from World Nomad´s blog, 16 July 2010

So, I´ve lost access to my Blogger blog. I resume journaling here.

Bogota is a nice city. I cannot find a better word than ´nice´. It isn´t beautiful (though there are beautiful things here), it isn´t grand (though there are grand things here). It is neither friendly or unfriendly. It isn´t full of garbage and graffiti, there are many roads of second-world-looking warehouses and shops, there are gated communities and shopping malls.

There is a stunning very old section of colourful small houses, some amazing cathedrals, impressive colonial buildings of grandeur, stylish cafes and bars, industrial roads, large highways, a shitload of road construction, neighbourhoods swathed in new apartment building, identical building after identical building, green mountains rising up around the city. It is warmish but grey, low-lying. Bogota is an incredibly architecturally diverse - hodgepodge - affair. I dig it.

My time here has been marred by the flu that is debilitating me a little bit, my constant dry mouth because I can´t breathe out of my nose. I have played the traditional Colombian game of tejo, where you throw heavy metallic - not disks, not balls - space-ship like objects at a slanted board of mud. The object is to get your tejo to stick in the mud in the middle of two pink paper triangles stuck on the board with gunpowder in them. If you get in the middle zou get 6 points. If you make the gunpowder go off you get 3 points. Otherwise the person whose tejo sticks nearest the middle gets 1 point. I was actually alright at this muddy game that involves drinking beer. You pay for the beer, not the game.

I am not feeling very motivated to write much, or even to do much. Tonight I take a night bus to Cali, where hopefully it is hot and sunny. This, I need.