Sketchbook In Bogota

I am about to finish my Bogota sketchbook.  I have one blank page left.  This has a special significance to me.  I am today almost exactly my mother`s age when she died from cancer twenty-five years ago.  She was sixty years and eighteen days old when she died.  Today I am sixty and fourteen days.  I believe that the last drawing in the book will be finished when I am exactly my mother`s age when she passed on.  Then I will begiln a new book.

I heard gunshots in the early hours this morning, two of them.  I don`t suppose there is any need to worry since I live downtown in Vancouver and from time to time there have been shootings not far from where I live.  But they only occur every few years or so and things are rather different here in Bogota.  I don`t think this is a particularly dangerous city but one still should take care.  My rule of thumb is that if a stranger is friendly for no reason then there must be a reason and it`s time to keep walking.

The neighbourhood where I`m staying isn`t the quietest.  The bed and breakfast is on the edge of Pasadena so there`s still quite a lot of stuff going on and I frequently hear broken car alarms.  It can be maddening at times.  The place I`m staying in is in itself pleasant and tranquil and some of the earlier tension seems to have relaxed between the owners and I.  I think when I made it clear that I wasn`t going to put up with being skapegoated that that was enough to get them to back off a bit.  And I was polite about it!

This morning I am going to sit in the Peruvian cafe with my sketchbook while waiting to meet a friend who lives here.