A very big house in the country...

It was our friend Marcella's birthday recently and she decided to have a party out at her parents 'summer home farm' on the outskirts of Bogota.
It really is the most gorgeous place I've seen.
A real treat as well, because it is surrounded by beautiful countryside which you really miss when you are in the city.

here are some pics.

Living la vida loca!

Here are some pictures from Friday night out,
We went out with Dom, Neil (Eddie) and Joanna.
We had another great night at the salsa bar a couple of blocks away.
We still had to take a taxi though, because it decided to pee it down
with rain!!
This unpredictable Colombian weather ay??

Cannibal Corpse

Well bloody hell!
last friday (viernes pasado) I went and saw Cannibal Corpse in Bogota and yes the stories about the south americans loving and going mad for their metal was not exaggerated!!

I went with my mate from work Micheal Lawless (no relation to Blacky) he has been in Bogota for 2 years and saw Slayer in Bogota he is also an awsome bass player and he can speak bloody good spanish which came in pretty handy getting into the gig as you are about to find out!!!

Well the night began with a couple of beers round Mikes apartment he was really ill but didn't want to miss out on the corpse. So we get in a taxi and give the driver the address. Now everybody I asked in the past week had not known where the hell the venue was so it did not look good. How hard can it be to find a venue that no one had heard of in a city of 8 million people just look for the dirty metallers yes? No it took us 40 minutes of driving around to find the place and it was only after a few phonecalls and the taxi driver stopping to ask a portero (a guy who is like a secruity guard) where the place was that we were lucky, thankfully he was a metal fan and knew where the gig was being held.

Well we got there to find a fuck off que to get in, well what I thought was a que to get in you had to que to get through into a courtyard and then you had to join another que to get into the venue. During this time we befriended and group of Colombian metallers and chatted, well Lawless did I just tried to understand what they were saying.

As standard metal proceedure would have it we didn't bother buying tickets so here was another problem. There seemed to be no organisation at all and what was more like organised chaos we eventually got into the gig with the colombian guys who told the guys on the door that we had come all the way from England and Austrailia to see Cannibal Corpse I then passed the guy on the door 150.000 pesos and we were in!!

Now this is the loco part as we got in to what looked like a small aircraft hanger the guys on the door closed the massive metal industrial doors behind us locking us and about a 1000 other metallers into the room. This left about 200 metallers outside locked out of the gig even if they had bought tickets I didn't feel that guilty I was in a warehouse about to watch Cannibal Corpse in Colombia!!!

As the gig went on the metallers outside did not go away they were banging on the doors and making one hell of a racket outside. By this time Lawless and I had been seperated by every metaller in the room going mad to Cannibal Corpse in England you can stand and admire the spectacle but not in Colombia they go nuts!! I had also noticed that there were no toilets inside (and after drinking beer before hand this was a bit of a problem) and no security guards whatsoever.
Cannibal Corpse were damn good playing the usual 'fucked with a knife' and 'strip raped and strangled' from their back catologue but as they got half way through the set the doors to the building started to shake and at one point these 10 foot industrial metal doors nearly left their hinges and crushed many a metaller. After this some bright spark decided to open the doors letting much needed air into the room but also 200 metallers all ran in full pelt towards the stage flattening everything in their path.

The gig carried on with amazingly no fatalities until Cannibal Corpse finished early due to their bass player being ill. I then walked out of the hangar to find mike and get into the first taxi we saw home!!!

Oh and next on the list is Exodus, Overkill and Gorgoroth!!!! Yes this place is Metal!!!!

You can dance...for inspiration....

These pictures are courtesy from our friend Dominique who took pictures (perhaps unwisely!) on our night out into the local bars and tanvernas.

We were only supposed to go for a couple of beers after our meal, which ended up being 5 bottles of rum...rum is good here.

Go on laugh...

Bogota, big city nights...

We've been to quite a few places since we got here,
can't quite believe that that was nearly 3 weeks ago!

Amongst those places was Monserrate, one of the mountains that surrounds Bogota.
On top of it (from where the picture is taken) there is a church that you can only reach by going up a strange train ride (on a diagonal axis!), then you can only go down by cable car, which is a little hairy for the height-a-phobic people (tim).

We have also been enjoying some of the local sights and sounds (and booze) of our local area.
We live in a part of the city called Cedritos. Its lovely, and has some really cool parts and some cool shops.

pictures to follow..

Part2...

Colombia! (Eventually…) Part 2
So, after eventually getting the plane to Lima we arrived there and didn’t quite understand what it was we were supposed to do.
The airline had given us no proof that we were going to stay in a hotel (from the Caracas side) and we didn’t know whether we had to go through immigration or what.
So we resolved to spend the night in the airport just to be safe.
After finding some seats to lay on, we were awoken half an hour later by an announcement for us (in Spanish) asking us to come to the desk of the airline carrier!

So we found our way there (eventually, looking like a right pair of gringo’s) and they told us they had been waiting to take us to the hotel!
So after another hour of trying to get all of our stuff together (UK restrictions are nothing compared to all the paper work you have to do to enter South American countries), we were packed off to a posh hotel in Lima with our own taxi driver who was also picking us up a few hours later.

After a well deserved sleep in a bed(!), we had breakfast in the hotel and Saff had Bacon and Eggs (a big mistake as you will see).
We got into the taxi and Saff started to feel a little sick…
…and then the inevitable… Saff was sick all down her front and in her lap whilst the poor taxi driver pulled over and Tim looked on in horror! Egg and bacon all over again.
…so the upshot was that Lima taxi drivers are the best in the world, as the poor guy gave me a shirt that he had in the boot of his car to go the rest of the journey in. Although I had to sit in sick smelling trousers all the way to Colombia and I puked on the plane and then again on the car journey to our new apartment in Bogota… TOTAL NIGHTMARE!!!!

Ah well, all’s well that ends well!

We are digital!

I managed to write a little bit on the mac before it died so here is what was supposed to be posted a long time ago!

Colombia! (Eventually…)

Well, we made it.
After what was a mammoth and fraught journey, (yeah it seems funny now but believe me it wasn’t at the time!)
Our journey started off smoothly from Heathrow to Frankfurt, connected with our flight from Frankfurt to Caracas ok too. No lost baggage or anything!
But then came Caracas… Hooray for Venezuela…not.

When we arrived in Venezuela to catch our last flight to Bogota, we thought how good and easy the journey had been… then the lady on the desk for our connecting flight said (in Spanish as well mind you) that our flight to Bogota didn’t actually exist!

Oh F**K we thought… so again in broken Spanish and with the help of a wonderful Colombian young lady we managed to understand that the now defunct airline’s sister company, were going to now fly us to Peru (another long plane journey) to stay in a hotel in Lima for the night, all paid for by the airline.

Ok… we thought… so then we had to try and contact our school here in Colombia to let them know we weren’t coming!
After a very tense couple of hours, we were on the plane to Lima…