New home!

It's been fun living with Panda's folks. They've treated me really well, and by a lucky coincidence her brother's being at camp meant that I got my own room. But after a week of apartment hunting, I finally found this lovely place, and last night moved in. It's impractical but cool: one huge room with windows all the way along one side, and a small bathroom and kitchen along the other side.

Neither married nor engaged

I seem to have confused a number of people with my use of the word "in-laws". I thought it could refer to the parents or family of one's partner. Apparently that is only if one is married to that partner. My apologies. Don't worry, I'll mention it if I get married (or engaged).

Back in the Col Omb I A

On Tuesday, I had no idea which continent I would be in on Thursday. I had neither plane ticket (thanks to Air Madrid's untimely demise) nor visa (thanks to Colombia's finely honed system of bureaucratic unhelpfulness.)

Yet by Wednesday afternoon I had, with the help of an army of in-laws in Colombia, managed to get that innocent-looking sticker in my passport which meant Freedom. And Thursday morning, at 4:30am at Heathrow airport, I took a deep breath and handed over 500 quid in return for a one-way ticket to Colombia: Panda's flight still had space for me.

This time round, I felt the culture shock a hundred times more than before. It was obvious that I would, going straight from the bosom of my family to the other side of the world. The altitude also affected me much more (last time the ascent from sea level took two days.) The odd thing about culture shock is its insidiousness. It's somehow easier to spend a couple of days in a mud hut in the jungle in Guatemala eating toads and drinking saliva-based beverages* than it is to live with a middle-class Colombian family. Bogota may be one of Robert Young Pelton's "Dangerous Places", but if you squint your eyes it can seem a lot like, well, "any normal city", as Simon memorably described it on seeing my Bogota In Pictures book.

But then again its not, quite.

Some cars are normal middle-class Renault Clios and Audis. But they share the road with an odd assortment of junky old pickups, cars without windows full of dirty children, and cobbled-together horse-drawn carts. We laughed about how in England people would ask Panda things like, "so, in Colombia, do you have cheese?" (or whatever other perfectly normal item). But then on my second night here I was awoken at 1am to the sound of smashing glass, shouting in the street, and the groans of a man apparently being bottled to death. Ok, perhaps the result of an over-active imagination fuelled by sleep-deprivation, jetlag, altitude-adjustment, and culture shock. But you know, the pavements aren't even normal. Each block has its own pavement, and poor blocks don't have a pavement at all. Huge smoke-belching buses attack you from all angles. People are either very rich and live in ugly apartment blocks surrounded by high fences and watchmen, or very poor and sleep in the central reservation. It is generally wise, when hailing a cab in the street, to first consider the apparent likelihood of being robbed by the driver. And people look at you all the time. And the girls are beautiful :).

Right now, I'm looking for an apartment. My in-laws have been very welcoming and have made me feel as at home as they can, but living in someone else's house has never been something I'm particularly good at. It's amazing the range of places available. Anything from £50 a month up to £2,000 a month. I suppose after Holland where the wealth gap is narrower even than England, the size of the wealth gap here is bound to come as a shock. The existence of a healthy middle-class comes as a surprise against a backdrop of so much poverty and suffering. The second-highest number of displaced people in the world, remember. After Sudan. And yet there I'll be, sipping lattes in the sun at the Parque 93, as if all were right with the world.

Come the revolution, I'll be the first against the wall, I'm sure. "But I was a sort of hippish liberal for a bit, between being a Tory twat teenager and integrating so well into the Colombian bourgeoisie! I bought organic pesto and knitted lentils! Spare me!", I'll blubber. But there'll be no remorse.


* No, you didn't miss an episode. I never did that. I'm just guessing.

Six to eight black men

Today, Sinterklaas arrived in town. Dutch children normally scare me by doing passable impressions of the Midwich Cuckoos, with their white-blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Today they were all cutely racially transformed, with blacked face-paint, red lipstick, and sporting curly-black-hair wigs. Apparently that's considered normal, in Holland.

David Sedaris takes up the story...

"A heartwarming tale of Christmas in a foreign land where, if you've been naughty, Saint Nick and his friends give you an ass-whuppin'.

