Stranger in a strange land

Goin' Bogota

[quehashecho]

At El Campín before Santa Fé's last group game against Real Garcilaso (Perú).

The first 20 minutes were atrocious, but it picked up after that and the two goals Santa Fé scored were actually pretty well-worked.

Will be going again on May 7th for the last 16 game against Gremio (Brasil).

[quehashecho]

Medellín aka 'The World's Most Innovative City 2013'

The announcement was actually made a week and a half ago, but I've only just gotten round to reading the cover story in Semana, and thought I'd put down some thoughts I had about this city.

In Europe and the US, Medellín is most well-known for being the city that was home to one of the most powerful and dangerous druglords of all time, Pablo Éscobar. In the early 90s, the city had the highest murder rate per 100.000 inhabitants in the world, and every day a lot of political activists, journalists and policemen (as well as current or former rival cartel members) used to leave the house unsure of whether they'd be coming back.

When my family and I visited Colombia in the mid-to-late 1990s, we never went to Medellín, but when my good friend Marco came to visit me at the end of last year, the capital of the Antioquia department was one of the first places I put on our preliminary itinerary.

Granted, we only spent 3 days there, but it was enough time to get some lasting first-hand impressions of the place praised by Colombians and loved by gringo expats and travelers.

The City of Eternal Spring

After not having taken a tube or train for six months, a personal highlight certainly was taking the metro, which was remarkably clean and ran smoothly and quickly. It even had announcements in English. Another great feature we noted was the amount of green spaces - we never made it to the botanical gardens or the Parque Arví, but we passed the former and a number of other parks on our frequent metro rides. Bogotá is a fun city, but the lack of easily accessible parks can be a huge bummer after weeks and weeks of inhaling exhaust fumes and ruining your knees by jogging on concrete.

Apart from the greenery and the public transport, another plus was the famed friendliness of the paisas (as the Antioquians are known). The restaurant lady who served us a delicious pollo asado told us to 'Come back soon, my lovelies' and the cab driver who took us to the pueblito paisa rattled off the city's sights informatively and with obvious pride.

Speaking of pride: The news that Medellín had won the  'City of the Year Award' was received by Colombians all across the country with great joy. In a country where regionalism is very much the norm, this is no mean feat. 

The reasons for the city's improvements, both real and perceived, mainly come down to a concerted effort by consecutive mayors - Sergio Fajardo, who took office in 2004, Alonso Salazar (2008 - 2011) and Aníbal Gaviria, the incumbent.

According to the Colombian weekly Semana, the award wasn't given because Medellín had suddenly reached the cultural richness and relative safety and equality of big European or American cities, but because a visible, structured and wide-reaching plan had been designed and, ultimately, carried out over a decade during which other cities (such as, sadly, Bogotá) have either come unstuck or deteriorated.

What's so impressive about this upturn is that the areas which have benefited most from the efforts of the local government and businesses aren't well-to do tourist areas such as El Poblado, but poor neighbourhoods. The famous Metrocable that connects the hillside barrios with the city centre has mobilised more than half a million inhabitants, while on the Western side a huge escalator spares people from the San Javier barrio a walk equivalent to a 10-storey building.

We took the Metrocable up the hill to the Biblioteca España, a building of which I'd seen a model in Bogotá and which is a lovely piece of architecture, and again it wasn't located in a middle class neighbourhood but in an area where, judging by the local schoolkids' art work displayed in one of the library's rooms, violence and poverty are if not the norm then at least too familiar to produce much outrage.

Other factors related to the slowly changing face of the city are the large number of volunteers participating in educational and social programmes, and, perhaps more importantly, the close integration of public services under the roof of the EPM (Public Services of Medellín), an organisation modeled on a similar grouping of local businesses founded in the 1970s that stood firm in the face of multi-national takeovers and helped cement the reputation of paisas as the shrewdest businesspeople in Colombia.

As with everything in this country, however, there is a dark side to all of this. Despite a 25% year-on-year drop in the number of homicides, Medellín and its surrounding areas are still among the most violent in the country (during the first weekend after the announcement, 24 murders were recorded in the city) and inequality is just as much of a problem as it is in Bogotá. In fact, the Medellín city centre by day felt as rough and grimy as that of the capital back in the late 90s. In a move unlikely to improve the world's view of Medellín, the gun-toting (and thus aptly named) rapper Gunplay has named his upcoming debut album after the city where he was filmed snorting cocaine during a Rick Ross videoshoot in 2009.

