Whatever

Another friend, Colm, has started his own blog. I get the requisite insult in the first entry. All my friends seem to take great delight in knocking me publicly.

Looks like Paul´s blog´s gone all homo-erotic, with pictures of his naked torso practically everywhere. Please stop Paul.

Spent today in the old walled city of Cartagena. Cartagena is on the northern Caribbean coast of Colombia and is probably the country´s most developed, and therefore secure, tourist destination. The old city is what Havana should be, well preserved colonial Spanish buildings, with decent tourist amenities (ie edible food). Except the women are a lot fitter than in Cuba.

I spent today just wondering around, eating, shopping, the normal stuff. Emeralds are the big thing here, I was given a lesson on the various types of emeralds from a guy in a place that called itself an Emerald Museum, but was actually just a shop. It was rather like those rug shops in Morocco - you wonder in and the next thing you know you´re sat down with a cup of tea being told a lot more than you actually want to know. Thinking I could pick up a bargain, I was shocked when the cheapest ring they had was US$1500.

Like Havana, and Morocco for that matter, there are more hustlers than you want to be dealing with. Here they´re selling fake watches and sunglasses. One guy noticed my fake rolex from Hong Kong and asked to look at it. I showed it him and he offered to buy it for US$25! I wonder if anyone else has actually been made an offer for their fake Rolex by a fake Rolex salesman before?

Had a few conversations recently about my career, which is now starting to eat away at me. The fact that I don´t have a job and yet am wondering around South America seems reckless. On the other hand, I don´t have any responsibilities other than to myself and I don´t really have any doubts about getting a decent position. I haven´t told my dad about all of this, what I´m doing would be absolutely incomprehensible to him. Anyway, the issue now though is that an anxiety about my situation has appeared that might just get in the way of having a decent trip. If it does I may as well just pack up and go home.

Whilst wondering around I had half an eye on what could be bought here cheaply that might be sellable in the UK. There´s the obvious Colombian product, but I´m too much of a wimp to do that, also I think the market is relatively well supplied as it is. It would be nice to have my own business that allowed me to travel to S America regularly.

None of my recently purchased iPod equipment is working here, something to do with the power being a different voltage. I took it to some electronics stores in Cartagena that looked like they were from the 60s and after about 45 minutes they said they couldn´t help me. Dont really feel like working anymore on the issue in this heat, so if anyone´s got any bright and easy solutions please tell me.

Think the Medellin trip is cancelled, to be replaced by a trip to Santa Marta which I´m not anywhere near as excited by so I might cancel the whole thing and bugger off to Argentina instead via Bogota.

Feeling sorry for myself today as you can probably guess, so will try to make a dash for freedom and go on a bender. Usually good for the blog those.