Esta cerrado.

Last night we celebrated Antoni's birthday. He and I and several other folks went to a bar called Poco Loco, where I tried to request our song, "Hip Hop Hooray." My fellow Venezolana economics buddy Elizabet helped me request it because she knew that it would get done a lot faster if she helped. We requested it around 11, but they still hadn't put it on by the time I left at 1:45.

I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep. I meant to go home earlier, but we were having fun dancing and all, and I didn't think it was appropriate to just leave Antoni's birthday celebration super early. We had originally set out to meet at the base of the teleferico at 7 o'clock sharp. After everyone had decided to go out, the time got pushed back to 8.

The teleferico is the world's longest cable car system. It has four stops and costs about 27 dollars if you're using the official exchange rate. Our decision to go at this time of year was based on the general knowledge that there are two tourist seasons and two "slow" seasons in Merida. We had thought that the price would drop during the slow season (after Sept. 15), which is what we had been told by nearly everyone that we had talked to about it. We waited with bated breath until the tourist season was over, hoping to get a better rate. Unfortunately, all that we ended up getting was the short end of the stick early this morning, as the teleferico is closed for a month in between the tourist and slow seasons for repairs and maintenance.

We took it in stride and went to a cafe and got ourselves a coffee and a pastry, where we chatted away most of the morning for which we begrudgingly woke up so early. After taking a long nap, snapping some pictures and updating my flickr account, I've done almost everything I needed to do today except my homework.

Anyway, the new pics on flickr aren't as cool as the ones I wanted to be posting today, but hopefully I'll get to ride the teleferico sooner or later.

Hair Today, Long Tomorrow

Last night, I got a message from a being far more Intelligent than myself.

She said, "Post a picture of what your head looks like on Thursday."

To which I replied "Just this Thursday?"

"No," said the majestic benevolent voice as she spoke again, "Every Thursday."

Here I am posting a picture of my head, as it looked at 1:30 local time today. In accordance with the voice, I shall be posting picture of my head each Thursday, every Thursday, unless I forget. So, without further adieu, I give you...


My Head.

For those who don't know a good wink when they see it, look out! Here comes a winker.

And with that; Happy Thursday, all! I'm going to be adding some pictures to my flickr acocunt [sic] (this should say account. Thanks for the heads up. - Fox) today. So if you get a chance to click over there, I'll advise you to check it out.

What cookies?

Even though the final batch of cookies ended up being more or less cemented to the baking sheet, they turned out pretty darned tasty. I would change a few things if I made them again; first, I would put a little bit less sugar in there. They could've used a touch more baking soda and a tad hotter of a cooking temperature, but they looked, smelled, and tasted like cookies when all was said and done. I felt pretty proud of myself, needless to say. Anyway, he's some pictures I snapped of them before they all mysteriously disappeared in less than two hours.

This is the plate I put 'em on. They ended up sort of shiny and crunchy, which I'm amounting to the extra sugar because I used a high altitude recipe.

I find this next picture pretty funny. Not such a great picture of anything except the table behind everything I wanted to take a picture of. It's all good, because it's taken in Venezuela.

Peace, and happy cookies!

Galletas y Leche

Wednesday's are my slow days, so I'm cooking up a batch o' chocolate chip cookies! I'm hoping all will go according to plan, but we'll have to see. My family doesn't really have measuring cups, so I think the only thing that I for sure got right was the two eggs we added. So far, they seem to be turning out just fine, maybe a little short on Baking soda, but as long as they taste great, I'm fine with it.


In case you folks didn't notice, there's a little group of photos on the right side bar just above the "archive" section, which will take you to my photos on my flickr page. Just wanted to give a quick heads up about it, in case you saw it and were wondering what it was.

I had a crazy dream this morning that when I got up, my roommate was trying to convince me that today was Thursday, and that I didn't get to sleep in. He still claims that he tried nothing of the sort. Since I talk in my sleep, I apparently told him to "Go take a shower, you bastard!" This started a whole string of back and forth insults, all of which amounted to me being steamroller-ed by my roommate on his was to class this morning.

I've made the executive decision that I need to start more random conversations with folks around here to use my Spanish more. Lately I find myself trying to slip in English words into my Spanish conversations, in order to rectify this I'm trying to broaden my comfort zone.

Anywho, I gotta check on those cookies. I'll let you know how they turn out.

Dancin' in the moonlight...

We get it on most every night
When that old moon gets so big and bright
It's a supernatural delight
Everybody was dancin' in the moonlight

Everybody here is out of sight
They don't bark, and they don't bite
They keep things loose, they keep things light
Everybody was dancin' in the moonlight

Had this song running through my head. I know it's Mo-town and all, but who can argue with a feel good tune from yesteryear? Not me, said the bee.