In France and Germany, gifts are exchanged on Christmas Eve, while
in Holland the children receive presents on December 5, in
celebration of Saint Nicholas Day. It sounded sort of quaint until
I spoke to a man named Oscar, who filled me in on a few of the
details as we walked from my hotel to the Amsterdam train station.

Unlike the jolly, obese American Santa, Saint Nicholas is painfully
thin and dresses not unlike the pope, topping his robes with a tall
hat resembling an embroidered tea cozy. The outfit, I was told, is
a carryover from his former career, when he served as a bishop in
Turkey.

One doesn't want to be too much of a cultural chauvinist, but this
seemed completely wrong to me. For starters, Santa didn't use to
do anything.  He's not retired, and, more important, he has
nothing to do with Turkey. The climate's all wrong, and people
wouldn't appreciate him. When asked how he got from Turkey to the
North Pole, Oscar told me with complete conviction that Saint
Nicholas currently resides in Spain, which again is simply not
true. While he could probably live wherever he wanted, Santa chose
the North Pole specifically because it is harsh and isolated. No
one can spy on him, and he doesn't have to worry about people
coming to the door. Anyone can come to the door in Spain, and in
that outfit, he'd most certainly be recognized. On top of that,
aside from a few pleasantries, Santa doesn't speak Spanish. He
knows enough to get by, but he's not fluent, and he certainly
doesn't eat tapas.

While our Santa flies on a sled, Saint Nicholas arrives by boat
and then transfers to a white horse.  The event is televised, and
great crowds gather at the waterfront to greet him. I'm not sure
if there's a set date, but he generally docks in late November and
spends a few weeks hanging out and asking people what they want.

"Is it just him alone?" I asked. "Or does he come with backup?"

Oscar's English was close to perfect, but he seemed thrown by a
term normally reserved for police reinforcement.

"Helpers," I said. "Does he have any elves?"

Maybe I'm just overly sensitive, but I couldn't help but feel
personally insulted when Oscar denounced the very idea as grotesque
and unrealistic. "Elves," he said. "They're just so silly."

The words silly and unrealistic were redefined when I learned that
Saint Nicholas travels with what was consistently described as "six
to eight black men." I asked several Dutch people to narrow it
down, but none of them could give me an exact number. It was always
"six to eight," which seems strange, seeing as they've had hundreds
of years to get a decent count.

The six to eight black men were characterized as personal slaves
until the mid-fifties, when the political climate changed and it
was decided that instead of being slaves they were just good
friends. I think history has proven that something usually comes
between slavery and friendship, a period of time marked not by
cookies and quiet times beside the fire but by bloodshed and
mutual hostility. They have such violence in Holland, but rather
than duking it out among themselves, Santa and his former slaves
decided to take it out on the public. In the early years, if a
child was naughty, Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black men
would beat him with what Oscar described as "the small branch of
a tree."

"A switch?"

"Yes," he said. "That's it. They'd kick him and beat him with a
switch. Then, if the youngster was really bad, they'd put him in
a sack and take him back to Spain."

"Saint Nicholas would kick you?"

"Well, not anymore," Oscar said. "Now he just pretends to kick
you."

"And the six to eight black men?"

"Them, too."

He considered this to be progressive, but in a way I think it's
almost more perverse than the original punishment. "I'm going to
hurt you, but not really."  How many times have we fallen for that
line? The fake slap invariably makes contact, adding the elements
of shock and betrayal to what had previously been plain, old-
fashioned fear. What kind of Santa spends his time pretending to
kick people before stuffing them into a canvas sack? Then, of
course, you've got the six to eight former slaves who could
potentially go off at any moment. This, I think, is the greatest
difference between us and the Dutch. While a certain segment of
our population might be perfectly happy with the arrangement, if
you told the average white American that six to eight nameless
black men would be sneaking into his house in the middle of the
night, he would barricade the doors and arm himself with whatever
he could get his hands on.

"Six to eight, did you say?"

