Penthouse

I´m sorry it´s been so long since I last wrote an entry - for the past couple of weeks I´ve been running around organising moving into the penthouse. Yesterday the process was completed with the purchase of the most remarkable livingroom suite I´ve ever seen. It´s black leather with white leather piping. If you try to imagine what an intergalactic pimp of the future would sit on you´ll get the idea.

Things took so long to organise because in Bogota you have to know exactly where to go to buy any particular thing. For instance, if you want a fishing rod you have to go to a certain street in a certain district. I will be going there on the suggestion of the man who runs the shop underneath the flat. He said that if we needed anything we should lower a bag with a note of what we want and the appropriate cash. He can then take this and replace it with our order.

I´ve started to get to know my new neighbourhood, La Macarena, a little bit better. It´s right in the middle of the city but retains a small town feel. The community, for some reason, revolves around a little shop run by a woman who looks like Tweedledum (or is it Tweedledee?). Although she runs a grocery store she also sells beer and has a small, dark back room which is always filled with people chatting and drinking. In a strange way it´s the closest thing I´ve found to an English pub since I arrived in the New World. Other oddities of the neighbourhood include a restaurant with hundreds of dismembered dolls and other old toys crawling all over the ceiling. It´s quite disturbing. If that weren´t enough the toilets have a hell theme - complete with urinals made of upended coffins with sinister bat heads to aim at. I think it´s something that needs to be seen, I´ll try to take some photos.

Sam, who has taken a lease on the flat for a year, left for the States today to pick up his dog, a Jack Russell terrier called Bruno who he can´t manage without. Before he left we decided to take another housemate.

So, now I find myself living with a Lebanese Virginian painter and a six-nippled Israeli who is teaching English on the basis of an encyclopaedic knowledge of Pink Floyd lyrics.

Quitter

No, not smoking - working. It was only earning me a few hundred quid a month and then I found out that my boss was taxing me by ten percent, even though I'm being paid under the table. I might get some private work at some point, but for the while I'm going to go back to lazing and sight-seeing. And then there's the world cup. German has installed a television in the common room for the duration and, particularly as there are people from every nation here, it's a great place to follow the tournament. It doesn't stop life as normal though; just now there was an Irish bloke playing the trumpet, several people on laptops and a Polish bloke bellowing his way through a Spanish lesson.

The hostel is a great deal more pleasant at the moment because the balance of sexes has reasserted itself. For the past few weeks it has been a totally male-dominated atmosphere here. Like a fraternity house at an American university or one of those places that scientists live in when they are analysing penguin droppings. Even though this is a nice place to be, I'm still hoping that the pimp's palace in the sky is sorted out before too long. There has been a great deal of paper work to do, but the home stretch seems to be in view.

One of the disadvantages of living in a place like the Platypus is that you so often have to say goodbye to people you've got to know quite well. One recent farewell was to Danny, who has been in and out of the hostel since I arrived. He's a photo journalist who was born in Colombia and adopted to a family in Sweden. His last job here involved going down to the 'Red Zone', which is often known as Little Iraq. This is the not-insubstantial portion of the country being fought over by guerillas, coca lords, paramilitaries and the army. He was a guest of the governor, or something, and one night was invited to a party in a village hall. It's just as well he couldn't make it; just as the night was getting going somebody lobbing a spinning grenade into the hall. Five were killed (including two children), 27 people lost limbs and the others were just horribly mutilated. He also go caught up in an aerial bombing raid on some town. This came about when the army went in to pull up some coca plants - to the annoyance of a guerilla contingent, who started firing on them. The army called in support, the guerillas arrived in greater numbers and battle was joined. The government's next step, of course, was to call in the bombers. You should be able to see some of the pictures on his website at www.opurey.com. I'm not sure, but I think he also managed to track down his birth family.

This side of Colobmian life is obviously the most well-known in the outside world and it's rare to hear about the good things (like being able to drink the water). I'm not sure if this will be successful, but this should be a link to a more positive vision of Colombia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MZQ8gY3WU (Edit: I think I failed; but you should be able to follow links on the youtube website to a video clip called Esto Es Colombia, or something)

Suckling pig

Saturday was the thirteenth anniversary of the Platypus, so German, the owner, threw a party with a traditional Colobmian barbecue and a group of musicians from the Pacific Coast. It started at lunchtime, and the free beer flowed throughout the afternoon. As night fell everyone was invited to housewarming party by a group of English guys who have just moved into a huge apartment here. My memories of this party are somewhat hazy, as we were all a little worse for wear. But one incident will stay with me forever. I´m not sure how it came about, but at some point in the evening an Israeli bloke announced that he had six nipples. He then opened his shirt to reveal them; three down each side and perfectly symmetrical, like a dog or cat. It´s always hard to know what to say at times like this, but I did my best: "Goodness, you could take female hormones and make a fortune suckling piglets," I ventured. Perhaps, in hindsight, not the best thing to say to a Jew.

Narcotango

Last night I went out with Juli to see a performance by an Argentinian "multi-media-electro-tango-fusion" band called Narcotango. The multi media aspect of the event consisted of videos showing people´s feet walking along the pavements of Buenos Aires. There was also a plump lady who huffed and puffed her way up ribbons attached to the ceiling and dangled there sweating and trying to smile. She was joined by a couple of tango dancers who snaked their way around the stage now and then. Juli noted that they weren´t looking into each others eyes when they danced, an important aspect of tango, apparently. I´d noticed this as well, but I put it down to the fact that they both had the most horrible hair imaginable. He had a single thick dreadlock emerging like a rat´s tail from a mass of curls and she looked like she´d fallen asleep in a bowl of oily soup.

I´d also seen Juli on Sunday when she´d invited me to her house to try arepas - I´d told her that I found them singularly unpleasant so she was determined to convert me. It was a nice afternoon relaxing in her family´s lovely apartment having a baffling array of arepas cooked for me by her mother. They were a great deal nicer than the greasy disks of maize I´ve tried from street vendors and I was more or less persuaded. It was also good to be with a Colombian family when the results of the elections were coming in. The sitting president, Uribe, a hard line right winger with an uncompromising approach to security, was returned to office, as expected, with a majority of about 40 per cent. Nobody here admits to liking him particularly, but they all wanted to give him another four years to continue the progress he´s made in improving the safety of the country. They all add, however, that he has to combine this with improvements to the lives of poor people, who have been somewhat neglected recently.

John and Nicole, the Australian couple I teach with, had an interesting time when they went to Venezuela to sort out their work visa. To begin with the Colombian consulate managed to take a four-hour job and stretch it out over a whole week. Every day they were told to gather more information and take it back the next day. When they did this they were told they needed to bring another lot of paperwork the day after that. Then, towards the end of the week, they were walking down the main street of Merida, the Venezuelan town with the consulate office, when Nicole was robbed by a street urchin. He grabbed a cheap gold chain from around her neck and ran off down the street. John gave chase, his flip-flops soon flying off his feet as he ran, followed by Nicole. They were wondering why people were tooting their horns at them and people seemed to be cheering them on. They cornered the thief in a shop and John punched him until he spat out the necklace, which he had hidden in his mouth. It was at this point that they realised why their chase had been so enthusiastically observed by the locals - the robber had ripped open Nicole´s top. As John said: "All it needed was that music and it would´ve been pure Benny Hill."