Bogota Week Eleven

Fucking Ecuadoreans. This woman is leaning on my shoulder while I try to type so I just shrugged her off. There was another bitch in the shop this morning. She tried to charge me $1.20 for a Colomiana. I could travel to Colombia, buy one and come back for less than that. Then she wanted $0.80 for a can of coke. Bitch. I have always paid $0.50 or maximum $0.70 in that same shop.

Hmm October 19th must have been an amazingly exciting day. Here is the full diary entry. 'Up and into class. Watched lessons and prepped until 11.30pm.' Quite possibly it might be the dullest day of my trip according to that entry. Certainly the shortest I believe. Next year I will have an October 19th memorial dullness session.

Had to get up at 5.30am as I had observation sessions with Leonardo. They thought we were a couple of Colombian students. We must look very teacher like. So tired. My first tutorial with Rosie went well. Was ticking over ok after the first two lessons. Would change over to Tom after this and I don't think he liked my teaching style much, but then everyone seems to have felt that. Went out for lunch and spent the afternoon trying not to fall asleep. My lesson went ok. It was not very well themed but they enjoyed it. I think it was the lesson I used road runner to elicit past tenses and then did charades of some sort. Lina had said that it was just to be me and her that weekend as we were heading to Villeta, her hometown. It was Praveen's last night so his girlfriend and Alice came over for a farewell meal. I then wrote assignment one. I passed all of my assignments first time and comfortably except for the grammar based one. Everyone had to repeat that except for Rebecca and I was the next closest with two minor faults. None of them took me very long, but I am a very fast and accurate writer. I mean I wrote my 13,000 word masters dissertation in just one day, with no editing and no rewrites and got the top grade.

I slept in a bit after saying goodbye to Praveen. As I said earlier, the flat was a lot quieter after he left. It had been a pretty good time in the flat. Will see him again in Porto Alegre and its his duty to throw a party for me down there to end my trip lol. I went to study and there was a problem with the shitty transmilenio due to an accident. It was a good morning for Bob Dylan. Enjoyed walking along calle 76 listening to Oxford Town. I took all evening to prepare the next lesson plan and I was doing a reading class based around the times that Praveen was attacked in Bogota. Made for some interesting stories.

I went to the classes and was nearly killed in the toilets by some industrial strength cleaner. I had just enough breath to make it through my piss, but afterwards I was struggling to breath and coughin a lot from the fumes. At least I knew I had fumigated my lungs. Lina was upset and had to leave early in my class. I found out later it was due to an argument she had had with her ex boyfriend. The class went fairly well for a class that I had prepared myself, but I still had not convinced I could put a coherent lesson together and I was now four lessons down, five to go. I stayed behind with Rachel afterwards to do assignment four for the next day. That was easier for the intermediate group as they had more activities to choose from. I met a drunken Fernando in the transmilenio and chatted for a while before ending up in an argument with Gloria as to my plans for the weekend.

I was up early for observation classes. Juan went AWOL that day so even though we weren't supposed to teach, Leonardo and I had to cover an hour spot with games and generally just fucking about with the class. We had moved over to the intermediate classes and had a new group. They had one cute girl called Camila but she lacked some oomph. She asked me how long I was here for lol. I love Colombians. I went for drink after class with Lina and Victoria. David joined us as well and then Lina had to go home early. Had assumed she was not that interested at this point. David and me grabbed some food. I was a little pissed from drinking almost alone and went to join Alice and Sofia and some Peruvian girl. We went to the crappy reggae bar and I fell asleep because I was completely knackered. I started to get some weird messages from Iranis now as well. I did not think it was her though, because the English was so awful. It turned out someone hacked her account and then read her e-mails and was intent on grilling me for information. She rang me to apologise and this person then wrote to Gloria. Caused a massive, mental ruckus ontop of the fight that was going to come from this weekend. I had to spend the first half of the next week dealing with these two problems, while also juggling my lessons. Nightmare.

I got up and watched online Tottenham batter Stoke into submission and then somehow lose 1-0. How the hell did we do that. Fuck sake. We were slipping a bit. It was Gloria's birthday. I sent her a happy birthday message and then went and met Lina to go to Villeta. We ended up kissing on the bus on the way there which was somewhat unexpected after the night before. Villeta is a nice, small, warm town. Her family have a beautiful house and she wants to open up a bar on the hill when she gets back from London. We went drinking with her friends and sister in the town. Asolutely smacking it down with rain. Afterwards we ended up having some strange fun on the stairs leading from the road to her house. She was always a little too preoccupied though. I used to call her 'preoccupada.'

The next day we slept in. Well I did. She sunbathed on the roof. Then we ended up lounging in a paddling pool on the roof for the afternoon before going to see some nearby waterfalls. Loads of soldiers were having competitions to see who could kill themselves the fastest by jumping off the top of the waterfall. Insane. Came back and played the 'boo' game with her nephew. He went mental. Afterwards we took a us back to Bogota and I went and stayed at her flat. Her psycho ex boyfriend kind of stalks her. Jealousy is a whole other level down here. So we had to turn off all the lights in case he was around. Fun times.