The shadows of the past still peek out of the corners, and many of the city's inhabitants still live in them. But the way the public and the private sector, local businesses and volunteers, locals and (to a lesser extent) tourists, have worked together to slowly but surely transform a city that 20 years ago was a frankly harrowing place remains something Colombians (which I guess includes me) should be proud of.

[quehashecho]

Last week I wrote a preview of my favourite Colombian bands playing this year's Festival Estéreo Picnic in Bogotá next month. Have a read.

[quehashecho]

Before I came here, I thought I'd be updating this every 2 weeks with at outlandish tales of almost marrying a coffee farmer's daughter or running into Faustino Asprilla at a salsa club or somesuch nonsense.

Trying write the first update in a while, I find it hard to come up with any similar revelation or anecdote that seems worthy of typing up. Has anything actually happened since I came back from holiday in early January? It doesn't really feel like it.

Except of course a few things have happened. I moved house. My old room was windowless, damp and without natural light, but I stuck it out mainly because of my housemates, all of whom were slightly loopy but lovely. There was Marco, the main tenant, a perpetually beaming, tee-total, vegetarian 22-year-old from the Chocó region of Colombia (on the Pacific coast) with dreads down to his hips. His boyfriend, Juan-Camilo, was from Santa Marta, and a fan of Creedence Clearwater Revival and weed.

Marco (taken from his Facebook artist page)

Then there was Ed, the American dude from South Caroline, who drank three pots of coffee a day and cooked like an absolute champ, and with whom I spoke only in Spanish until one night we got drunk and decided that that was stupid. And finally, bless her, Kathi, a fellow German girl who had to endure the cat's fleas, a rat fleeing into her room, and a drunk guy smashing her bedroom window one night.

Things that broke in the 6 months I lived in that house:

- A glass panel in the door of the building

- The tap in the kitchen sink

- The Internet

- The front door lock

- The electric shower head (central heating is pretty much non-existant in Bogotá)

- The main water pipe outside of our building (didn't actually break - someone ripped off the metal cover and stole the water counter, apparently to sell it back to the water company #locombia)

Now I live on the other side of the Septima, one of Bogotá's main roads, a bit closer to the mountains and overall in a less grimy area. The housemates are nice but less engaging to talk to, but my room has daylight out the metaphorical ass and I have a double bed, so fuck the housemates.

Other than that, I seem to have been working shitloads in the last 2 months. December and January are usually fairly bad weeks for English teachers (well, I say 'bad' - if you save up a bit of money beforehand it just means that you don't have any work for 6 weeks and can therefore doss around/travel at your leisure)  and it took some time to motivate my students to start classes again.

But once I cajoled/emotionally blackmailed them into kicking things off, everything started ticking over and it hasn't really dropped off since. They recommended me to one of their colleagues, who signed me up to teach his wife, meaning I now have 6 students and 27 hours of teaching per week. This, plus traveling to and from classes and lesson planning, adds up to more than a normal working week for me back home, which has made me think recently about whether I'm really doing what I came here to do.

There's only so much exploring, learning and, well yes, drinking and talking to girls you can do when you have to get up at 6am every other day. So the last couple of weeks I've been thinking a lot about where to go from here, both literally and figuratively speaking. I'm getting the feeling that something needs to change (again), but as of yet I don't know what that will be.

I'll leave you with a few photos of my immediate surroundings (I promise I'll take some more interesting ones soon).

The view out of my room to the left

  The view out of my room to the right

  The building where I do most of my classes (9th floor to be exact)

  The view to the East from said 9th floor at around 5.45pm

  And lastly...

El Profe

Miss u guyz

x

[quehashecho]

Yesterday, police, firefighters and heavy machinery moved into 'El Bronx', one of the poorest and most dangerous neighbourhoods in Bogotá.

They removed a squalid shantytown to 'increase the quality of life for the residents of the neighbourhood', and in the process, displaced dozens of drug addicts and homeless people. Officially, these people will be re-located or moved into treatment facilities, but obviously it's far more likely they'll sleep on the streets or move into another part of the city.

There's a pretty haunting photo gallery up on El Tiempo's website that shows what happened in 'El Bronx'. Go here to have a look.

