#theatron

“Bad luck has trapped me”; this is a sentence I came across while reading a story written by one of my Grade 2 students at work. The story was about a really bad day she had had where she missed the bus and forgot her homework and was pushed in the mud, but in the end it was made alright by coming home to her Mum who held her and told her everything would be alright.

I found this particular sentence to be a very pretty way of describing the turmoil of a day where nothing will just go right, and thought that it applied absolutely to my feeling on Saturday morning when I approached a barred, bolted, blatantly shut cycle-hire shop. Fancying a bike ride round Bogotá, I researched bike hires in my area and found this fateful establishment, which advertised itself to be open at 9am. It was now 12pm. But it was, in typical Colombian fashion, shut. Now, I don’t know how the mice are getting on, but it seems that recently the best laid schemes of men don’t just aft gang agley, they always bloody gang agley! The Puente weekend Tatacoa trip fell through, the Guatavita day trip fell through, twice; it seems every activity we have organised for ourselves in the past weeks has been met by some unpredictable, impassable obstacle. I vented this frustration to Stephen over a resigned coffee on the curb outside Tostao, our favoured local coffee shop, but calmed down after tentatively wolfing down an apple tart of holy quality.

In the caffeinated optimism of the short walk home, I considered that maybe part of the reason I’ve been struggling lately with my mind being in two places is down to trying to do too much here, trying too hard to hop about as much of the country as possible and go on all these adventures and consequently resenting the gap house every time I’m there for over two hours. And so in turn part of me has forgotten that I actually live here, and so neither my bed in Bogotá or Nailsea have felt like mine, and so a traveller’s ambition has rooted me neither here nor there. I suddenly felt brighter about everything having finally isolated a problem which I could solve; when we got home I made a blueberry pie at a leisurely pace while skyping Mum and Dad for almost two hours and getting through numerous country albums from Sun Kil Moon, Flogging Molly and Father John Misty. It felt good to be doing something which I knew I would like, something aimless and quaint to remind me that this house I my home and not just where I sleep.

Not wishing to blow out this rekindling homeliness, I called off a semi-planned-not-really trip to Villavicencio, capital city of the Meta region of Colombia, sorta-scheduled for the next day and decided to dedicate my energy to what matters most: the sesh. That night George, Dom and I went on a ‘girl’s night out’; we played a few games of Worms modified for drinking, drank too many chocolate cocktails at a brilliantly quirky, brilliantly expensive, and then made our triumphant return to Theatron, the town-sized club not visited since way back in January when we first arrived. It was throwing a mad one for its 15th anniversary, and we threw outrageous shapes in the special way that only gringos do in almost all of the rooms in the complex, including one American-dive-bar style room which blasted System Of A Down’s Toxicity. At the drop of a hat (literally: one dude head banged so hard his hat fell off), I had to severely alter my dancing style from hip-wriggling Reggaeton to fending for my life in the pit. It was the best night out I’ve ever had.

The bus to Usaquen flea market the next morning was a bit more of a struggle though. I had only had a couple hours sleep, and the vehicle’s leaps over the potholes and speedbumps thumped my aching head like the way an alcoholic divorced man pounds on a static TV set. However, it proved to be an excursion worth going on; after getting milkshakes in a 50s style diner which curiously played Thin Lizzy’s 1976 hit ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’, we hit the market and for an hour I lost myself in the vender’s heckles, in the street performers, in the crafts of both art and tat. A woman on one stool tried to, and succeeded in, selling me a bottle of Stowford Press cider which she had marketed as some sort of English delicacy. I couldn’t help but giggle when she poured me a sample shot glass of the stuff out of a can. I also bought myself three pairs of earrings, increasing my tally to an amount which is completely unjustified for a person who is still yet to get their ears pierced.

That night the entire gap house population went out for dinner at a stark, nigh-on abandoned Mister Liu’s Chinese Restaurant (a photograph of which I’ve posted on this blog, but until now we had never been). The staff looked genuinely surprised to see people come in. The walls were lavished in Chinese ornamentation but the TV was playing a Mexican soap opera. Our drinks were brought out in plastic cups. Despite, being the only people in the place, the service was still pretty slow and we joked about how its only Mister Liu in the kitchen and maybe he’s a dwarf with a moustache that reaches all the way down to the floor and he keeps tripping over it. It was one of those dining experiences that reached that perfect, bliss level of shitness that made it amazing.

