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.

A List Upon Departure (for Marty)

Ladies, fellas, it's been a little while. I apologise.
Right now it's two and a half hours until my plane leaves Perth for Sydney, where I will, for two days, run around and look at art with an ex-girlfriend/ lounge in front of the World Cup with an ex-housemate before onwards travelling towards Buenos Aries, and Bogota and then to Medellin. I will be away for two months in all. There is a plan to write on this blog a number of times weekly. Thats a lot more than I have been writing on it recently.

Colombia. Col-om-bia. Mmmmm. chk chk. Colombia.

Partial list of items packed for the trip:

• 1 x silk inner sheet
• 2 x books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• 1 x book by Jorge Luis Borges
• 1 x power adaptor
• 1 x inflatable kangaroo
  
• 1 x Australian passport
• 1 x Yellow Fever Vacination Certificate
• 2 x mousepads with naked beach girls on them, with the words "AUSSIE BABES - AUSTRALIA"
• 1 x Triceritops iPod case, with iPod.
  
• 1 x box of chocolate covered macadamia nuts, in the shape of koalas.
• 1 x Jordanian kefiyah
• 16 x Temazepam sleeping pills.
• 1 x brand new notebook
• 2 x protective combination padlocks
• 3 x packets of Timtams, part of a present I am delivering on behalf of a Colombian au pair who looks after a girl at my afterschool care centre, to her family and boyfriend in Medellin.
• 1 x book belonging to Nick Tapper called "Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish".
• Probably too many jumpers.

For the record: this is probably my most hesitant departure ever. Because? I have reasons.

Lived in Parks, Lived in the Night Air.

Tonight is Sunday night and if I could choose anything I would be sitting, legs tucked up, in a dark movie theatre watching some French film with Katie's head nustled perfectly into my neck, eating a tub of expensive vanilla icecream with a cold, clean spoon; instead I am at work, at the bookstore. Listening to Wolf Parade, rubbing my scalp, practising Mexican slang (chinga tu madre, cabron!), fielding blank questions from the wasteland minds of customers. I have a new hat - its about as good a replacement for my old favourite hat (lost in the shadows of Masada, by the Dead Sea, in Israel) as I will ever likely find, and in terms of this criteria scores an 8.5/10. There's the chilled air coming from the door. There's Oreo Wafersticks. There's dilapidated shelves, attacked by the hands of browsers (hands holding icecreams, hands holding hands), ready and waiting for me to come and tidy and straighten and replenish. My lips are chapped (the nights are long and warm and dark). I stand in the doorway, leaning onto the frame as I imagine old Turkish rug salesmen and old French Tabac owners and old African American barbers doing outside of their own stores, waiting for sales, gazing outwards at the passing by. Across the street from the bookstore is Oxford 130, a cafe which would have to be reconstructed as a set in a soundstage in the tv adaptation of my life, were there one. The chinking of glasses, the rev of engines. You know, this afternoon we were in the park and this whole group of Sudanese kids ran past flying a kite, a plastic yellow hawk on a string. It tugged and weaved between the branches of the trees. We lay there on the edge of the dappled sunlight, watching these kids, with their white teeth, and matching haircuts and fast legs skipping and tripping. I babbled about Middle Eastern history and Katie listened carefully and intently despite the serious pain in her muscles from six hours worth of dance audition. A nearby kookaburra ate the scraps of a bread roll. All around the lake there were people clustered in groups, walking dogs, cooking sausages, limbs akimbo on picnic rugs. We lay together and her eyes were wide and her hair was shimmering and her fingertips were soft and her heartbeat slow and steady and the sky was gentle and cloudless and my clothes all fit comfortably and everything was right, all right. All right?