Esteban's Venezuelan Adventure

Saludos desde Maracaibo! I've now been in Venezuela for three weeks and I am starting to get a feeling for the rhythms of daily life. Maracaibo is known in Spanish as "La ciudad de sol amada" or 'the city beloved by the sun.' This is a friendly way of saying that it is hot enough here to overwhelm the capacities of most normal air conditioners. If I take a nap in my room, I have to be naked with the AC on full blast, and I still sweat - an arousing image. Don't worry, though; this will not stop me from taking naps. The saving grace as I have said before is that Maracuchos have so far proven to be as friendly and open as everyone says. The picture below was taken at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Zulia (MACZUL) on the campus of the University of Zulia. MACZUL is a spectacular facility and is actually the largest art museum in all of South America. The woman to my right wearing the red shirt is Adriana, a new friend who has been taking me to all sorts of art and culture shows around Maracaibo. She used to be a journalist in the arts section of the big local newspaper, Panorama, so she knows everybody. This was the opening of a new exhibition of local artists and we are posing in front of a very cool painting of ferns produced by the woman to the far right. I'm not sure who the old man and little kid are, but I invited them to be in the picture, and they obliged.


Below is another work at the art exhibition at MACZUL. I was not permitted to use my flash when photographing it, but you should be able to get an idea of the contents. It is a sort of collage with pictures of American flags and presidents (mostly Bush) superimposed on pictures of dead people, bombs, Hitler, etc. People's opinions about the US seem to vary a lot here. I was talking to a cab driver the other day about Bush and the USA. The man told me that he thinks Bush is an evil man. "What do you think about Americans, then?" We had arrived at our destination by this time, but I stayed in the car to listen. His feeling was that most Americans are good people, but that we do bear some responsibility for electing our President. I think this is how many Venezuelans feel.


Going along with the comparing-things-to-Hitler theme, this is a tag that I have seen on a bunch of walls throughout the city. In case you can't see it, it is a Jewish star and a Swastika linked by an equals sign. I talked about this image with a friend of mine who is a Venezuelan history professor at a local University. He told me that there is a popular book out right now that compares the tactics of Israel against the Palestinians with those of the Nazis against the Jews. My professor friend told me that this image is anti-Israeli rather than anti-Jewish, but I'd imagine that it's quite easy to confound the two. Suffice to say that I need to be very selective as to whom I tell information about my background.















This is a picture taken at the base of a large cross in the courtyard of the Catholic Church attended by the Peruvian family with whom I live. At the beginning of the service, the Priest welcomed me very warmly to their community. Sra. Socorro, the Peruvian grandmother, told me that they have a reinforced room on the second floor of one of the buildings in the Church complex where they are planning to go if the apocalypse comes. I won't tell you the location of the Church, just in case.















This is a picture of the exterior of a very sumptuous and expensive motel on the outskirts of Maracaibo called "The Aladdin." In Venezuela, the word motel has a very different meaning than it does in the US. Here, a motel is a hotel that people go to to have sex. This is a vital service in a country where most people live in the same house with their conservative, Catholic parents. A taxi driver spent several minutes listing the names of all of the motels he could think of in the Maracaibo metropolitan area. There are A LOT. You can rent rooms on the weekend for as short as one hour, though I'd imagine that proper romance demands at least an hour and a half.

Here I am in front of one of the longest bridges in the world, called El Puente Rafael Urdaneta. It is 8.7 kilometers long from end-to-end. When I drove across it, there was a rainstorm that began abruptly in the middle of the bridge and nearly stopped traffic on the opposite shore of the bridge. On the return trip, the rain stopped again at exactly the same spot.

Here I am on my first night out in Maracaibo. Really loud Salsa music was playing. The gentleman sitting to the left of me is Jorge, the Vice-consul of Columbia in Venezuela, who is in charge of the Maracaibo office of the Colombian embassy. His wife took the picture. The people to the right work for the UN office for refugee aid. I have a big smile on my face because I am drunk off of Solera Verde, a popular Venezuelan brew. These are good people.

This is a picture taken from the inside of a carrito or porpuesto. These little cars are taxis that follow a very specific route just like a bus. Carritos became popular after a series of bus driver strikes and mismanagement of the mass transit system. Some of these vehicles have holes in the floor plugged up with cardboard; on entering, one is told to step carefully. A long ride costs about 45 cents, a short one about 25 cents. Written on the piece of cardboard held in the drivers left hand is the route this carrito follows - in this case Bella Vista. The cardboard also serves to deflect wind onto the sweaty head of the driver as many carrito's are not outfitted with a functional air conditioners. The piece of fabric on the drivers left arm protects him from sun burn.

One last story before I go. There is a word here that means 'stuff, junk.' The word is macundales, which is pronounced in Spanish mack-oon-dah-lace. This word has a very interesting etiology. Apparently, there was a large American shipping company called
"Mack & Dales" that used very solidly constructed wood boxes. In this country, people don't just throw out a good wood box - they recycle it as a storage bin. Because people used these boxes to store a wide variety of items, the name "Mack & Dales" became associated with general junk you put in a box. So clear your macundales off the table, we're about to eat dinner! Ciao, amigos. Estais en mis pensamientos.