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.