Making progress…   Tuesday 11/10/2022

Perhaps for the good, I don’t have anything dramatic to report! My formal Spanish lessons ended on Friday 30th September. I had a week to go over everything I’d learned, and then was supposed to be having private lessons from yesterday. Unfortunately getting this arranged proved very difficult – despite assurances to the contrary (very Colombian I’m afraid, no sense of urgency or planning). So I told the university to forget it and set about finding myself a private teacher.

I was pretty sure that there must be many private teachers around, so I started an online search. Luckily, I came across a site offering the services of various people. Some I thought were just too young, and I settled on a guy called Gustavo who is in his forties. He’s Venezuelan (one of the 2.5 million in Colombia thanks to the collapse of the Venezuelan economy over the last several years). Although his background is not Spanish teaching, he was for a few years a professor of systems engineering at Santa Maria university in Caracas. He has a love of life and is very interested in Spanish literature, so I think that he is a good choice. As he said to me: you have enough grammar, what you need is conversation!

So yesterday and today I met up with him mid-morning and we had two hours’ conversation. He’s keen to meet in different places, so we basically just select a place to meet, sit there for a while and then perhaps take a long walk. Yesterday it was the Parque Nacional, about half an hour’s walk from the apartment, today it was the Parque de los Periodistas (the Park of Journalists) which is only three minutes’ walk away.

So that’s proving interesting, meeting up and talking about anything under the sun – families, history, the sad story of Venezuela, literature, the apartment market in Bogotá… He’s a helluva nice guy and it’s interesting to get a different perspective, from someone who has only lived in Bogotá for four years. I wondered how accepting the Colombians are of this huge influx of Venezuelans into their country. He says it varies. According to him, there are a lot of very rough Venezuelans here and they are not very popular. But he says that he’s made several Colombian friends, and describes the Colombians as naturally kind, open-hearted and friendly – very much my feeling as a foreigner. There’s no problem understanding his Spanish – although it’s Caribbean Spanish, it’s a lot clearer than that spoken in Cartagena, for example (probably because he’s from the capital, well-educated and speaks well). 

So this new arrangement has introduced something quite different into my stay here in Bogotá. Which I’m pleased about! Life here is relatively easy: the apartment is modern, everything works, the maintenance and management of the building is excellent, and its situation is fantastic – I’m close to everything, and this part of the city is well policed and very safe (men and women walk the streets alone at night). You can’t really ask for more.

Being the capital, there are regular political protests here. A couple of weeks ago it was a broad-based right wing protest (Justice, Liberty and Order) against the new socialist government. Certainly nothing threatening: thousands of very middle-class looking people peacefully marching through the streets, complaining about higher taxes, various environmental measures and their sense that national traditions are not being respected. Yesterday it was the turn of the National Rooster Federation of Colombia… I’m not making this up! They are campaigning to protect and preserve the tradition of cockfighting, against the threat of it being made illegal. They appeared to be country people, so I think it’s simply what you see elsewhere: the rural-urban divide (very much like battles over fox hunting in the UK). But, being Colombians, they had set up a stage on which was playing a heavy rock band in support of the campaign to keep roosters fighting. Altogether, an amusing and quite bizarre atmosphere. 

Two weekends ago, at the very end of September, I flew down to Cartagena and stayed one night on the boat, just to check everything and speak to the marina people. All was good – to be fair, the marina is well-managed. It was certainly a shock to go from a daytime temperature of about 15 here to 32 there, plus the humidity. 

So life goes along well, and in just under three weeks I’ll be flying to the UK for a brief visit. That will be a culture shock! It will be brilliant to see both Anna and Louisa, as well as visiting my aunt on her farm in the Brecon Beacons in mid-Wales. My sister and her husband are flying over from Norway to visit at the same time, so it’ll be something of a family reunion. The black sheep returns, even if it’s only briefly!