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?