Settled in Bogotá! Tuesday 06/09/2022
I had an easy trip up to Bogotá on Friday and checked into my accommodation. It’s a studio apartment on the 18th floor of a modern 20-storey building, fully equipped with kitchen utensils and bedding. It has great views westward over the capital. Being modern and very new – it looks like it has only been in use for a few months – everything appears to work, while the door has a digital lock, so you have a code to enter rather than a key (which does greatly reduce the chance of being locked out!).
After stocking up with food and other supplies on Friday, I spent the weekend wandering around and buying a few things I needed. Walking long distances is easy here because the temperature is cool – so far the daily maximum has been between 15 and 17 degrees, which is an incredible difference to Cartagena, where the “feels like” temperature was typically 38 to 41 degrees in the middle of the day. It’s also easy to travel longer distances around the city by taxi – there are lots of them and they are cheap: travel 5 miles (8 kilometres) and it costs no more than £4 (or 5 US dollars).
Being in Bogotá for the second time, I like it as much as I did the first. It’s lively and there’s lots of variety, including in food. The benefits of being in the capital and in a real metropolis of eight million people…
My Spanish course started yesterday morning and it’s excellent! The “profesora” is a woman of 32 who is lively and engaging. And it’s absolutely not about being presented with long lists of verbs to be conjugated… Instead, it’s centred on practical things – addressing people, asking for things, nationalities, numbers etc. – with rules of grammar coming out of these things. So a sort of practice and theory combined. The class is ideal: there are four of us, so there’s lots of participation. The other three people are women who all work for an international charity – one an Australian who lives in London, another from Barbados and a third from Trinidad & Tobago. They are all temporarily posted to the Colombian office and attend the course from 8 to 12 in the morning and then go back to work in the afternoon.
They have a heavier schedule than me. Apart from work, it takes them about 45 minutes to be driven in to the centre from where they are staying close to their office, which is on the northern outskirts of the city. For me it’s easy: from inside my apartment on the 18th floor to the second floor seminar room at the university it’s an eight minute walk – I planned this right! Four hours of lessons is very tiring – when I leave I feel exhausted. So I’m lucky to have the afternoon free. Yesterday and today I went out for an hour-plus walk in mid-afternoon, then came back in and spent almost two hours going over my notes. I’m trying to get the maximum out of this – I’ve had plenty of time to relax, now is the time to make an effort! I suspect that after a week I will be adjusted to this rather radical lifestyle change and will feel less tired!
But it’s good to be doing something completely different – it really adds to the variety I’ve had over the past year and a half. It’s interesting to be tackling a language – and never in my life did I ever dream that I would be living in an apartment in Bogotá! There’s something to be said for that…