In the years before central heating, Dutch children would leave
their shoes by the fireplace, the promise being that unless they
planned to beat you, kick you, or stuff you into a sack, Saint
Nicholas and the six to eight black men would fill your clogs
with presents. Aside from the threats of violence and kidnapping,
it's not much different from hanging your stockings from the
mantel. Now that so few people have a working fireplace, Dutch
children are instructed to leave their shoes beside the radiator,
furnace, or space heater. Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black
men arrive on horses, which jump from the yard onto the roof. At
this point, I guess, they either jump back down and use the door,
or they stay put and vaporize through the pipes and electrical
wires. Oscar wasn't too clear about the particulars, but, really,
who can blame him? We have the same problem with our Santa. He's
supposed to use the chimney, but if you don't have one, he still
manages to come through. It's best not to think about it too hard.

While eight flying reindeer are a hard pill to swallow, our
Christmas story remains relatively simple. Santa lives with his
wife in a remote polar village and spends one night a year
traveling around the world. If you're bad, he leaves you coal. If
you're good and live in America, he'll give you just about anything
you want. We tell our children to be good and send them off to bed,
where they lie awake, anticipating their great bounty. A Dutch
parent has a decidedly hairier story to relate, telling his
children, "Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things
together before you go to bed. The former bishop from Turkey will
be coming along with six to eight black men. They might put some
candy in your shoes, they might stuff you in a sack and take you
to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don't know
for sure, but we want you to be prepared."

This is the reward for living in Holland. As a child you get to
hear this story, and as an adult you get to turn around and repeat
it. As an added bonus, the government has thrown in legalized drugs
and prostitution-so what's not to love about being Dutch?"

Alien

So, having alienated those few remaining readers who had made it this far, by posting in a foreign language, I now (with an audience of no-one) feel complete freedom to write whatever I please.

Some time has passed without a blog entry. It's hard to blog homecoming. Hard to capture it at all. It's at once such a strange mix of feelings and yet at the same time so horribly cliched. Sometimes I tried to avoid the cliches ("oh you drive on the wrong side, how funny!"), sometimes I just went with it ("oh you call cellphones mobiles!") Probably I mostly annoyed everyone, as people who have "been away" invariably do.

I write now because I have news, mundane, but blogworthy at least. I am taking a job in Holland. A five week software development contract based in Amsterdam. I (re-)pack my bags and travel there on Tuesday. In keeping with the climate-change worries of the times, I am travelling by overnight coach, not on the more-obvious absurdly-cheap easyjet flight. I do take the worries about climate change fairly seriously, notwithstanding an ongoing transatlantic romantic involvement. I doubt I will ever resolve that particular dilemma.

In other news, it has been nice to see everyone and catch up, and relax somewhat into the culture into which I was born. Although everyone in Brighton is now Polish, apparently. Odd. Racists have to work hard to keep up these days. My brother's new house is very nice, and work has immediately begun on Changing Things, in the garden and inside.

Having no audience isn't as freeing as I'd thought. I'm at a loss to know what to report to whom. And that, I think, is the untidy end to that untidy blog post. I'll keep you all up to date on what working in a Dutch energy company is like. I will naturally bike to work every day and eat pancakes regularly!

¿Hablas espanol?

En la ducha esta manana estaba pensando: que raro que llevo ahora diez meses en latinoamerica, sin escribir una sola entrada en el blog en espanol. Pues la razon es claro, que casi ninguna de mis lectores hablan espanol. Pero igual me parecia una buena idea hacer una pequena esfuerza y tratar de escribir en espanol antes de que salga del continente.

Igual la espanol que he aprendido ha sido usado mas para reservar habitaciones (o bien discutir problemas mecanicos de mi carro) que filosofar sobre mis experiences. Aun peor ahora, por tan perezoso que yo sea, empiezo mas y mas a hablar ingles con mis amigos. Claro que ellos hablan en espanol, y a veces si contesto en espanol, pero para que la conversacion adelante con un velocidad mas o menos normal, me parece mejor usualmente hablar en ingles. En hecho es una fuente de diversion ver como la gente nos mira en la calle con nuestras conversaciones bilingue :).

Entonces, en estos ultimos dias, siento muy como entre dos mundos. Estoy hablando con mis amigos y padres en Inglaterra organizando vernos etc, y por eso siento casi ya alla. Pero igual me queda todavia siete dias aca, que no es poco tiempo, y tengo muchos planes y oportunidades por experiences cheveres todavia. Por ejemplo, el esposo de la hermana de mi novia nos invita a su finca el domingo. Mi ultima oportunidad de ver el sol antes de quien sabe cuando!

