@radiobrendan Back in late 2007, during my first full-time radio job, the general manager of the station in question, a recently-appointed Portuguese man, took to me one side and said, ‘Brendan, you’ve lost your joie de vivre.’ While he mightn’t have been...
@radiobrendan As we looked at in our last post, Colombia is, from a tourism perspective anyway, ‘the country of the moment’. In the coming months and years it may be about to see unprecedented numbers visiting its shores as word has finally got out of the many natural beauties the place has to offer. What’s […]
@radiobrendan In our last post we saw how the security concerns some may have about visiting the departments of Caquetá and Putumayo may be a bit off the mark. In a way, you could say both places are microcosms of what Colombia as a whole was for the international community just a decade or so […]
@radiobrendan There’s a school of thought that suggests that travellers who seek out ‘non-tourist’ areas are generally doing themselves a disservice. Basically, the reason why some places aren’t holiday hotspots is that there’s just nothing of...
@radiobrendan ‘When all is said and done, a lot more is said than done.’ It’s very difficult to argue against that one. As a species, we’re good at talking a good talk, but we don’t always follow it up with the appropriate action if and when...
@radiobrendan Picture the scenario. You meet a stranger on the street, have a brief, perhaps cordial exchange, and moments later you’re handing over practically everything you have in your possession. If you’ve got your bank cards on you, you might even go to the...
@radiobrendan For the last 20 months Bogotá’s only regular quiz (trivia) night, IQuiz, has been on the go. It’s still quite a niche event, a nature of the ‘beast’ that it is perhaps. Nonetheless, as a labour of love, it’s been relatively successful...
@radiobrendan Stop the presses! ‘Colombian politician in corruption scandal!’ In a country that does corruption as regularly and spectacularly as the ‘best’ of them, it’s not a very exciting announcement, is it? It’s even less so when the story comes from the country’s backwater department of Putumayo. ‘Move on, nothing to see here.’ Yet, digging […]
@radiobrendan The world, it’s true to say, has never been as interconnected, and not just in a virtual way. We can move around the globe like no other time in our history, finding ourselves immersed in cultures quite distinct from our own, yet at the same time be close to...
@radiobrendan One measure of the positive development of a country is its literacy rate. The more people who are competent in reading, writing and arithmetic, the greater chance of a better quality of life is the general belief. In the not-too-distant past, such abilities were...
