A stroll down Dios lane

Today Giulio suggested we go to the MACCSI (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Imber). While I was excited to see a new part of Caracas, contemplating the meaning of a big black circle on a white canvas doesn’t really turn me on.

But damn, was I pleased with our visit. They had a photography exhibit on mythology from various Latin American countries. I looked at each photo and tried to place myself in that moment—standing alongside, for example, an elderly Quechua tribe leader with a perfectly proportioned feather headdress, gazing at the dreamlike mountainous terrain before him.

Or beside Kalakshé, dueño of the impenetrable jungle of the mountain that provides infinite resources for his tribe. Or next to Awishame, Colombian dueña of the the coca plant, valued for the energy and clarity it provides while engaging in cultural traditions.

I liked the photo they associated with the Mawari, evil spirits of the table-top mountains in Canaima. They are the enemy of man, responsible for the deaths and disappearances of those who dare climb.

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The visit put a little painting seed in my head. So when I got home, I went up to the roof, put on Gustavo Santoalla's Montaña, gazed at my lovely Avila, and made this:

The return of the goat

Vero likes to say things that she knows I don’t understand. Today we had this convo en español:

Me: Matt’s party will be fun.

Vero: Yeah totally. There will be mostly guys there.

Me: Are you gonna bring your new man?

Vero: I'm not going to bring a goat to Coro.

Me: Umm.

Vero: You don’t bring a goat to Coro.

At first I thought: FINALLY! I understand this one. She’s talking about how she doesn’t bring a goat, meaning, higher up fancy man, to Coro.

Coro must be a low-brow bar, where one would not bring a fancy man. Like Matt's party.

No, not at all.

Coro is a place in Venezuela where there are lots of goats. So it’s like saying “you don’t bring sand to the beach.”

Her point: Time for Vero to meet a new man.

Plata

Yesterday, my boss sent me an excerpt from a book written in 1963 by historian AJ Toynbee. He shared it because he believes much of what Toynbee said about Venezuela in 1963 is still true. This part was the most interesting to me:

Venezuela has the makings of an earthly paradise. It would, in fact, be one if a paradise could be stocked solely with minerals and plants, without needing any complement of human inhabitants. Venezuelan human nature is probably no better and no worse than the general run of the mill. Venezuelan wealth, however, is something quite out of the ordinary, and extra-ordinary wealth puts human nature to one of its hardest tests. Can human nature stand this? That is the critical question for Venezuela.

Caracas in 1963

The excerpt got me thinking about what it would have been like to live in Venezuela before the "golden rain from the oil-fields and the iron mountains began to descend on the capital." There is so much wealth here and it's interesting to think about the effect it has on the human psyche.

Toynbee briefly discusses that idea:

In present-day Venezuela, as in the present-day World as a whole, one is conscious of a tension in the air. Was the atmosphere as tense, I wonder, in the days--still not so long ago--when poverty was the Venezuelan people's common lot, and when even the largest landowners were no millionaires?

A tale of two presidents

Today I got the front-seat view of a little movie I like to call "National leaders are absurdly influential on the psychology of individuals."

I opened my office window to a sunny day and felt a movie-like euphoria (complete with birds chirping and babies laughing): Bush is gone and, more importantly, Obama is President.

We'd just watched his speech dubbed in Spanish. Some of his key WOW lines came out more like yonoentiendoniuncoño, but nevertheless I gazed starry-eyed at the screen, still in disbelief that he is President. It’s like a national dream from which we'll wake up next month. (Maybe the wakeup will happen when, three weeks into his term, Fox News demands, “WHERE’S THE CHANGE?”)

I’m reading articles about “getting used to the new president,” as if our national senses have been numbed by two Bush terms and must be reawakened to adjust to positive feelings towards our leader.

While I don’t yet burst with pride every time I explain, soy de Estados Unidos, I can see a light at the end of the awkwardness-as-a-result-of-my-nationality tunnel. And watching his speech from Venezuela made me yearn for the chance to be in Washington and feel the energy of his symbolic triumph.

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Below my office window, though, student marches are starting. Next month, there will be another constitutional referendum to eliminate term limits here. I had the impression that Venezuelans are tired of being bombarded with this kind of thing (what my friend calls crisis fatigue), until I blindly stuck my camera out the window and caught this girl:

They’re mockingly wearing red shirts that say “NO” on the back. Red is Chavez’s color, so when Vero spotted them on the street below, she groaned and got all, ay coño aqui vienen los revolucionarios (“oh f*ck here come the revolutionaries again...”)