Para prepararme por mi vuelo de regreso, compre un libro que se llama "sin tetas no hay paraiso". mira este critica en ingles. es un libro muy popular en todas las librerias de bogota. era un telenovela popularisimo aca, y trata de muchas temas muy colombianas: carteles de drogas, la distancia entre pobres y ricos, la prostitucion, cirugia por ampliar las tetas... Tengo muchas ganas de leerlo.

Y ya! Espero que la proxima vez que escribo estara cuando este de regreso. Entonces... aca termina el viaje de 13 meses, 10 paises, y una sola mochila:

"El mapa no es el territorio."

Pint

Bad poetry aside, I am looking forward to coming home. My plans have changed slightly, too: I plan to stay in the UK for the rest of 2006. I hope to share many pint-drinking opportunities with you all during this time!

One of the worst things about living here is the pollution (although there are many worse cities in the world.) It's impossible to stroll the streets of the city without being belched on by buses. Fresh air is something I'm looking forward to a lot.

And one of the oddest is the lack of seasons. There's a very primal part of me that just keeps expecting the days to get longer, or shorter, or sunnier, or rainier, or something. But no. It's like being in some kind of time-warp. One positive side-effect is that I never feel like I am "wasting" the sunshine by doing something else. It'll probably be sunny tomorrow, too. I'm wondering what it's going to be like returning to the grim British winter. Grim, I expect. Still, I'm looking forward to bright autumn mornings, at least, while they last :). Anyway, I always felt that it was February that was the most unpleasant and unnecessary month, and I hope I'll be back to sunny seasonless Bogota by then!

City of night, city of night

I like cities at night. I've never been able to work out if i like Edward Hopper because his pictures so effectively evoke late-night lonely city places, or if I like late-night lonely city places because they remind me of Hopper.

My girlfriend lives in the northern suburbs, which are very nice. Lots of middle-class apartment blocks, malls, and swanky bars. It is relatively safe, and the number of poor people is kept to a minimum. However, it is not safe enough that she is happy to get a taxi home by herself. That's wierd for me, because practically the only purpose of getting a taxi from my point of view is that it is safe, eg if you're a girl travelling alone, but of course Colombia is a foreign country, and they do things differently here.

So anyway, one day last week we went out for a beer, then I accompanied her home, and then made the 40 minute Transmilenio journey home.

In the north, the shining example of a great mass-transit system that is the Transmi blends in well, seeming rather ordinary and perhaps just a slightly cheapskate way to avoid getting taxis. However, as you head south, particularly at night, you begin to have the impression that you are being ported through a parallel Universe. Whilst you are cocooned in your speedy, comfortable 21st-century transport pod, the world outside begins to look more and more threatening and poor. The well-dressed people inside contrast heavily with the street-people outside, carrying plastic sacks of rubbish they have spent the day collecting, standing around burning piles of rubbish, or just sleeping on the street. The grimy prostitutes which line the shuttered shopfronts, lit by dim orange streetlamps, seem not to even be aware of the existence of the buses whooshing past.

I like cities at night. They seem exotic and interesting. That is, until you need to step out into them. Then they seem downright frightening.

For once I manage to post a recent photo (thanks, Pilar!)

This was me and Panda in Oma last week. Naturally, I have photoshopped out my grey hairs.

Humility

There's nothing quite like sitting in a room full of people who you know only slightly, and whose language you understand only partially, to give you a great life-lesson in humility.

When I am speaking Spanish one-on-one I sometimes appear to speak it quite well. This is because in one-on-one conversation a lot can be inferred from context. Try suddenly changing the subject on me and the chances are I will stare slack-jawed at you until I finally manage a "huh?" It is also because in one-on-one conversation I only have to understand a short burst of Spanish before I get to speak.

However, in a group setting, I quickly become very lost. Staying unlost requires a fair amount of concentration, and even then I usually laugh after everyone else, or look bewilderedly to my girlfriend for an explanation in toddler-speak.

