Far South of I-10

We're finally out of the hotel and in an apartment. We lucked out and the same people that are selling us an apartment were willing to rent us their newest apartment for a month until we close on the piece of junk we're buying and fix it up enough to live in. (they call condominiums apartments too) We've got cable tv and internet too now, so I had the joy of hooking up a new router to a new cable modem. I screwed something up when I set the mac address to the cable modem and all I kept getting was the cable companies web page to test the speed of the modem. With dread yet a small ray of hope I called tech support, opcion 1 - clientes de red (network), opcion 2 clientes de TVcable, opcion 3 - clientes de negocio. Fuck. no "oprima dos para ingles" like we hear back home in the multi- culty USA. Luckily I've done enough network troubleshooting that I could follow the steps even though I couldn't quite catch every word. They reset something and suddenly:...

If anyone is curious, we're all ok. There was a car bomb this morning about a mile from our hotel. http://www.eltiempo.com/bogota/2006-10-19/ARTICULO-WEB-NOTA_INTERIOR-3290947.html It was our friends los farc attacking a military school. No one was killed thankfully, just six people injured. not for lack of trying though. Updated later: This the key part of the el tiempo story: La Escuela Superior de Guerra está ubicada en el complejo militar del Cantón Norte, donde también se encuentran la Escuela de Infantería y la Universidad Militar Nueva Granada. En la institución se celebraba un acto académico sobre Derechos Humanos al que estaban invitadas varias personalidades del Estado y la cúpula militar. En el momento de la explosión se encontraba el comandante del Ejército, general Mario Montoya. "in the moment of the explosion, the commander of the army was there"...so they werent trying to blow up students, but the commander of the army.

I'm back in Bogota after a week of traveling to Quito and Lima to meet clients and coworkers and people that now work for me. All I can say is that I'm glad we're going to live here and not Lima, much of which looks like a run-down version of the model of Tokyo from Kill Bill 1. Anyway since I changed from cold to cool to humid and warm yet cool whenever the wind blows, in 72 hours, I got pretty sick on friday with fever chills, torrential running nose and a cough suited for "les miserables". Once I got back here to my ziplock bag full of american medicines, I took a double dose of Nyquil and went to sleep. (er, passed out, being a Nyquil veteran, I know enough to take my dose in bed, if you take Nyquil in the kitchen you may wake up on the kitchen floor.) I had the most freaked out dreams, I'm not sure if they were all nyquil related, or just stress. The first set seemed normal...no aliens...but I apparently got a job as a regional manager for Walmart. In ...

We're down here in Colombia, living in a hotel until we can find an apartment. Living in a hotel always sounds so cool, like being a rich writer living in a hotel in New York, where the doorman tips his hat before going up to your four room suite. But living in an actual hotel room sucks pretty bad, especially when the bed here is nothing like my memory-foam mattress. (E.T. Voice on/ home, oooouuuch, E.T. Voice off/) Work progresses, I've tried not to screw up too many things my first week, but since the whole job has been 100% in spanish, I think most people here think I'm a babbling idiot. At the farewell dinner for the guy I'm replacing I had to stand up and say a few words...unfortunately, with the altitude my alchohol tolerance is zero here, after two beers and two glasses of wine over two hours I was halfway to Dean-Martinized. I stood up, said something in bad spanish and sat down again. I sat down and immediately panicked and asked my wife, "what did...