[quehashecho]

20 Favourite Albums of 2012

For what it's worth, here are my favourite albums of the year. Compared to past year, I've definitely listened to more rap in the last 12 months, which is where I think the most interesting things were happening. I didn't discover a single 'traditional' (ugh) band that I got as interested in as I was in people like Action Bronson, Nacho Picasso or Kendrick Lamar. 

The few 'indie rock' records that I did enjoy a lot were made by bands I already knew (maybe with the exception of Cold Pumas and Sauna Youth, who released their debut albums this year, even though I was aware of their singles before that) - like Japandroids, Cloud Nothings (whose first record was super-boring) and Mountain Goats.

Another thing I just noticed is how little pop music featured in my listening habits this year. Arguably the Niki & The Dove and Frank Ocean albums could be classified as (fantastic) pop albums, but other than that not a lot registered with me - the Jessie Ware album was solid, and I haven't listened to Solange's EP enough to make up my mind.

There are a few albums that I listened to more than the ones I've listed below, but that was mostly because I kept trying to understand them and ultimately gave up (e.g. Guided By Voices, Jeremiah Jae).

I know there are a lot of releases I didn't get round to listen to from all kinds of genres, so if there's anything you think I should check out let me know.

PS I left off Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball because I can't really be unbiased about his albums - as a Springsteen album, I'd give it a 7/10.

FAVOURITE ALBUMS OF 2012

1) Japandroids - Celebration Rock

Best Song: "The House That Heaven Built"

2) Niki & The Dove - Instinct

Best Song: "Taylor" (This album is so good that the best song is actually a song the band didn't think was good enough to be on it other than as a bonus track)

3) Death Grips - The Money Store

Best Song: "Hacker"

4) Cloud Nothings - Attack on Memory

Best Song: "Wasted Days"

5) Sharon Van Etten - Tramp

Best Song: "Serpents"

6) Frank Ocean - Channel Orange

Best Song: "Lost"

7) Miguel - Kaleidoscope Dream

Best Song: "The Thrill"

8) OC & Apollo Brown - Trophies

Best Song: "The First 48"

9) Mark Lanegan Band - Blues Funeral

Best Song: "Harbourview Hospital"

10) Kendrick Lamar - good kid, M.A.A.D. city

Best Song: "Sing About Me, I'm Dying Of Thirst"

11) Cold Pumas - Persistent Malaise

12) The Killers - Battle Born

13) John Talabot - fin

14) The Mountain Goats - Transcendental Youth

15) Sauna Youth - Dreamlands

16) THEESatisfaciton - awE NaturalE

17) Leonard Cohen - Old Ideas

18) Blondes - Blondes

19) Ab-Soul - Control System

20) VCMG - SSSS

_____________________________________________________________

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

"Heavy" stuff

Black Breath - Sentenced to Life

Hammers - Vardøgr

Torche - Harminocraft

Neurosis - Honour Found in Decay

OFF! - OFF!

Metz - Metz

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"Indie Rock" stuff

Fang Island - Major

The Shins - Port of Morrow

Patti Smith - Banga

Shearwater - Animal Joy

Grimes - Visions

Jack White - Blunderbuss

Chromatics - Kill For Love

Cat Power - Sun

Swearin' - Swearin'

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"Rap" stuff

Heems - Nehru Jackets

Azealia Banks - Fantasea

Blue Sky Black Death & Nacho Picasso - Exalted

Freddie Gibbs - Baby Face Killa

JJ Doom - Key To The Kuffs

Roc Marciano - Reloaded

Big Boi - Viscious Lies & Dangerous Rumours

Rick Ross - Rich Forever

El-P - Cancer For Cure

Big K.R.I.T. -4Eva N A Day

Nas - Life is Good

Sean Price - Mic Tyson

Angel Haze - Reservation

[quehashecho]

"Hello teacher!"

This is how I'm greeted every morning by the receptionists at the company at whose offices I teach. I've been teaching full-time for about a month and a half now, and it's probably safe to say I've learned just as much (if not more) as my students in that time.

Teaching English in Bogotá is fairly easy - there are loads of institutes, legit or not, offering courses to individuals and companies, and sometimes the only qualifications that are required are a passport from an English-speaking country and a pulse. Needless to say, those kinds of jobs rarely pay well or even reliably, which is why I chose to do the CELTA course.

The CELTA is one of the more widely recognised qualifications for ESL teaching, and while the month-long course wasn't that intellectually challenging, it was a shit load of work and stress, with the odd minor freak-out thrown in for good measure. But I'm glad I did it, because it gave me (someone with zero teaching experience) a good foundation on which to fall back on in the real world (of course, to what extent teaching English in a foreign country can be deemed 'the real world' is debatable).