The Grade 2 girl that wrote that story and came up with that neat little phrase, her Mother died the second week I was here. I read the story with her again today, as she was submitting it into her portfolio for her ‘Student Led Conference’, and when I finished it she smiled and said “My mum was a really nice person” and I said “I can tell she was”. It’s inspiring how positive she has been in school the past four months having undergone the most crushing of tragedies, how hard she works, how well she writes, how friendly she is to everyone, how hard she tries to get me to say ‘water’ in my apparently hilarious British accent every day. It shows how one can lift themselves from even the lowest of lows if they make the effort to get that first push off the ground. I’m sure that inside she is hurting deeply, but if she can lose a loved one so precious to her and can keep herself together every school day for over a hundred days, then I can make sure a little confusion doesn’t get to me for the next forty-odd.

I am enjoying my time in Bogotá thus far. The city is like a cauldron; I enjoy its incessant bubbling hiss and I enjoy the mountainous landscapes that contain it. I also enjoy cohabitation more than I thought I would; my housemates and I, the newly christened ‘Gap-son Five’, have organised ourselves pretty well these first two weeks. The communal fund and cooking rota is functioning well with no drama or dispute and, outside the more bureaucratic end of sharing-living, we are having a good time. The members of the five are ‘yes people’; they are fun and open to pretty much anything, and I am thankful to be living in the positive environment they create, particularly now that we have bought a blow-up Micky Mouse Club House kiddie pool for the garden (it seemed like a good idea at the time (and it still is a good idea)).

What I do not enjoy, however, are taxi rides. In Bogotá, taxis are the most practical way of getting around if you don’t own a car. We have been briefed a number of times about the potential dangers surrounding taxis, and told a handful of torch-under-face stories of drivers insisting to take a shortcut and instead turning into some enclosed alley where their two friends are waiting hungrily for the contents of a gringo wallet. These tales are not what distress me, though I must admit an anxious shiver jolts up my spine every time the taxi driver locks the car doors once we’ve climbed inside. What churns my stomach is the quality, or lack thereof, of the driving of both the taxi driver and the rest of the city’s mobilised population. Honestly, if the streets of Bogotá were used in a driving theory test hazard perception video, the computer would freeze and shut down due to the amount of times one would have to click the mouse. I’d actually be very surprised if driving theory tests were even enforced in Colombia as, from my English perception, the highway code here seems to be two-fold:

1. Get where you need to be. 2. Get there fast.

The roads usually consist of two lanes going in each direction, four lanes in total, and everyone is recklessly weaving in and out of these lanes, trying to gain that crucial four second advantage over the faded red jeep who’s only going 20kmph over the speed limit. No time for ‘mirror, signal, manoeuvre’, shave crucial nanoseconds off your journey and potentially years off someone’s life by just skipping straight to the manoeuvre. You don’t even have to worry much about getting the manoeuvre right either, just accelerate and hope that natural selection is on your side.

I cannot quite believe I have only witnessed the one road accident in the first two weeks here, a somewhat gentle collision which nudged a motorcyclist to the floor. Maybe everyone driving like a total maniac somehow cancels out any danger, and all it takes is one sensible driver accustomed to the snail pace of Southmead to send the whole autopista to kingdom come.

Having completely slammed a part of Colombian culture, I must now shower another part of it with buckets of praise: the night-life. On Saturday night, the Gap-son Five ventured to ‘Theatron’, truly the most spectacular and explosive club I have ever stepped inside. Entry was 48,000 pesos (roughly £12), which ordinarily would be a little steep did they not supply you with your own personal chalice, which you can fill again and again with as many free drinks as you want. The vodka in my vodka-lemonades (my classic weapon of choice) may have been substantially watered-down, but it was enough to gather a buzz sufficient to boogy. A monstrously-sized palace, the club must have had a double digit of rooms, each packed to the brim with people and each with a different theme, including ‘The Temple’, a converted church hall which mostly blared the melt-inducing rhythms of Colombian pop. We spent most of the night there and in another room more dedicated to heavy house and punching basslines. The space was electric; the dancefloor oozed dry-ice as the strobes assaulted us and the male burlesque dancers thrust their spandex groins about their platforms. It would have been an overly intense experience were it not for the fact that everyone there was having such a euphoric time. There was no aggressive moshing or seedy guys looking to ‘pull’, everyone was simply there to have a good time and dance like morons.

Blek Le Roc