@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...
@radiobrendan In these social media times we live in, it seems that virtual reality has become reality. Or at least our smartphone updates have allowed those who read/view them to believe they know us and make judgements about us, even if they’ve only briefly met us or...
@radiobrendan One of the most frustrating things non-natives, especially Westerners, in Colombia (and other similar countries) have to put up with is the arbitrary ‘foreigner tax’. This is basically the additional cost put on to a host of goods and services simply...
@radiobrendan It’s been quite a year so far. In the sporting world, people have called it the ‘year of the underdog’. The biggest representation of that was Leicester City Football Club’s remarkable triumph in England’s Premier League; from 5000-to-1 outsiders to top dog in the space of nine months. You also had unheralded Iceland, with […]
@radiobrendan In a country with such vast inequality, along with a significant disconnect between officialdom and the masses, to say Colombia’s ‘vote for peace’ is its moment of truth might be overstretching it a little. Nonetheless, in the unlikely event of the Colombian electorate rejecting the October 2nd plebiscite on the agreement reached between the […]