After interviewing around with a few agencies and institutes, I now have five students in total - four of them I got through my main employer, an agency run by a gregarious Irishman with a handshake that evokes a medieval torture device. One of the most annoying things about working as a teacher here is the fact that you'll sometimes spend almost half as much time travelling to work as you do actually working. The traffic in the city is horrendous, despite the surprisingly effective and functional TransMilenio public transport service. So I'm pretty happy with the fact that these four students all work for the same company, an energy firm owned by a British-based multinational.

This means I have to take the bus to the same address three times a day, which is arguably more convenient than criss-crossing the city the same number of times.

The students are all between 22 and 27 years old, which makes things a bit easier - a lot of teachers I know tend to teach high-level executives - and more fun. All the classes are one-on-one, as opposed to group classes, which is a bit of a shame because I did like working with groups just because of the variety of personalities and activities you can do in the classroom. In one-on-one sessions, there is very little downtime and it can sometimes feel a bit like private tutoring.

Thankfully, the students are all very interesting and intelligent. The youngest of them is a usually well-dressed, gym-going party boy with a lot of confidence but not necessarily much accuracy. He rushes through activities and gets bored easily and prefers to talk about parties and things that happened at the weekend. He doesn't like being picked up on pronounciation mistakes, but he has a sense of humour so if I do it in a subtle way he doesn't get too huffy. 

One thing most of them have in common is that they all come from simple, working class backgrounds in smaller towns far away from Bogotá. In some cases they are the most successful of their siblings or even the first in their whole family to go to university. Their drive and discipline (they have to take time out of their working day to take the classes) puts my incredibly limited ambition to shame and talking to them often helps me regain perspective after a fit of melancholy or moaning.

One of my newer students is from the coast, which brings its very own challenges. Bogotanos aren't very friendly towards costenõs, whom they consider to be lazy tricksters. This guy is anything but lazy, however. He told me he wanted to work for this company since before he started uni, and went through a 6-month internship and an arduous interview process to get the job he has now. He also has a slight speech impediment, which I only realised after I kept trying to correct his pronounciation and seeing him becoming ever more sheepish. Bit awkward.

The first student I got through the Irish dude is probably the best student I'll ever have. She's motivated, incredibly disciplined and intelligent, and possibly the loveliest girl ever. Her fluency and ability to grasp new structures is ridiculously high for someone whose total exposure to native speakers consists of a week and a half in New York (the first time she ever left the country) last year. The only thing she lacks is confidence, which is why I think she keeps taking lessons despite there not being that much, realistically, that I could teach her. She is two years older than me, I think, and there definitely is a bit of flirting going on sometimes - I even had a dream the other night that she was my girlfriend - but there is no way I would ever want to ruin it with a student who makes me feel like I know what I'm doing.

Speaking of which - my latest student asked me, in our first class, if I could explain my 'methodology' to him. After stifling an explosion of laughter, I mumbled something about 'basing my lessons on students' needs' and swiftly moved on. I am definitely still in the 'I hope nobody sees through me and discovers how much of a fraud I am' phase of this whole teaching thing - sometimes, simple grammar or vocabulary questions ('What's the difference between obsession and addiction?') throw me off in a way that feels very un-teachery and I still find myself talking way too much during lessons, instead of letting the students get on with things and trying out forms and vocab.

However, apparently I got two of these students because the other two recommended me, so I guess despite their collective intelligence and perceptiveness they haven't seen what's behind the glasses-and-impeccable-hair combo - a stranger in a stranger land, trying to learn while trying to teach.

Photo credit: mikesbogotablog.blogspot.com

[quehashecho]

New AraabMuzik. Holy shit.

[quehashecho]

3 months in

On Wednesday it'll be 3 months since I arrived in Bogotá [insert clichéd phrase about the passing of time here]. The most significant things that have happened in that time are finishing the CELTA course successfully, going on my first trip within the country, starting to work as a teacher and getting Colombian citizenship.

The latter was done more out of laziness - I didn't want to have to go through the paperwork hell that is a work visa, and getting my citizenship turned out a fair bit cheaper than photocopying a thousand documents and flying to Venezuela and back to re-enter the country.

