Spanish and a secret city…    Saturday 22/10/2022

I’ve spent the past two weeks wandering around the city with my Spanish teacher Gustavo, seeing things that I would normally never have seen. Amazing markets which sell everything under the sun, various parks, the museum of modern art, an old church which has been transformed into a gallery of mainly 17th and 18th century art…

Outside of all this, I’ve been attempting to further my knowledge of Spanish grammar, working by myself. I found an excellent textbook online, which I downloaded in PDF format for free, and there is a great website that gives all the various tenses for any verb you enter. Sophisticated Spanish is fairly complicated – there are multiple variations of verbs depending on tense and meaning – but practically speaking the simple past and future tenses are what’s really important (a lot of the complicated stuff is seldom used in everyday speech anyway). 

I’ve also been reading a book of short stories by the Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez – short stories are ideal because it’s slow-going. I bought an electronic copy of the book off Amazon, which works brilliantly because it’s downloaded to the Kindle app, which has a dictionary embedded in it. So as I read I can translate to English, ensuring that I understand what I’m reading. I’m happy to say I’m understanding more and more. Trying to read Marquez is obviously optimistic: my daughter Anna who is fluent in Spanish, said Wow, that’s challenging! To which I could only reply “I’ve always thought that it’s a good idea to try to run before you can walk…”

So everything is good here. I shall miss Bogotá – it’s a great city. It has a lot of depth; it’s the sort of place that even if you lived here for several years, you would still be finding new things that you hadn’t known existed. There’s a lot hidden away – behind a 10 metre facade, a lot of old buildings will go back 50 metres or more, with hidden courtyards – oases of quiet in a loud, dynamic city. Yesterday we found a great cafe that was typical of this – the entrance from the street was tiny, but up a flight of stairs and then suddenly you’re in a huge place, a covered garden stretching way back with a hodgepodge of different tables and chairs.

The weather has been very mixed. Typically you get some sun every day, often in the morning. And then with little warning, rain will sweep over the city – a couple of times I’ve been caught and soaked. Even with an umbrella you still get pretty wet: the rain bounces off the ground and huge deep puddles quickly form. Then it might be cloudy, but sometimes the sun comes out again in the late afternoon. Very much a mountain climate, with rapid changes. The sun is very strong: when it’s sunny the UV index is often 11, very high. It feels warm, but the temperature drops rapidly when clouds come over. Even in the middle of the day it can be only 13 degrees, and at night it falls to somewhere between 5 and 7 degrees. So it’s ever-changing: right now as I write this, just after noon, rain has swept in and there’s a wild thunder storm too. But it’ll clear and then I’ll go out for a walk…