Duuude!!!!

Unlike the previous night/mornings death sleep, jet lag had caused me to wake up several times during the night, and i had awoken, unable to drift off again, at somewhere around what i guessed was about four in the morning. It’s always weird having insomnia in when your new in someone elses house. You dont want to disturb anyone who’s sleeping, so you hold that piss you need to take for a really fucking long time, until you decide that if you dont get up and go to the dunny your gonna piss the bed, which would be a whole lot worse than waking up the entire household by pissing like a racehorse and flushing down atom bombs.

When you do get up, you end up using all the stealth of a cat burglar or diamond thief and creeeeep down the stairs, treading as lightly as you can, then turning the door handle as softly as you can, shutting the door before the light from the bathroom has a chance to escape and blaze into someones eyes. You piss on the porcelain so as to keep noise to the minumum, and don’t even think about flushing because that’ll fuck everyone off and your welcome will be worn out before you can even wipe the dribbles of the tiles.

Releived, you do the whole process in reverse until your back in bed, snug and warm, and after ten munutes your drifting off when, all of a sudden, your are slapped back into waking life by someone crunching out of bed, hammering down the stairs, pissing like a firehose with the door wide open and flushing it all down like a tsunami before rushing back up and jumping into bed.

Fuck.

Maybe it’s just me. I think my paranoia in waking others up (people i don’t know well, anyway, I could’nt give two shits about waking my friends and family) stems from being a partial insomniac and very light sleeper. As most people who are close to me will know, if i get woken up during a good, much needed sleep, especially if I have work or something else important on the next morning, I turn into a fucking psychopath.

My housemate woke me up not long ago coming home pissed as from a night out. I had work the next day, as did he although he failed to give a shit, and first asked him politely to keep it down, holding back my impulse to hack his brain out withthe TV remote. He obliged, for about 15 minutes, just long enough for me tobegin todrift off again before he began stomping and yelling again. Being the zen master that I am, i tried for about an hour to channel the gods of tranquillity and peace in the hope that I would zonk out again, until I god fed up with all that Buddist shite and got out of bed, kicked his door open and started throwing shit around, banging on his drumkit and screaming “How do you like it, you fucking cunt!!”.

After this outburst, i got back into bed feeling satisfied although a little guilty, as I had woken up the rest of our housemates, not to mention probably the whole building and half the fuckin’ street. The next morning as I was making breakfast the said housemate got up and came to join me in the kitchen. I was expecting a full on shit storm, fucken shitloads of cussing and maybe a punch on, but he did’nt say anything about my tantrum and just gave me a simple “Hey man.”

Stupefied, I apolgised for being such a baby but stood my grounds on the reasons behind my actions. He looked at me like an I was a fucking nutbar.

“What?Last night?”

“Yeah, dude, I kicked in your door and cracked the shits. I was was banging on your drumkit, yelling and everything.”

“Yeah right…”

The guy had been so fucking shit-can wasted that he slept through the whole ordeal. I couldnt believe it. The cunt. Serves me right I guess.

Annnnnyyyyyywwwwwaaaaaayyyyy………

Back to Bogota…..so after lying awake in bed for ages, cata knocked on my door a hour or so after sun up and we went down for another kickarse breakfast. Today it was hot chocolate and cheese with Tamale. Tamales are these fucking awesome little packages of chicken and vegies caked withing this corn flour paste stuff, all wrapped up in a and baked in a banana leaf!

Wooooop!!

So fucking good. After brekky we showered up and went out to withdraw money, which turned turned  out to be an impromptu tour of the neighborhood where cata grew up. On the way to the bank went past her old house, her old corner shop with same lady working the front (she recognised cata right away and they had a good ‘ol catch up session) and other random spots that she had all sorts of little anecdotes about (apparently their old neighbor is a real bitch).

The suburb she grew up in is called Cedritos and is in the northern part of Bogota where most of the nicer and more affluent areas are. Cata’s “hood” reminded of Toronto mixed with Tokyo, which was really fucking wierd, and she told me so. It’s hard to describe what suburban Bogota looks like, especially since the term ‘suburban’ doesn’t really apply to anywhere in Bogota.

It’s a combo of high rise appartment buildings broken up by rows of gated off enclaves of little two and three story townhouses (such as the one cata’s family live in) with these awesome red clay roof tiles that make everything look like a mexican cantina. A lot of the streets are lined with trees and have nature strips and there are small parks spotted around the place. Every block has two or three little corner shops and there are bakeries, restaurants and little bars everywhere. Often all three are combined into one, I call them barstauries. None of these places are of the fashionable, I’m-a-trendy-wanker-soon-to-be-a-celebrity-but-for-now-just-waiting-tables variety and are very no frills, which after living in Melbourne (natural habitat of the trendy dickhead) for four years was a breath of fresh air.