Although I thought I was an introvert, it has been made clear to me that I just don't feel comfortable sitting in a group of people laughing and joking amongst themselves and not being able to make any kind of contribution. Panda astutely said to me, "I think what it is is that you like to be the centre of attention, and when you're not, you sulk." I think she put it more kindly, but in essence that appears to be true!

Whatever the level of my Spanish, it is manifest that I just can't stay au courant with the conversation without a lot of concentration, and mostly not even then. This means that I am always two steps behind. It's not where the ego would like to be. The ego would like to be one step ahead of everyone else, demonstrating its sharp wit and intelligence with a funny line here and an apt comparison there. And unfortunately I can't just cry, or run away. I have to persevere through a whole evening or day of being the slow one. It was hard to begin with, mostly because it never even occurred to me that it would be hard!

But really I think it is amazing for one to be subjected to this kind of ego-beating. Egos are stupid things anyway. And realising that you can go through the beating and come out the other side, that being something other than the centre of attention is really OK, is very valuable.

Culture Shock

Culture shock is not wearing off. Quite the opposite: it is intensifying.

Police. Girls. Dancing. Crime. Climate. Food. Everything is different in ways that are so hard to quantify that often you don't even notice them initially. They become steadily more apparent the longer you stick around, until you suddenly turn around and think, "hang on, I thought I understood that but I don't at all!"

It's hard at times. But as a confirmed challenge-addict, I think that's what I like about it. As long as I'm allowed to let off steam at times. So my anti-Whatever rants on here shouldn't be taken too seriously :).

Dancing

You spend your entire teenagehood going out to venues which play loud music in order to meet girls. Some people mistake the means for the end and keep going out even if they already have a partner. Few people make this mistake, but since those people stay in the places, while the others find their girl and move on, they make up a sizable proportion of those in the club.

In your late 20s, you've worked it out. You basically know how to dance, or more to the point how to behave, in a variety of late-night, loud-music, alcohol-fuelled situations. In my case, a combination of the metal clubs of my teenage years and the drum'n'bass and techno clubs of my brighton years, added to which a smattering of gay clubs, led me to behave in a certain ways in venues characterized by loud repetitive beats and stroboscopic lighting.

Then, you come to a different culture. You might, for instance, find yourself in Bogota. You continue, out of habit, to consume beer and come to nightspots. However, insidiously, everything is different. You thought it was all about getting drunk and dancing like a ponce with your mates! Or perhaps you thought it was all about getting drunk, dancing like a ponce with your mates, and picking up a random girl (also drunk and dancing with her mates, perhaps less like a ponce and more like a pissed bint.)

But no. In fact, these nightspots are an excuse for the local youth, who all live with their parents and don't believe in sex before marriage, to simulate sex with their partners on the dancefloor. I believe that the theory is that if you do it in a public place, it can't be bad. True enough, everyone keeps their clothes on, but beyond that there is some serious groin proximity going on.

Of course, being a northern European, I think dance music is about a 4/4 beat and dancing in lines facing the DJ. I feel like an alien here. Dancing is about knowing what you're doing. It's also about simulating sex. Actually, although you might think latin music or salsa is fun and exotic, after you've watched some hot latin girls dancing with their pimply or mustachioed boyfriends on the dance floor a few times, you really wish they would go home and just have sex in their houses like civilised human beings, and leave the dancefloors for people to just have fun!

Obviously, I don't really know how to dance Salsa. But even if i did, i have to say that i reject the whole idea of musical sex on the dancefloor. People say its not about sex, and that I am a silly Brit to think so. Then I ask why I can't dance with a man, and they say "because that would be gay!" Case closed.

I wonder if my own culture will seem weird on my return, or whether it will be a welcome breath of fresh air. I'll say one thing though: I intend to go clubbing, and I intend to dance and have fun. What a revolutionary idea!

Love is a piano

"Love is a piano
dropped out a fourth-storey window
and I am in the wrong place
at the wrong time."