Yesterday and today have been slow in comparison with Friday's trip. It wasn't like I didn't do anything, but most of it involved staying in the apartment with my host family. I won a game of poker against some Venezuelans, had a good long talk with my host mom, got a chance to do some journaling, that type of thing.

As of tonight, Minnesota and Venezuela will only be a half an hour apart instead of the usual hour, due to a new policy to make sure the poor school children have plenty of time to make it to class. I'm not sure how true that is, but you can read about it in the article on Reuters.

Other than that, I've been doing some homework and trying my hardest to stay on task. I've finally decided to start taking some initiative on planning my trips around Venezuela, so this way I can have actual plans for my weekend travels instead of just winging them.

Vegasol

What do you call a waterpark where nothing is open?

Closed.

Friday, the US students and a few Venezuelans all went to the waterpark called Vegasol. After waiting more than an hour and a half for our entire group to show up, we finally hit the road. It was supposed to be about a 40 minute drive in our buseta, but pending a delay per a bike race on the narrow mountian road, it took an additional hour. We finally got there, only to find that the go-cart track was closed, the "tunel del terror" gate locked, and the waterslide lacking water. The bar was open however, so all was not lost.

Things picked up when a fun bunch of Venezuelan fellas showed up and started dancing by the pool-side. After a few of us did a bit of dancing with 'em, they told us "Vamos a tocar tambores" which didn't register as "We're going to go play drums" in my head until after they got all their drums out and we had ourselves a little rump shaking fun while they got funky in a drum ensemble.

In all, it didn't really matter that the other pools and the terror tunnel were closed, but we all got kind of offended when the woman running the snack bar seemed to have a vendetta against us gringos. Sure, at first she overcharged me the equivalent of $.50 for my ice cream, but she was ignoring the rest of us, telling us she did have any of the food to make burgers or sandwiches, that kind of thing. We

I neglected to bring my camera for fear of it being stolen, so unfortunately I have no pictures of our dance pow-wow or the pool, or my roommate stealing some girl's boyshorts to go ride the waterslide.

My roommate and I came home with a buzz on and chatted up our host mother for a pretty long time, all the while finishing off an entire pitcher of fruit salad that our host sister had made earlier that day. A good day, a good fruit salad. Because of his talkative state my host mom kept saying that Andres, my roommate, simply needed to drink every day to speak better. I think it was more the participation aspect that was improving his Spanish, but as P-funk says, "To each his reach, but if I don't cop it ain't mine to have. But I'll be reaching for ya"

A new 'do.

But hey, it'll grow back. Right?

Here's a picture to brighten your day.

I know the black and white and color thing is cheesy and overplayed, but I did this myself! All by myself! Isn't that exciting? I thought so anyhow.

This is another picture I did all by myself. It was originally supposed to be a frog.

Cool, huh? Yeah, I thought so too. Hope the states are treating you well.

Sushi Tei

Today, I ran out of money.

Sure, I had a supply of cash in US bills, but no Bolivares. It was a bummer. I did a fair bit of walking because I didn't have any money for the bus, but it was good to get some exercise again. It was my monday night activites, in the end, that bankrupted me.

Last night I went out with some of "my fellow Americans" to a Sushi bar. A fellow from our group named Jack picked out that the owners were actually Chinese and chatted them up with the little bit of Mandarin he picked up while he had studied abroad a few years ago.

My roommate Andy heard about this place upon recommendation from his sister, and who had also said we had to meet a waiter there named Carlos. Sure enough, our waiter was Carlos - the very same. We all had a good time, he spoke plenty of English and we US Americans ordered our Japanese food in Spanglish. It was exactly the experience I wanted.

After some warm sake and good conversation, the food arrived. I'm no conniseur or anything, but that was some darn good sushi. I highly recommend Unagi, and apparently Caterpillar roll is something of a standard. Both were highly delicious. The enitre meal (including the sushi, sake, and miso soup) cost me about 40,000 Bolivares, which is under 17 bucks including tax and tip. You just can't do dinner for that in the states.

In other news, I've been voted boat captain for Sailing Club at the U next year, so thanks to everyone who responded to the survey.

Tomorrow I'll only have class in the afternoon, so for all of you that are working Wednesday morning, no worries. I'll be sleeping in for you.

Weekend Update, with Fox

Woof. Saturday was more like a day and a half - I did so much. We went to these hot springs in the state of Merida, which weren't too far away at all. We agreed to meet at ten, and that was that. Except for it wasn't. I decided to wait in the wrong plaza, but it was all goo because the group needed to pick up antoher person in the plaza I decided to go to, so I just met them a bit later. We hopped a bus and later a jeep, where we saw some rabbits in a pet store (there's a pic on flickr, shout out to my honey!) and climbed our way up the mountain. Every now and then there would be a cow just hanging out, moo-ing, munchin' some cud and what not, so I snapped a few pics. Our jeep broke down halfway up the hill, so we hiked a bit and finally got to the hot springs, which wasn't at all what I expected a natural hot springs to be like.

