Street Art: Bogotá

Children at home and abroad. I have just written the longest blog entry I have ever written. It was about trying to watch the Australia-Croatia game here in Bogota, about the transport system, about my insecurities, about my continuous jetlag and about the crazy dreams I have been having, including one in which Australian socceroos coach Guus Hiddink was attacked, on field, by a guide dog which ravaged his right ankle. I had just finished it, and tried to use the backspace bar to erase one letter and for some reason it erased the whole thing. I had been writing for one hour and a half and it was a good entry, I think. My efforts to get it back were fruitless. I must go now, but I'll end this heartbreaking entry by saying that I will not, after all, have internet access at the camp, which begins next week. As a result, don't expect too much from this motherfucking blog. You are, however, warmly invited to send, by email (standardlinedelivery@gmail.com) your own fictional accounts of what you imagine I might be up to, at the camp, or just freely wandering the verdant forests of Colombia. All submissions will be published. Excuse me while I go stand in front of a bus.

One Fork in the Path.

I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.
- Jorge Luis Borges

On the outskirts of Buenos Aires, beside the autopistas which run between the city centre and the Ministropistarmi airport, where the green commons are lined with leafless trees of early winter, where streams trickle in shy gullies, an old man has balanced his bike on the trunk of an elm while he stoops to collect firewood. Above him in the branches, as in a number of other trees in nearby fields, an abandoned kite hangs tangled, its long colourful tail lashing slowly in the wind. Its an overcast sky, thick and low. The man moves slowly on the grass, ties bundles of sticks to the frame of his bike. There are small birds above the telegraph wires. The sound of tyres of damp roads.

Downtown, the cobbled streets of el barrio San Telmo are peppered with porteños - amourous couples tightly held, students in scarves and sweaters, tired eyed beggars with infants wrapped close, Argentine women with carefully constructed hairstyles. It's Sunday, and Plaza Dorrego is crammed full with a labyrinth of stalls, selling antique candlesticks, timepieces, binoculars, hats and old photographs stuffed in metal tins. Groups gather and grin around the street performers. Here is a leotarded contortionist, here a puppeteer. Here, old men in brimmed hats are playing piano accordion, here couples dance the tango. And the old women, wild haired and with smudged lipstick, whose attraction is just that they are mad, and who bang out rhythms on deoderant lids or tango with stuffed toys. All attract crowds. Then the smell from the resturaunts, of thick, juicy beef steak, of fried potatoes, of chorizo. And, as darkness approaches the people slowly leak downwards, into the tiled subte stations, another labyrinth, musty and echoing, once grand.