Despite the idea that afuera todo es más arrecho (“everything is much better outside of Venezuela”… read that link if you are a Spanish speaker--it is hilarious), Venezuelans I know are way more proud to be from here than gringos are to be from the U.S. At the same time, there is far more political strife here and often, things don’t work the way people want them to (like when you're sitting in traffic for 30 minutes to turn a corner, or when the water dies for five days during your 20-person Thanksgiving dinner and you can’t wash any dishes so the chiripas—mini cockroaches—step up to the task). But in general Venezuelans seem pleased with themselves when they talk about where they are from. This is especially true for some when they completely separate their national identity from their nation's highest representative, as if the two were totally irreconcilable.

I, on the other hand, get more of a “alrighty well, let’s change the subject!” feeling when I have to talk about my home country in general. But I didn’t get that feeling today.

Geduld

I decided on a vegetarian trial run two weeks ago. It’s going OK. I don’t miss meat (aside from the crushing realization upon suggesting we visit the Colonia Tovar because it "has great German sausages!”)

Vero believes this switch means I'm loca, as the food chain is a natural part of life—lions eat deer (or whatever the hell they want), birds eat fish, and so on. But I'm doing it because of what I’ve been reading about Buddhism. The views on meat eating vary from school to school, and I’m not enough knowledgeable to know which makes the most sense to me personally. Mahayana Buddhism, for example, argues that if one pursues the path of the Bodhisattva for enlightenment, one should avoid meat eating to cultivate compassion for all living beings. Reading that line (thank you, Wikipedia) made me want to let go of meat right away, and now I think of it whenever I see meat dishes.

The best part of my switch was the dog that Brit and I fed last night. He (who we later learned was indeed a she, then continued to refer to her as a he) got the best of my freezer’s parilla leftovers. She was sleeping in the garden in front of my building and emerged to greet us, escorted by her nose. One look at her sad eyes and round goofy ears gave me the impulse to do something--anything--give her my spare change? It left me sad and unsatisfied. So we raced upstairs, nuked some frozen pork, and mixed it with corn flakes and a raw egg.

She seemed hesitant towards her meal, circling it and then backing away as if it were still alive and she’d forgotten how to kill. We felt relief when she pulled the pork out of the bag and ate the whole thing. But she left the rest. Sensing my disappointment, and still a little disgusted by my decision to give her a raw egg, Brit reassured me: “Don’t worry--it just means she has good taste.”

We sat on the stoop and chatted while the dog finished eating, content that at least for tonight, she was well-fed. Upon finishing, she climbed to our eye level and looked at us: Do you think you could maybe pet me for a while? So of course we did, before leading her to a fount of fresh water and deciding to purchase a bag of dog chow.

I think I will name her Geduld, which babelfish tells me is German for patience.

Malabo

“Can you go to Malabo on Friday?”

Not exactly the kind question one expects at 8 a.m. on a Monday in the heart of all things suburbia--otherwise known as Bethesda, Maryland.

It was the assignment everyone was suddenly “too swamped” to take. Malabo, in the words of my veteran supervisor, was the "weirdest place on earth.” By his account, six years in sand-stormy Sudan would be more pleasant than a six-day assignment in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea.

Aside from that sunny comparison, I had at my imagination’s disposal four facts about this location: it’s the only Spanish speaking country in Africa; photography is punishable by jail sentence; the government is renowned for torturing opposition supporters in “Black Beach;” and most of the population is extremely poor while foreign oil extractors live comfortably on Pleasantville-style compounds.

It was just the kind of place I wanted to spend Christmas alone.

My bosses needed a Spanish speaker to coordinate startup for a USAID project there, and it all had to be completed within two weeks, or else I’d be spending the holidays on Strange Island.

Before I knew it, I was floating in a sea of long faces and alligator skin attire at the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport. About 30 men, not so fresh off their flight from Dallas, looked like they were waiting for the Devil to swing by and escort them back to Hell. Everyone, from the pilot to the rotund man named Jimmy sitting to my left, had one thought plastered on his face: What’s a woman doin' on this plane? Maybe she’s confused and thinks we’re goin’ to New Guinea in South 'merica.