Safe Colombia

From MarketWatch:

"Uribe's rigid stance against guerrillas and his peace plan with far-right paramilitary groups have helped bring down Colombia's murder rate to a near two-decade low, kidnappings declined nearly 78% over four years, and armed rebel attacks on villages have been nearly eliminated, according to Defense Ministry figures."

regresando

So the date is finally set. On Tuesday October 17, I catch an Air Madrid flight to Madrid, and the next day connect with an Easyjet flight which gets me to Gatwick at 2215 Wednesday night.

This should be plenty of time to manage to make it to Beth's wedding on the 21st, and not get the biggest Wag point of all time by being in the wrong continent and missing it.

I have booked a return flight for the 6th of November, which should give me a few weeks to say hi to the UK and see some fireworks, before coming back here to continue my southward peregrinations!

Settled

In case it wasn't obvious, I have decided to stay here, "live" here, until October. Although it is nothing like the original aim of my trip, that is OK, because plans are there to be changed. The map is not the territory, remember?

I have bought a laptop and have persuaded my landlord to install a broadband connection. This gives me the possibility of earning money, and also occupies my days.

I am enrolled in a Spanish Course at the Universidad Nacional, which takes up eight hours a week. It is helpful in filling in the gaps in my grammar knowledge. Unfortunately, in terms of practising, it isn't so useful, because although I am making friends from the class, they seem to prefer to speak English except when the class is actually running. Better to just make friends with Colombians and speak Spanish with them. So I am doing that too :).

The longest that one can stay in Colombia without a visa is 6 months, in any one year: that means I can stay until October 29. I am studying until September 12. Beth's wedding is October 21. So I plan to get a standby flight from Air Madrid and return cheaply in late October. Whether or not this is a permanent return to the UK remains to be seen. It occurs to me that whilst the six months following October are generally grim in the UK, in South America it is summer! So perhaps I will return to continue the trip southwards. Either way, I plan to spend a few weeks in the UK in Oct/Nov, so hopefully will be able to doing some catching up!

Right, I have to go to the DAS office to extend my visa. If they deny me, then I have to leave the country in the next three days, so perhaps plans will change and my next blog post will be written on a steamer travelling up the Amazon into darkest Peru!

Independence Day

Yesterday, July 21, was Independence Day.

As I stood in the packed streets, taking advantage of being 6 inches taller than anyone else to watch the procession of squadrons of military-looking individuals in various forms of neatly-pressed outfit, I thought, "Hmmm, this isn't much like Brighton."

Living in a foreign city is great. Part of it is living in a foreign language. It adds a level of indirection to everyday life which lends it something of the flavour of a video game. My friend Dominic asked me, "Bogota? What's wrong with Brighton or Bognor?" And although I don't think anything needs to be said about Bognor, regarding Brighton this is a reasonable question. Especially at this time of year, when you are revelling in 35° heatwaves, sunlight until 10pm, and boozing on the beach, while I have daily rain because of the mountains, a monthly cold because of the altitude, and darkness by 6pm every day.

There is a practical element to living here rather than there. The monthly rent for my furnished apartment is £120. A two course lunch round the corner will cost me 80p. In a bar, a bottle of beer will be 35p. (I should mention that if instead you go out in the wealthy northern suburbs, dinner is easily 10 quid, and a pint £2.50). But the real fun of living here is the cultural differences. They keep you on your toes.

If you order tea with milk, they bring you a cup of hot milk with a teabag dumped into it. Hmmm. If you pay for a 8,000 peso meal with a 10,000 peso note, they complain about not having any change and ask if you don't have anything smaller. If you want to call someone from your cellphone who isn't on your network, you go into a small shop where they have bought a cellphone from each network, and use theirs. If you want gum, or water, or a cigarette (just one), you look up and down the street and within one block there will be a man sitting around with a tray, selling these things to you. If you leave your house with shoes in any state other than immaculately shined, you will be hassled continuously to get them cleaned. If you walk along the street looking at anything other than the sidewalk in front of you, you run the serious risk of falling into various potholes, open drain-covers, and the like: every sidewalk is a potential deathtrap.

Homeless people will ask you for money. When you refuse, they will politely desist. When you say that a price in a shop is too high, the shopkeeper will make no attempt to bargain with you or keep you in the shop. When you say, "This liver is horribly overcooked!", the waiter will smile and say, "Si, senor," and not offer to take it away.

