Esteban's Venezuelan Adventure

In this entry are a bunch of pics of my apartament along with other miscellany. Here is a picture of the fruit basket in the kitchen. In the bottom of the frame you can see bananas, which are here called cambures. Though a huge number of bananas are grown in Venezuela, most of the good ones get shipped to the US and we are left with smooshy browns. In the top is a huge, gorgeous, cheap avocado. This is one of the great gastronomical pleasures of my life here. Flanking the avocado are two banana-like plantains, which are really more similar to potatoes than bananas. I boil them, fry them, and pan simmer them with sugar. Plantains arrive green but then mature to yellow and ultimately turn black. Different recipes work for different levels of ripeness. The two apples on the far edges of the fruit basket were imported and very expensive, but it was nice to have a taste of home. In the middle of the basket is a large, greenish-yellow fruit, a papaya. Here they call it lechoza. Nearly every day for breakfast I eat corn flakes with soy milk and cut up lechoza. The lechoza contains useful proteolytic digestive enzymes which help in the digestion of soy protein.
Beside my kitchen is a storage room for furniture and mattresses. The wall between these two rooms is a wooden board with mouse-sized holes cut into the bottom corners. I took this picture after seeing two mice run into this hole from under my kitchen counter. One of the mice was poorly coordinated and collided with the wall with a thud before making it through the hole. The mice had chewed through the plastic bags holding rice and flour. I now keep all of my food in the refrigerator or in tupperware containers. The red wire leads to the stove and allows me to spark the burners to life.
Here is a meal that I made from the my favorite cookbook. In the middle is a homemade hummous and baba ghanoush pate and to the right is a black bean dip. The beige colored container to the left is filled with a hot sauce made by the landlord of my building. He gave it to me as a gift after we, mostly he, drank a bunch of whiskey one night. It is excessively delicious and I drizzle a bit on almost everything I eat.










Here is a picture of my private deck. It is really just a piece of roof surrounded by sheer drops and electric fence, but I call it my own. I do calisthenics out here on many nights. The chairs are set up to do dips and I execute pullups on the overhang to the upper left. Through the window to the right is my bedroom/study/living room/den/closet/servants quarters.
Here is a pretty neat picture of the view off the edge of my deck. The adjoining property is an apartment building and apparently the people who live there don't want me to climb over the walls. Needless to say, during parties, I will need to be careful to keep the drunks indoors or they risk severe shocks. As a plus, I can perform low-cost electroconvulsive therapy, a vital service for the mentally ill of the city.
At CEVAZ, the English school where I work, one of my biggest projects is organizing poetry competitions, called 'Slams,' in the upper level adult discussion courses. I put on a two-day class series in which we read and analyze a poem, the students write poems, and then we have the competition. This girl was really nervous and I probably shouldn't have taken her picture when she was exposing a part of her mental landscape to the class, but she did a good job in spite of the interruption. Some students hate being forced to read and write poetry, but most of them rise to the challenge and end up producing good work. In this photo, you can see the three candles that I always bring along to set the mood. I am currently organizing a full-scale public poetry slam for next January with another teacher at CEVAZ.










Here is the wonderful Pilar, the mother in the Peruvian family that housed me during the first month of my stay here. She was putting on a presentation about teaching English to very young children when I snapped this picture. She has a four-year old daughter, teaches more than full time at CEVAZ, and has just started to earn her bachelor's degree in education (or maybe modern languages). She helps me whenever I need to change my phone plan, get a package, or otherwise navigate some segment of the expansive Venezuelan bureaucracy. Without Pilar and her family, my experience here would be much more difficult.
Here is a picture of the Christmas lights on Bella Vista Avenue right around the corner from CEVAZ. This photo was taken on the Friday night on which all of the lights are turned on. This night also inaugurated the two-week festival for which Maracaibo is famous, the Feria de la Chinita. La Chinita is short for 'El Virgen de la Chiquinquirra.' This virgin was a Guajiro indian from Colombia who saw the virgin Mary. Guajiro have slightly elongated, almond-shaped eyes, like Asians, hence the name 'La Chinita.' In the next blog entry, I will post more pictures of the long and wild party that was La Feria de la Chinita.
One brief note before I go. This upcoming Sunday is the presidential election here in Venezuela. The two candidates are Hugo Chavez, the incumbent, and Manuel Rosales, the challenger and current governor of Zulia state. The supporters of Chavez are called Chavistas and the supporters of Rosales, Opositores. Schools are being cancelled on Friday and Monday to prepare for the casting of ballots. Nobody is totally sure what is going to happen. Some poles put Chavez on top and others have said Rosales looks to be the likely winner. Both sides claim the other is going to cheat. I am going to stay at a friend's farm for the weekend, so will have to observe the unfolding of events on television and radio. If you want to know my opinion, you can suck an egg - as of this moment, I am not taking sides.