After a few half-comatose and extremely disorienting realizations that the silent, deep indigo view I repeatedly awoke to was indeed the Sahara, and that all my sleepy co-passengers were indeed from America's Heartland, we descended upon Malabo.

The electricity-less terrain we’d just passed made the island of Bioko look like Vegas on steroids, with dozens of oil refinery fires thrown in for good measure (environmentalists seeking an image of natural resource exploitation at the height of its fury need look no further).

On that cold night under heavy rain an immigration officer looked me up and down with an unhurried, menacing grin. He gripped a bulky machine gun and posited his main question--the one thing every border patrolman must know: "Why are you without your husband?"

Welcome to Malabo.

Sensgiveen en Caracas

Last night was an unexpectedly very Thanksgiving-esque dinner en mi casa en Caracas. Turkey, wine, stuffing, sweet potatoes, green beans, soup—the whole deal. We even went around and each said what we’re thankful for en español. Por ejemplo, Thom and I said we were thankful for all the friends we’d made in Caracas; Steve said he was thankful for water (we had no running water, which made washing dishes/hands interesting...), and Giulio said he was happy for passing all the tests he needs to graduate (eeesooo). The mood was lovely and everyone left five pounds heavier than when they'd arrived.

Back for more

The cleaning lady at our office just sprayed the most oppresive brisas de vainila odor-eater throughout the office. HELLLLPPPP meeee!!!

So anyway, I’m now here on a courtesy visa, which is their way of saying "please get off our backs until we’re assured that Devil Barbie (Sarah Palin) will not be elected" (she just said she'd use military force here--that's fun! I’m really glad that she made that comment. It was well thought-out and reflected her nuanced understanding of relations with this country).

As much as I enjoy temporary corporate housing, it is so nice to be back here. Yesterday, it rained in that four-to-five-inches-on-the-streets kind of way; and when I said I was leaving to walk home (everyone else takes metro or drives), my coworkers wished me a pleasant swim. Even though it was 65 degrees out, they all rested assured that the boss-lady would be stuck at home with the flu the next day.

Instead of the flu, I came back with a Tupperware stocked with amazing cookies. Which leads me to the next point: I am becoming domesticated. Not sure where it’s coming from, but I actually look forward to grocery shopping—and I’m not even buying frozen meals. Last night, I washed and chopped vegetables with my boyfriend and actually enjoyed it—felt a cozy, appreciative relationship with the tomatoes and mushrooms.

Thankfully, domestication hasn’t reached the point of enjoying laundry, which is why I also made sure to purchase several weeks worth of extra clothing while in the U.S.

New favorite word

Carabobeño.

(http://www.el-carabobeno.com/)

The magic wand.

Parks in Ha Noi are the kind of place where it’s difficult to walk ten feet without bumping into a man or group of men who are meditating, resting their untroubled gaze upon some placid body of water, or engaging in a similar mind/body/spirit expanding activity. What struck me about those guys (and other Vietnamese people I’ve bumped into on the street) is that they are relatively very soft spoken until you pull out the magic wand: a camera.

This device turns the shiest of Vietnamese into smiley, jazzy friends who think its so funny that you have a camera! A staff member in a red shirt blazed by me yelling “Hello! Where you from!” as I sat by the pond at the Temple of Literature.

Out of nowhere: a dragon pose.

I searched around me to see if one of his friends was about to snap a pic but no, he was waiting for me to capture his moment of glory—finger claws, snarled teeth and all—to be placed in the photo album he’d never see.

I then asked him where he was from. Time to get shy again. It was probably his lack of English, but the man went from a crazy fun-loving dragon to a self-conscious staff member who suddenly had to run away. Literally, he ran away from me, but at least he was smiling when he did.

CHỈ SỐ VỀ TÍNH NHẤT THỂ TÀI CHÍNH CỦA CHÍNH QUYỀN ĐỊA PHƯƠNG

One of my four favorite things about being in Ha Noi is that I have absolutely no idea what anything means. I’m here developing an index for local governance that I call the Fiscal Integrity Index. I just got it translated to Vietnamese for a meeting with government reps. It looks so ridiculous to me. “Fiscal Integrity Index” apparently translates to the following: CHỈ SỐ VỀ TÍNH NHẤT THỂ TÀI CHÍNH CỦA CHÍNH QUYỀN ĐỊA PHƯƠNG. The one word that I actually understand and brings me solace is my name. But then it's followed by 1209 other words I am totally lost on.