When I went to the registry to sort out my identity card, I could see people clocking my foreign accent and wondering what the fuck I was doing there. But then the lady behind the desk gave me my ID card (a shitty-looking piece of paper in a plastic envolope) and said "Ya eres Colombiano!" and that was it.

The whole thing doesn't feel much different - it's not like I can suddenly dance without looking like a moron or no longer care about being punctual - but my tourist visa runs out in two days and then I'll be here not as a gringo tourist, but as a Colombian. I'll have to step up my latino game.

This Sunday just gone, I went to the International Bogotá Art Fair with my uncle Carlos. I had gotten home at around 4.30am and then stayed up skyping with a friend, so when my uncle rang to tell me he'd be near my house in 15 minutes I was less than a 100% sure where I was and what was going on.

But the visit was absolutely worth the gnarly hangover - there were acres full of Latin American art works, and some absolutely beautiful pieces. It did make me aware of how little I actually know about art, and my uncle reinforced this by being able to name every single artist and bumping into what seemed like a dozen artists or curators or critics that he knew.

Again, in my sorry state I forgot to bring a notebook and a pen, so I couldn't note down the (many) artists that I liked, but I've included some photos anyway.

Night

The dude with the hat and the tie is a leader of the M-19 guerilla group. I love how his heavies are all wet and tired, and he himself looks like he had steak for breakfast. Like most leaders of this group, he was assassinated.

This one was called Marvel Comics. I have no idea what it means but I love it.

Then my battery ran out. In other less upbeat news, I got mugged a week ago. I went to see a film at the Bogotá Film Festival (I saw this, and it was very good) and didn't want to spend money on a taxi, so I thought I'd take a bus form the city centre. Only thing was that it was a national holiday, so there was nobody on the streets, and a foreigner standing on a street corner for five minutes will eventually set someone's fool detector off something rotten.

So this guy, who's probably been watching me for a few minutes, gets on the bus with me and sits down next to me (there are about two more people on there) where he pulls out a knife and says that either I give him all my cash now or he follows me out of the bus and takes my phone, wallet, shoes etc.

Now I've never been on the receiving end of any sort of violence (apart from one time when, out of nothing, some prick punched me in the head in Kingston in broad daylight), so my natural reaction was to just hand over everything and then get off the bus with around £20 less than I got on and walk the remainder of the way home feeling furious with myself.

But of course I was neither hurt nor robbed of anything genuinely irreplaceable, so I guess the whole episode was a rather gentle lesson in how not to be an idiot on a big South American city.

[quehashecho]

[quehashecho]

Bogotá Graffiti Tour

While jobhunting a couple of weeks ago, I found myself with the odd few hours of downtime in between traveling to and attending interviews and faffing around with my CV. I decided to finally check out the Bogotá graffiti tour, which I'd read about and which sounded like a cool way to pass a few hours and hopefully see a different side to the city.

We set off from Las Aguas in the city centre, and mainly wandered around the Candelaria district. The whole tour took around two and a half hours and was very well presented and informative. It was led by an Aussie physiotherapist and street artist who knows a lot of the artists represented on the tour personally and has witnessed the rise of graffiti and street art in the Colombian capital first hand after coming here a few years ago.

Unfortunately I didn't take notes during the tour, so I've forgotten who painted most of the art work shown in the photos, but there was a great mix of local artists like Stinkfish (see first photo below) and DJ LU and international graffiteros like Pez (Barcelona) and our tour guide himself, who paints under the nom de plume Crisp.

Pez's signature character - a really fucking creepy fish

On Calle 12B with Carrera 4, near where I did my CELTA course

A restaurant near the Chorro, where the local students go to get pissed

One of the dozens of hostels in the Candelaria neighbourhood

A collaborative mural by a local crew and some individual artists

Another Stinkfish stencil piece. He apparently works from photographs he takes of people in the street.

A massive mural by Bastardilla, one of the few openly feminist voices in the graffiti scene. Her work often focuses on violence against women as well as poverty and environmental concerns.

One way the street artists make money here is to take on commercial commissions like film posters. There is a massive one on my way into the city centre for The Expendables 2, which actually looks alright.

Toxicomano are probably the most punk bunch of graffiteros in Bogotá. Their work is a lot less playful and more frontloaded with critical statements about  the media, politicians and the corporate 'elite'.

Another collaborative mural, this time with the Monserrate church in the background.

A socio-critical, collaborative mural made by DJ LU, Toxicomano, Stinkfish and a guy called Lesivo on Calle 20 with Carrera 5.