All this niceness is balanced out by the everpresent smog and noise from shitloads of cars screaming down the pot holed roads and all sorts of other chaos going on 24 hours a day. As I was quickly finding out, Bogota doesn’t sleep, and I hadn’t even left the burbs yet!

We eventually got our money out and met up with cata’s mum, then headed to the nearest Trans-Milenio station to get a bus to into the city centre to meet up with Gaby, get some lunch and check things out. Its worth mentioning here that Bogota has three main forms of Public Transport: Trans-Milenio, Buses and Taxi’s.

The Trans-Milenio are these huge busses that run all over the city on a set route that is seperate from other traffic so that it can just hoon down to all it’s stops just as a train would. They have set stations similar to that of a train where the passengers embark and it only costs 1200 pesos (60c aus). The Buses are just that, busses, excepth that they are probably very different to the ones in your city. The busses are privately owned and have a set route, (usually printed on the front window so you can see where it’s going before it plows into your spine) but they dont have specified stops, so you just spot the one you wan’t and flag it down wherever you like. The same goes with getting off. The more passengers the driver picks up the more money he makes, which is sweet for him but often means they can get a bit slow and crowded. These cost about the around 1200 pesos aswell.

The third form, and most expensive, is the taxi. In Bogota taxi’s are fucken everywhere, and for your average Bogotano they are a little pricey for everyday use, but if you are travelling in aussie dollars like we are, a ten minute cab ride comes to about $2.50AU, which makes it really tempting to catch them fucken everywhere.

Unfortunately for me, on this particular day we only caught one to the trans-milenio station, where we were squashed in and bounced forty minutes into the city centre. This was my first opportunityto see Bogota outside of Cedrito’s and, holy fuck, it was full on!

The closer we got to the centre the more run-down, smoggy and crowded things got. The flow of people on the streets got thicker and thicker until it just looked like a torrent of bodies ont he footpath. Traffic is a joke here and I was glad to be in the express lane on the trans-milenio as the cars beside us sat bumper to bumper, honking at one another.

If you’re on of those people who loves wide open spaces, green hills, valley’s covered in grapevines and dove’s blowing one another, then you will probably hate Bogota. It’s fucking big, smoggy, very dirty in parts and busy beyond all belief, but i dug it.

I’m a big fan of huge cities and have been to most of the big ones: London, New York, Paris, Tokyo – fuck, I sound like Karl Lagerfield – but Bogota felt the biggest for sure, simply because it lacks the order and infrastructure that the larger cities in more developed countries take for granted. Thank fuck I had cata there to hold my hand because otherwise I would’ve been lost and handing my cash over at the wrong end of a shiv in no time.

Central Bogota was simply more madness. People everywhere on the streets everywhere loafing, eating and selling all types of shit. We got of the bus and met up with Gaby and went straight into La Candelaria, the almost 500 year old colonial centre of Bogota. La Candelaria is like a city unto itself, and is much more chilled and serene than the areas fencing it in. It’s a bit of a student and backpacker hangout and is full of craft shops, musuems (of which more than a few are free) theatres, bars and cheap eateries.

We had a cool time just cruising around checking out the museums and crazy, old spanish houses. Many of these have been converted into the afore mentioned theatres and craftshops so you can just stroll in and check ’em out. One particularly cool one had the inner court yard cinverted into a blacksmiths, complete with a massive fucking Great Dane, weird artwork and hundreds of cool statues, paintings and shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

While here we also got a meal of rice, beans, beef, potatoes, salad and lemonade for $2.50AU each and I got to try a traditional type of booze called Chicha, which is made from fermented, pulverised corn and tastes like mashed pears. RAD!!

Much to my dissapointment, we also walked around for a couple of the markety areas for an hour or two looking for small bits and peices for the wedding, which was akin to having thumscrews put on my dick.

Completely knackered, we hopped back on the Trans-Milenio for home, my feeble brain still trying to take in everything I had seen. My first proper day in Bogota had been like taking an eskimo to ayers rock and my senses were still reeling when i got into bed that night. Bogota is not an easy city (unless you have a fiance to do all the hard stuff for you) but it is definately one of the most alive and I couldnt wait to get up again and be swollowed by it all over again – but not before prying my hand off my dick with the biggest pair of pliers you have ever seen!

Tags: bogota, colombia, food

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 3:31 pm and is filed under bogota, colombia, food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.