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I do hate the flaming ignoramus feeling when it comes to local languages, so I try to feign apprehension with cab drivers by repeating whatever they just said to me. The other day I met a lovely cab driver who had the most endearingly awkward bowl hair cut. He was so smiley that I couldn't help but want him to think I knew Vietnamese:

Lovely cab driver: Anh bao nhiêu tuoi?
Me: Ah! Yes, anh bao nhiêu tuoi .
Lovely cab driver: Tôi duoc ba mươi lăm tuoi...
Me: Oh--lăm tuoi—haha!
Lovely cab driver: (turns around, confused) hahahahaha!!!

Sa' tu donest'ah laof'ina de fax?

And now: a guest post. From Ms. Hina Strayer:

The most giant soft old woman with painted lips of coral and misaligned pencil drawn eyebrows just sauntered up to me. It was as if a Floridian shower curtain had ripped itself from a retirement home bathroom and found its way to my desk. She asks, in a dialect that could only be Caribbean Spanish, a long melodic question that sounded like "Sa' tu donest'ah laof'ina de fax?", followed up by an flagrantly frustrated "Oye, hablas espanol?". I reply amicably, "si, pero no se donde esta...", and she interrupts me by rolling her big tired-lidded eyes back into her head, just shaking it slowly back and forth. And waddles away without another word.

Sigh.

Vietnam: I like my pants linen and my moto without a seatbelt

Crossing the street in Vietnam is like walking through a beehive and just trusting it will be ok if you go at the right pace. If you stop or get scared, ZING, you.are.dead my friend. Every time I do it I feel like a 13-year-old boy is directing all the motos from his Nintendo controller up above, just waiting to confuse one of the opponent motos into crashing into me.

I first discovered this while on my way to a meeting on the other side of town. A professor and I walked to his motorcycle and I put on my helmet in a way that wouldn’t mess up my hair, which is not possible. He couldn’t believe I’d never been on a mototaxi in Ha Noi, or that no one had told me how to cross the street Vietnamese style.

Time to look cool: “Well I’ve only been here 24 hours.” Even cooler: “also, I’ve been in Caracas, where riding these things is likened to a death wish.”

“Hah! Here too!” he shouted as we sped off around the corner, all of my precious papers nearly flying out of my lap and into the street. “The good thing is,” he continued, “I’ve only been in one accident. But it practically wasn’t my fault, you know?”

No. No I don't know.

I then determined why everyone in Ha Noi wears those face masks while riding motos: exhaust fumes. Mmm.

A few white-knuckled miles later, it was yet again time to enter Super Mario land o' oncoming motos. I stayed directly parallel to the professor and copied his movements exactly, in an attempt to use him as a buffer in case of emergency (likely).

Just because they stopped for two seconds is not going to keep them

from starting up while you're mid stream.

When we got to the meeting, rife with chivos (higher ups) in the international development community, I noticed many U.S. expats here like to wear linen, a look that says “I’m humble because I work in development—no 9-5 office clothes for me, no sir. I can take it without AC--just look how simple my office is--except when I get home to my U.S. tax-paid cushy palace that has three local maids and a cook. I also like to have peace of mind—an attitude embodied by these pants that easily adjust to locally practiced meditation poses, which I never do.”

For the love of a generator.

I saw a three year old in the park in Ha Noi today. He was all about this generator so I decided to take lots of pictures of him. And now I've created a mystical tale about their romance:

He had a feeling from the beginning that this generator was the one.

At times, he did wonder if this inanimate object was The one. After all, the tree was tall, dark and organic.

He soon realized though, that his love for the small gray metal box was unstoppable.

He ran into its nonexistent arms.

He greeted it with love and smacks.

He was sure: for him, there was no other generator.

The frirk

I’m on my way back from my 5th trip to Caracas and feel removed enough from U.S. culture to make some superficial generalizations. Namely, that we gringos are so awkward. I asked for soda water with a lime and this caused the stewardess to get all “uhh!! I’m going to have to—look—uhh! for that...later..uh!”

Alternatively, the Venezolana approach might have been to say no hay before flashing a deadpan upside down smirk (like a frown + smirk: frirk). The frirk no hay combo is deceptively simple but roughly translates to:

And what are you going to do about it? I’m not even going to mention what the other options are because you went and asked me for something I don’t have. And when you tell me what you want instead, I’m going to look in the other direction and pretend I didn’t hear because you know what? I have better things to be thinking of right now. God, it’s hot in here. No, you can’t get your money back, because I already made your receipt and the manager’s at his wife’s cousin’s aunt’s baby shower, and only the manager can give you your money back. He’ll be back at six. But we close at five.