You speak Spanish all the time. So does everyone else. Everyone talks about this or that place being dangerous, and it never is, and you wonder if it's just like people thinking London is dangerous, or if actually there is really dangerous stuff going on here, and you just don't see it. On every street corner there is a group of 5 teenagers with khaki uniforms and shaven heads. You don't know whether to be comforted or nervous about this. You never really work out who is the military, who is the police, and where the distinction even lies.

Milk comes in bags, not cartons. Cheese is expensive or horrible, or often both. Apples are expensive, bananas and eggs are super-cheap. Juan Valdez sells gorgeous decaf coffee at 25p a cup, and everyone tells you how expensive the place is. Taxis beep you in the street, just in case you might need a taxi somewhere. Buses stop anywhere and everywhere to pick up and drop off: in between stops, they attempt to break the speed limit before the next stoplight. Instead of route numbers, they have a plaque with some of the places the bus is going propped up in the windscreen, and you have 2 seconds to read the whole thing and flag the bleeder down before it zooms past. Every bus is the pride and joy of the owner, who prefers to spend money putting in speakers that force all the passengers to listen to blaring vallenato music, or red drape curtains across the windscreen, than to actually fix the gearbox.

You must never leave your house without applying sun-cream, and carrying sunglasses, a waterproof coat or umbrella, and a sweater. When the sun is out it can be deadly at this altitude. But five minutes later the clouds have moved in, and without a sweater you are shivering. Then the rain begins, and you remember why you've been carrying this stupid brolly around all day.

Nightclubs play a range of Latin music that you have to dance to in couples. You can ask any girl to dance and they invariably say yes, but that doesn't mean anything. People assume that the reason you are not dancing is stubborness or being boring: they only accept you really can't dance when they see it. Girls passing you in the street look you right in the eyes and smile. But a girl won't kiss you in a club, even tho she's been dancing and flirting with you for the past hour, in case her friends think she's a slut. If you go to a party of wealthy twenty-somethings, chances are that half of them will be wearing metal braces on their teeth. It's de rigueur among those who can afford it. Also de rigueur is for everyone to wear jeans and denim jackets, even tho it must be the worst possible thing to wear, given the climate.

where's the counterculture?

it seems to me, after a while in latin america, that there are two kinds of people here: those who don't have much money but who would like to have some so that they can buy into the "consumer goods" dream, and those that have plenty of money and are glad about that because it allows them to buy into the "consumer goods" dream.

this feeling of unease, you may remember, started in monterrey, mexico, my first destination in latin america. people seemed to think it odd that one might have money and yet not use it to demonstrate status, and that perhaps one's life goals were not perfectly aligned with those of the actors in a car commercial. living in bogotá has made this point even more obvious.

we rich westerners like to perpetuate the fantasy that the rich countries, usually headed by the USA, are big bad boys who mess up the rest of the world with their dysfunctional cultures of individuality, workworkwork, and consumerism. but in all my journey through the US, it seemed i was never far from a grass-roots environmental movement, mothers against nuclear power, or students complaining about multi-nationals' treatment of poor workers in el salvador. and the same can be said about brighton, too.

now i should say right now, that of course my impressions are entirely personal, and i make not even the slightest attempt to gather a representative sample. however, my impressions are at least based on actual interactions with actual citizens of the country, rather than any form of conjecture. and i have to say that i have yet to meet the socially-conscious latin american. if there is a barrio of bogota where everyone eats granola and meets every wednesday in the vegan cafe to read poetry and watch films about the wall in israel, i have yet to encounter or even hear of it.

perhaps unsurprisingly, there are a lot of slogans scrawled on walls, along the lines of "don't vote: organise and fight!" however, not a single person i've mentioned these to has said "yeah, that's right!". everyone is like, "oh yeah, those", a bit ashamed that their country is uncool enough to have such graffiti, not realising that i am proud of the graffiti in my home town! "destroy your TV"! yeah! to me that shows that i live in a place that is socially conscious.

