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.