me think I had just stepped into Narnia. The various party rooms were all in tunnels coming off the main avenue, which had a ceiling about 100ft high. Not all the of the tunnels had DJs in them, some of them were inhabited by the Virgin Mary and or saints - who looked oddly unholy encrusted with salt. Although this isn´t the Salt Cathedral I´d been planning to visit, it´s still like an underground church. I guess salt miners are particularly religious.

Getting to the place was quite a challenge. Our tickets told us that free buses would be leaving from a certain petrol station in the north of the city from nine. We got there about 11 o´clock and found a large crowd of annoyed Colombians who had been there for more than three hours. Eventually the bus arrived after midnight, so we didn´t arrive at the mines until gone two. That was plenty early enough, though, as the party went on until nine. When we emerged from the bowels of the earth it was like a legion of the living dead crawling out of hell and shambling through the town looking for buses. Eventually we found one, but it was a bus that served "the rural community", so we didn´t get back to the hostel until about noon.

Yesterday, Sunday, was a quiet day.

Today was quite jolly though. I went along to an English class at one of the universities here where the students were doing a presentation about Colombian food. Along with an Australian couple, John and Nicole, I sat through short presentations about regional specialities and then was given plates of the stuff to try. It was a genuine free lunch, and the Colombian teacher even paid the taxi there and back. She also wants to go on a date on Thursday, so I´ll have to see if I do better with teachers than with lawyers.

I´m starting to formulate a plan to escape Bogota and explore some of the rest of Colombia, but I´m constantly being offered work as an English teacher - and on good money too. Really not sure what to do. Any ideas?

Home Thoughts, From Abroad

The arrival of April always makes me feel sentimental for England, and as Robert Borwning wrote:

Oh, to be in England
Now that April´s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!

But I was grateful to Paul for sending me the following report from the Guardian, which helped snuff out this maudlin homesickness:

Britain's youngest drink-driver punched a prosecutor in the back, threw a jug of water at magistrates and hurled abuse at court officials as she was told she would be locked up for four months.

Proceedings at Newbury youth court stopped yesterday when Leanne Black, 14, kicked a chair over and lunged at prosecuting lawyer Lesley Gilmore. The teenager raced around the courtroom swearing at officials and grappling with members of her family before security guards, who had been alerted when Mrs Gilmore pressed a panic button in the court, arrived and led her away.

The hearing resumed after lunch in a different courtroom. Before her outburst, Black, wearing a white tracksuit and a gold chain, told magistrates that she had changed her ways. She said: "I'm sorry for my behaviour and what I've done. I know what I have done to my dad and stuff."

Black had arrived at court armed with eggs - to pelt photographers with - and her mother, Nora, also contributed to the day's events by sticking out her bottom for the cameras and saying "film this".

In a way I miss chavs. They really know how to brighten up a city centre.

The date with Paula, the lovely lawyer, didn´t happen yesterday. The day flew by and by the time I called there was no answer. Oh well. I ended up going to a few local bars with a Swedish Colombian photographer called Danny and a couple of girls from the hostel. It was very late when we got back, and my last memory is of being stopped at the door to my dormitory by an American bloke who stepped out of the shadows with a smoking apple.

After getting up very late today I went downtown to a parade marking the opening of Bogota´s theatre festival. It was quite remarkable, it went on for about three hours. The atmosphere was very much how I would imagine Rio carnival to be. There were people on stilts, firebreathers, marching bands, samba dancers, hobby horses and, my favourite part, a naked lady on a swing inside a big perspex box. She got the biggest cheer.

I´m now preparing myself for the party in the salt mine, which apparently is going to be about 200ft underground. I´m feeling very tired, but if I start to flag later I can at least lick the walls.