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."