Friday, 31 August 2012

Full Moon over Bogota

Twitter went off on one tonight with Bogotanos twittering about the moon, how amazing it was, how bright it was, how blue it was (explain that one to me). I was sort of non-plussed, and then we went to the shops to get the usual Friday night supplies of that liquid that helps you recover from a week of wage-slavery. Beer. And the moon was pretty stunning.

On my return to the flat, I found the bedroom lit up just beautifully, and despite the many scratches on the front of my little Canon G12's lens, the dicky little tripod held the camera still enough to capture the moonlight falling across the bed. Throught the window you can see the streetlight on the side wall of the next block of flats down the road from us.

Saturday, 18 August 2012

The Slide


If I was to put it in a cliché, there's never a dull moment in Colombia. What this means in more prosaic terms is that you rarely get a moment's peace and quiet in a restless, raucous city such as Bogotá with its eight million inhabitants. There's so much to notice here on a daily basis that yells out to be observed and recorded and shared, yet one consideration holds me in check a lot of the time. It is the suspicion that the things that catch my eye seem noteworthy to me perhaps more as a result of my own ignorance of local conventions, and that by commenting on them I essentially run the risk of ignorantly poking fun at Johnny Foreigner (a historically popular pastime for the inhabitants of the United Kingdom). Which is already a daft way of looking at things, because you can hardly categorise Colombians in Colombia as foreigners. So if I were to comment on these eye-catching moments it would be more like Johnny Gringo showing up his own idiocy by scoffing at the locals.