i met a really nice girl a couple of saturdays ago in the kind of swanky restaurant/bar/club that would never admit me in london. she was there by accident, she isn't a regular shallow party girl, she was at pains to point out when we met up later in the week. and indeed, she had moved away from her family in cali, come to bogotá to follow her career as a programmer, was also studying auditing, lived in her own apartment, and seemed happily unmarried and unchildrened at the age of 27. a pretty intelligent and independent girl, and not afraid of bucking those latina traditions. but guess what, when we started talking properly, it was like we were from different planets:

me: "so what do you like to do? what are you into?"
her: "oh, you know. going to the mall. talking to my friends on the phone."
me: "oh. you like films?"
her: "yeah, i loved x-men III and mission impossible III! i love hollywood!"
me: "oh. read anything good recently?"
her: "i don't really read."
me: "and so what is your dream? where are you heading in your life?"
her: "well i'd love to have my own place, and i want to have a nice car."

as we walked through the gridlocked traffic to get to the highly efficient public transport system home, i tried some of the regular anti-car arguments on her. look at all the people trapped in their silly tin cans! sat in traffic! destroying the environment! destroying social cohesion!

she was like "what do you mean? think how comfortable it is, and without all those other people bashing into you." i didn't pursue it further.

i don't mean to pick on this one girl, but she does conveniently illustrate the more general point. everyone here is SO much more consumer-driven, and the idea of a sort of counter-culture, a non-acceptance of that basic 50s american goal of "more and better appliances lead to happiness!" is mostly just met with blank incomprehension.

perhaps it is because the UK and the US did have a counter-culture in the 50s - 70s, and Colombia did not. to be fair, they were probably too busy being mired in an everlasting civil war. indeed, if those people who can escape such things decide to just close down their focus and concentrate on shiny things, and the getting of them, who am I to blame or question them? and i don't. i merely bring this surprising cultural difference to your attention. perhaps it isn't what you would have expected either.

what are you doing in bogotá?

more or less nothing. i interviewed a company to see if i wanted to be employed by them to teach english, but decided that (a) i didn't want to commit to two months, and (b) i couldn't really be bothered to work. so i am basically idle, and my time is spent wandering the streets of bogotá which is called "andando conociendo" in spanish which sounds better, hanging out and er doing not much. it's nice. oh yeah and watching the football.

take a look at the recent behaviour of the colombian peso (this is the sort of link that dates quickly...) and it seems that by far my best option is to spend pounds here, rather than earn pesos.

however, asisnet.com looks like an interesting place. perhaps i'll go and interview them for a job...

Travelling without moving

So Jason left yesterday, and the very same morning I spoke to his landlord and agreed to keep the flat for one more month. I handed over the pesos, and now am suddenly a Bogotá resident. It feels good!

They charge 600,000 pesos, which is around 130 quid, for the month. Seemed pretty reasonable to me -- until an Irish guy told me I should be paying half that. Well, I'm happy for now, because I have a place to myself in a cool location, and I can always re-assess when the month is up.

I have been looking around at various options for teaching english. I don't really need to work, since staying in one place is more or less cheaper than moving around, but I thought it might be fun. A couple of TEFL courses are offered here, running for a month or two, and certainly look comprehensive, but they cost more or less the same as they would in the UK -- from 600 to 1000 quid. A hefty chunk of travel budget right there.

Moreover, it appears that a native speaker, especially one with a University Degree, can more or less walk into private tuition type jobs. The Irish guy mocking my rent is doing this, at about US$10 an hour, which ain't bad really. My question is, do I want an excellent TEFL qualification which will prepare me and allow me to travel the world teaching English to groups of adults or children? Or do I just want to kill a month or two in Bogota? I guess in reality, the latter is the case.

I really must go and buy a jumper. It gets pretty cold here in the evenings! I think that is why I like the weather here so much: there is always a slight cold edge to the air, like a sunny Spring or Autumn day in England. Although the weather patterns are all mixed up, another expat told me: the rainy season is supposed to be way over, but yesterday the wind was strong enough to blow the parasols away in Juan Valdez!

So that's it. After 8 months of travelling, I am now settling down for a while. For how long, I really don't know. One side-effect is that my blog entries are going to be become a whole lot less interesting, and probably less regular. Another is that now that I have a permanent address, I also have a permanent phone number! It's 33 44 323 -- this, from the UK.