We have achieved rain at last. On Thursday evening it came and I listened to it on the skylight while I read a letter or two by CS Lewis—I love the ones to his brother—and then some Eddison.

This morning it rained again after I had gone out for a walk, beginning slow and building up to a straight downpour. Then it quit but remained overcast. It began again when we were leaving, and we waited under a bad umbrella and under a tree—should have turned back or gotten a taxi, but instead kept going. Eventually we were a bit wet and got a taxi. Now some books have more character, I know my bag is not waterproof, and that my shoes are really good for the rain.

While in class it started again and then after class as we were leaving it was getting finished. It drizzled on our longish walk to the Transmilenio but nobody in Bogota minds a little drizzle.

So we went up to the mall to look at the prices in the grocery store again, found no umbrellas there, and departed with the rain coming pretty steadily but not hard.

When it rains in Bogota everything keeps going except that suddenly there are people hawking umbrellas everywhere. I’m not sure about buying an umbrella from a chap in the street, but the selection in the one store that had any wasn’t good. Anyway, you get wet, you dry out, you keep going, things are fine. I haven’t changed my clothes and at one point they were pretty damp.

There are a few lessons:

1 Have a good umbrella. Not sure if I want a golf umbrella but I don’t want a bad little one.

2 If it is starting up, take a taxi.

3 If it is clearing or done, go immediately to where you need to be since it is going to start again soon.

I’m pleased about the rain.

* * *
We are becoming rather friendly with everybody in the class. We got two Colombians who teach English already—they’re getting certified; we got a guy from NY who has been living in Costa Rica and wants to teach children—knows some Hebrew from spending a year in a Kibutz when he was 13; and a Canadian girl from Toronto—listen to them say the word ‘about.’ Our teacher is a girl from Cali who knows how to run a class well.

On the whole, we are very pleased about it.

* * *
It is shallow blogging, but that’s all I’m up to for the moment. One of the things about being noncontroversial in the classroom is that you really can’t get into things—the sense of community having to be kept up without really finding out whether you actually have something in common. We were being told about Multiple Intelligences which is an anti-academical notion (in the traditional sense, or perhaps an anti-traditional notion) of learning that seems to aim at making everybody succeed on false premises—not entirely because some of it is pretty sensible. I was smirking about it and then the guy from NY started too. When asked I just said I was wondering where the thing was going to go. Anyway, the point of that is to make sure the teacher is trying every way possible to get the student to learn.

Odd way to have a school, one thinks, remembering how when one was a student one would operate under reversed premises.

We have received good assurances of the prospects for employment here. Many come and the turnover is high, so openings are opening. We bought a wok, somewhat inadvertently—I fret over the purchase of things like woks and q-tips and wonder why we don’t buy more potatoes instead (Katrina does not yet understand the potato, I’m afraid). As we were getting ready to head out the opening of Bruckner’s 4th came to me and I was humming it a while until I figured out what it was and then I didn’t want to stop humming it as there is nothing like finding the right music to express the mood which is the fullness of its completion. It is a slow horn call of deep contentment, and when I listened to it, it was full of great prospects opening like broad views on wondrous landscapes.

It was our last day before school begins: we go to school from noon till four. A bit unusual, it seems to me, to start so early. People are thinking about eating the big almuerzo sometime after noon. It is a quiet time to ride the public transportation and a relatively quiet time for coming back. Slow mornings, class, and then long evenings.

I watched four bodyguards at Carrefour (a French type of Wal-Mart) stand two at each end of the aisle while their employer shopped. Later, I watched the guard down in the places of government—at the place where the President works, I reckon—wave us back when Katrina decided to keep backing up for a picture and came too close upon the official premises.

We went among the crowds down in the center of town. Many likely looking restaurants and eateries down there. But we have food at home and the peso is really strong against the dollar which appears to be heading for a long bout of weakness, so it is the moment for being more economical. I hope for rain tomorrow, and plan on rain for Thursday, and with the rain some quiet reading, some quiet writing and thinking, some more settling and repose.

I saw a fountain dripping idly in an enclosed courtyard; the setting sun shone through its running strands of hair. The sun was bright all day on Bogota, and we climbed up to 68 degrees.

The flowers are everywhere: great roses, calla lilies, bougainvillea, flowers on shrubs and climbing vines—everything grows here. Even the spiky palms look fine against the clear blue sky. Not without its dirty places, great, urban, mostly dry, concrete waterways, trash and dust and traffic, still, Bogota is a pleasant place, and they’re always working on cleaning it.

You aren’t supposed to go too hard when first arrived because of the altitude but we managed to walk a deal, to have good coffee, to have a good lunch, to have fresh fruit (the only expensive fruit or vegetable here is the avocado which can get almost up to a dollar for a great green, big one). So come visit us and eat! We walked a lot because the transportation thing, without using taxis, can be a bit strange. We met an Australian girl who has been here for three years and she cannot explain it.

What I haven’t found in Bogota is the niceness of restaurant interiors like in Sogamoso. Bogota is a large, great place and I have not been much around it, but it seems restaurants are very small, or very charmless toward downtown, or else of the expensive-looking variety. I’m sure it is a matter of time. Once we built up more immunities . . . I want to be like the people here I’ve met who when asked if they knew what KFC was like down here or McDonalds did not know, having failed to even want to try such establishments.

I have a cell phone now, or I should say we have a cell phone. It was pretty easy—everybody here has cell phones and if you need to you can stop at a stand on the street and pay to use a cell phone—but if you don’t use up the minutes you paid for in a month, then you lose the money. Now to understand the ins and outs of cell phones.

We have lots of little bags—talegos. Anytime you buy anything anywhere, in a store, from a person carrying a tray or sitting with a blanket of wares on a sidewalk or pushing a cart on the street, they give you at least one bag, some two. When we bought half of a roasted chicken it was interesting to watch the girl lick her fingers to get the thing open to put the chicken in.

And the crowds. It gets to be like Dublin with so many people walking, pouring in a constant stream out of the Transmilenio (aboveground, bus-like subway system), walking everywhere over the hazards of the sidewalks. Here the rule is that pedestrians look out for themselves or get beeped at very vigorously. Things are interesting in the day, but after dark the smells from the little sidewalk stands become even more interesting and the pedestrian traffic does not appear to let up.

On the way to Bogota

Hardest of all is to leave behind friends. That has been going on over the years, but culminated today. The hard part comes when you look at each other and say things you mean. Better, I can imagine Montaigne saying, to say things you don’t mean—and he’d write an interesting essay on the rationale and perhaps include some practical suggestions.

Now we’re at the mercy of wireless for a while, and we don’t know our way around that yet. I thought any public place in America would have free wireless. Not so, apparently, or I’ve found one of the few places without. Maybe O’Hare will be better. O’Hare my old friend—how well I know the place from going through it at least six times in my life.

* * *
Curious place, Miami. Heat, shabbiness—it is an outpost of South America with North American infrastructure and government. We stayed in the Pit of the Arm Hotel. Curious smells in the tiled lobby and even more curious smells in the hallway. Cold room, large with walk-in closets, and general hot weather feeling: plain walls, space, stark lights, and shabby. I think I’d like Miami.

The J concourse at MIA is recent and shows signs of intelligent design. I think the concourse from which we flew out with American last March kind of evolved and had not reached any stages of discernible design or intelligence. Still no free wireless . . . I’m wondering if I ought to pay for it.