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.