’cho-cuiao-co-ua-vaiii

Having a bilingual Venezuelan boyfriend is similar to having a personal translator. All I have to do is say a Spanish word with a certain intonation and he auto-feeds the translation back to me. It also works for phrases. My favorite is “You better WATCH yoself:” Mucho cuidado con una vaina. We mutilate it into a snobbier, single word: ’cho-cuiao-co-ua-vaiii always pronounced with an open, lazy mouth and sometimes an accompanying finger snap or threatening “OK” sign. I use it as an extremely dramatic overreaction to anything: getting too close to another car on the highway, stealing a fry from my McDonald’s meal—basically any act that slightly resembles a transgression calls for ’cho-cuiao-co-ua-vaiii.

Cheaper than water

Colleen just forwarded me one of those email jokes. This one looked promising because it was about gas prices, something I rarely concern myself with as a car-less freeloader.

The whole gas thing of course got me thinking about Venezuela's petroleo. On a lovely four-hour mountainous drive to the beach, Giulio and I pulled up to a gas station.

Oh yeah—offer to pay for gas. I’m getting a free ride here.

“No no—let me get this,” I selflessly offered.

"It’s ok,” he said, scrounging for some coins between car seats. "Do you have like, 15 cents?"

I looked at the register and wondered if the figure we saw was for one liter, or if they should have been using the old currency and forgot to add three zero's to the end, or if the machine was broken and computing incorrectly, or if the mountain air had induced in me a form of temporary numerical illiteracy and 98 cents really meant "109080 cents".

Nope. The whoooole tank: 98 cents.

Bienvenido a Venezuela.

Caracas: Why walk two blocks when you can drive?

My Paris parenthesis

It is greedy to dream of traveling abroad while in a foreign country, but I just searched for pictures of Paris because I have ahuge crush on it. If I were a city, I'd want to marry it, but would surely have to get in line with all the other (certainly more financially capable) admirer cities.

The photos stirred up my latent fantasies of being a petite Frenchy for a month or two--doing nothing but drinking vin rouge and writing about the quirky things Parisians do and say in the public places I'd stealthily observe them, like bus stops and park benches. My intermediate French language barrier would ensure mild alienation and thus an ability to feel completely at ease in taking notes while staring at strangers.

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I would live in an exorbitantly-priced closet with a view of the Sienne; eat fresh nutella crepes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; and stroll around listening to the Amelie soundtrack on my 'pod as though I were starring in my own petite scene. I'd probably try to find an old, bitter, but quirky and ultimately lovable, artichoke vendor like the one in the movie; but I wouldn’t be able to converse with him (or anyone) without sounding awkward. That’s fine though, because Paris would be lovely for exploring life as a hermit.

Raid and vulgarities: Venezuelan futbol

Going to a soccer game in Venezuela is the same as going to a Red Sox/ Yankees game, but just everyone is on crack. Upon arrival, I made the assumption that the fire shooting from the hands of fanaticos originated from special fire-spouting devices that one can only purchase in Venezuela.

Upon further inspection, though, I realized they were cans of Raid with a lighter held to the spout. So that’s fun to inhale in an enclosed space.

I got pretty decked out for this game and even bought my own devil horns to celebrate the red glory that is the Caracas fútbol team.

I wrote down and memorized the chants that everyone sings to the other team. Also similar to chants sung at Red Sox/ Yankees games, but everyone is 10 times more pissed off and 100 times more vulgar. When a special goal kick is made (I’m sure it has a name other than ‘special goal kick’ but we’ll take care of that bit o’ knowledge at another time), everyone shouts HIJO DE PUTA!! to which the other side of the stadium (Tachira fans) responds TU MADRE!!, to which we retaliate with LA TUYA!!! We also sing about how everyone says that Caraqueños are drunken delinquents.

This fan only looks innocent.

You better put that budget right.

Being part of "management" in an office where I am not a native speaker and am half the age of the people I "manage" is always fun, particularly when I get pissed off at employees and write threatening emails in awkward Spanish:
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"Paola, I waste the time on this. I don't want more. Please put the budget right next time. Make me know if you have the questions about this. A thousand thanks. Bye."
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