Myriam, the owner of the bed and breakfast has three guests now besides me, all friends of hers from Switzerland. I imagine they must be paying her something though I`m sure my paying extra for breakfast could be subsidizing their stay. Not a big deal. It`s still a bargain and they`re nice people, older, academic-ish. With Myriam they always speak French though their English and Spanish is also acceptable and we communicate in Spanglish.
Ir`s cold this morning, Vancouver-cold and I`m bundled upa bit. It will likely warm up at around midday. I carry my big umbrella with me everywhere now. I feel like a bit of a dork hauling it around in sunny weather but the rain can hit at any moment and when it hits it punches. Hard. I think I`m becoming a bit obsessive -compulsive about it.
Today I`m picking up my fresh fruit supplement at one of the local supermarkets: usually bananas and big tangerines. The fruit plate I have with my breakfast is pretty good but since I`m eating in restaurants nearly everyday I still want to take care about my nutrition. There`s an upscale supermarket chain here in Bogota called Carrullo It`s kind of like a Colombian Choices or Whole Paycheck (oops! I mean Whole Foods) Yesterday while walking home I stopped in a Carrullo`s where I picked up a nice mix of stuff in their salad bar and later stuffed myself on a park bench surrounded by trees and tranquility.
The other day a friend and I were sitting in a cheap working class restaurant. I couldn´t have anything there since it was all meat except for a plate of really good fruit. My friend, a middle class Colombian, commented that the people in this restaurant are only interested in parying, dancing, drinking, using drugs. I couldn´t resist the bait so I dropped a little conversation bomb. It seems to me, I said, that what would really preoccupy them would be the need to survive. Shut him right up!
I am enjoying greatly Karen Armstrongs book, Fields of Blood. Right now Im reading the chapter about the beginning of the Renaissance and of how Pope Alexander VI gave Spain and Portugal permission to divide between them South America. So the Portuguesse got Brazil and the Spanish almost everything else. There is something key to this, I believe, to many of the contemporary and stubbornly persistent problems that seem to bedevil many Latin American countries. I was only able to make the connection last night when I read about it. Pope Alexander VI was also the famously corrupt and evil father of the Borgia clan. He didnt have a Christian bone in his body and managed to gain the papacy through bribery and other dirty tricks. He was the lynchpin, I would say, that drove an already corrupted and bloodied church to its deepest nadir and it was under his watch that the Conquistadores began their campaign of genocide that created Latin America. To this day this legacy continues to repeat itself on Latin American countries and cultures. There is no surprise then that whole societies are often paralyzed and that change, when it happens, moves at a snails pace. I have come to wonder if the famous Latino joie de vivre is really a collective coping mechanism in the face of the problems they have had to tolerate for generations due to a rigid, corrupt and often very cruel political religious socio economic hierarchy that to this day is often deaf and indiferent to the peoples calls for change.
When we were up at Monserrate the other day I noticed the stations of the cross along an outdoor path. An indigenous looking woman was kneeled before one of them, barefoot and singing from a prayer book.
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