Since the tour, I've been keeping my eyes open for more street art and graffiti, and it's true - there seems to be a very healthy scene in Bogotá, aided by a somewhat muddled legal situation and the creativity and persistence of the artists involved.

Check out work from Stinkfish, Pez, Bastardilla, and DJ LU.

[simply-war]

A naked protester shouts slogans to a riot police truck during a march on October 12, 2012, in Bogota.(AFP Photo / Guillermo Legaria)

[quehashecho]

Yesterday, Colombia beat Paraguay 2-0 to go top of the table in their qualifying group before the winter break. I missed the whole game because I had an induction at a language institute, but when I had gone for a run in the morning, I had already seen dozens of people rocking the national shirt.

Students were wearing it underneath their leather jackets, taxi drivers were wearing it as a sort of uniform for the day, children were getting their mothers to buy them one from one of the people selling it at every street corner.

Considering how little of a fuck anyone really gives in London whenever England have a qualifying game, this was really cool to see, and obviously the atmosphere got even better when the final whistle went.

This team, to me, still sometimes seems one injury to Falcao away from collapsing back into mediocrity and over-confident ineffectiveness, but the front four are definitely clicking in a way that hasn't been seen in this country since the golden but ultimately tragic days of the 1990s.

James Rodriguez, Jackson Martinez (both Porto), Freddy Guarin (Inter Milan), Mario Yepes, Cristian Zapata (both Milan) and Radamel Falcao (Atletíco Madrid) all play in Europe, and second forward Teofilo Gutierrez seems to have found form after a string of transfers and a short-lived stay in Argentina.

There are still a lot of stray and stupid passes being made, especially from central midfield, but Juan Zuniga (Napoli) has crept ever closer to fulfilling the promise that he'd be our own Roberto Carlos, and Yepes, despite being 35 and about as quick on the turn as Per Mertesacker after a couple of beers, has done a lot to bring the group closer together as well as forming the joint-best defence of the group, along with Argentina.

The team has a nice blend of youth (Rodriguez, goalkeeper Ospina) and experience (reserve goalkeeper and former number 1 Faryd Mondragon is 41), and with an average age of around 25 you would think that most of these guys should be nearing their respective peaks by the time the World Cup kicks off.

There is still the second round of qualifying games to play, and despite being top, Colombia only has five points more than Venezuela, who are in 6th. But some Colombian fans are already making their reservations for Brazil 2014, and good on them. We might just get there.

[quehashecho]

The Simon Bolívar monument at the Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino in Santa Marta. The inscription reads "Colombia to the liberator".

It's a pretty impressive edifice, and when I was there, the heat and quiet lent it a weirdly solemn kind of vibe. Inside, there is a massive marble statue of the man himself, reminiscent of the one of Abe Lincoln in Washington, D.C.

Colombia is, not unlike the US, a pretty young country, and its people are similarly patriotic. Part of the idea of coming here was to see whether I would start to feel some kind of deeper connection with the place I was born, and while sometimes there are moments where I feel pleased to be able to say that I'm from here, I know that the latter is not really the case - my mother happened to be working in Bogotá at the time she was in the final stages of pregnancy, and we left again when I was barely 2 months old.

Pride is an essential component of patriotism, but I'm still looking for the connection between this country and myself - what do we share that is worth being proud of, what is the thing that ties us together inextricably and uniquely, while being something I can share with other Colombians? I'm probably overreaching myself in trying to come across that something, and I try not to think about it too much, but this monument did get me thinking about how this place and I are linked.

[quehashecho]

My ex-colleagues gave me the English version of this book as a farewell gift. I've only just finished it - not because it's boring, far from it - but because reading time has been taken up by expeditions into the city or keeping up with Breaking Bad and Louie.

It's a collection of first-hand accounts of displaced Colombians from all around the country, detailing their lives in the fields and mountains, and the brutality and poverty they had (and often still have) to endure.

The author Alfredo Molano's main point is that the violence in Colombia is not down to drug trafficking, but is rooted in economic and social inequality, a lack of government reach in rural areas, and wealthy landowners and international corporations basically being allowed free dibs on natural resources.

It's a very interesting little read, and it made me re-consider my position on the FARC and Alvaro Uribe (president from 2002 until 2010). This country is a beautiful, chaotic mess, and I can't wait to get my head around it properly.

[quehashecho]

All I want to be eating for the rest of my life