Was it hot? Not exceptionally.

Was it natural? About as natural as a swimming pool could be.

Did it spring out of the ground? I certainly couldn't tell; all we could see was PVC pipes guiding the water into the pools.

Was it fun anyway? Heck yes!

They had a couple of different man made falls around that you could turn into your own private group bathing party if you found the right stuff to stop up the holes with. I had brought an extra pair of boxers, and a like minded Venezuelan friend had a brought an extra T-shirt. Thus, when rocks failed to sufficiently choke the flow of water rushing out of our bathing pond, we volunteered our extra garments to be plugs for the sake of the greater good. We sat in our makeshift pool for a while, until Antoni said he'd felt a parasite swimming around next to him. Not that I entirely believed a parasite would be so big you could feel it next to you, but who wants to take chances?

Afterwards, we checked out the other pools, ate the food we'd brought and headed back home. Later that day, my fellow US students and I regrouped at the ritzy Hotel Chama restaurant and checked out the live jazz. The drinks were pricey, but the band wasn't half bad. I wasn't feeling their guitarist, but the drummer had some nice chops. I stood next to the bar, drinking my Tom Collins and just watching with a steadily tapping foot. I watched arrangements of salad served in wafer thin boxes of bread and desserts of truffles and ice cream float past on the slender hands of the astonishingly gorgeous waitstaff, I realized my urgent need to return to this restaurant.

Due to the price of the drinks, I was out-voted and we left Hotel Chama before the band's last set and we headed to "Ollo de Queque" (I have no idea what this means). At the fault of one of the girls in my group, I spent most of the time in "Ollo" dancing and talking with an attractive 30 something. Like most of the folks who practice English with a stranger, she made sure to tell me how much she loved the United States and how she wanted to go there. Like most of these conversations go, I struggled through her native tongue the best I could while she had an equally difficult time with mine. By the time one o'clock rolled around, she had finally asked me "how many years I have." I told her, which then prompted her to ask me to guess her and her friends' ages. I guessed low, just like I was supposed to, and she didn't divulge the truth, just like she was supposed to. They wanted us to head across the street with them, but due to our conflicting idealogical differences in night club philosophy, our group headed elsewhere.

After committing the traveler's sin of eating food from the street vendors, we finished off the night in Poco Loco, where I spent most of my time wishing I could just fall asleep in my bed. We all made it home, safe and sound, and I slept past noon on the following day. It was a full day, to say the least, but it was definitely a Saturday well spent.

Hey, a few more new pics to look at!

My Camera Update 5 054, originally uploaded by runfoxrun!.

Okay, so this isn't the most interesting photo, but they got me through a tough day. Go ahead, give it a click. I've got some new pictures on there for you.

The difficulties of language immersion, or how the sum of the squares of the two legs of any right triangle is equal to the square of the hypoteneuse

For those of us who know who Sufjan Stevens is, doesn't the title of this entry seem like it could be from one of his songs? I thought so, anyway. Well then, on to our story...

Here in Merida, many of the folks about my age speak English. In most cases they speak English about as well as I speak Spanish, which sometimes means that my fellow discussion buddies and I resort to that primitive (yet effective) method of communication which involves pointing, naming nouns, and more gestures than necessary. Other venezuelan students in VENUSA speak English like I could only dream of speaking Spanish. My friend Marlyn definitely fits into that "speaks like I want to" category. The other day, after Marlyn had helped me finish correcting my errors in my Spanish paper, she was leafing through the pages of my notebook. I pointed at the itinerary that I drew up for our road trip this past spring break, and said "nuestro horario," meaning "our schedule."

She said to me, "I know that. I'm not stupid, Fox."

I think that I had gotten so accustomed to a certain level of communication that I forgot how obvious things like a chart of places and times tend to speak for themselves. I know that this wasn't the first occasion in which I had taken someone's intelligence for granted because I thought they might not have understood me or vice versa, but it was definitely the first time I realized just how insulting it is. I told her that I knew she wasn't stupid, but I still felt as if I had done something wrong.

I couldn't imagine meeting a new culture with a new language for the first time ever, and then trying later to explain your most complicated ideas such as the "pythagorean theorem" or the arch without a common language in which to discuss such things.

*Here's a little aside. I put the "Pythagorean theorem" in quotes because I heard that it was actually discovered by the Persians several hundred years before Pythagorus dreamed it up, but they were ignored because they weren't white. I'm not sure if it's true or not because I heard this little tidbit in a comedy play, but I liked the play a lot, so props to the theatre troupe and to Kritty's sister Nicole for scoring us those tickets.

That being said, I'm glad that other people have learned spanish before I tried, so that way I don't have to deal with just pointing all the time. Thanks, Spanish-English dictionary!

The burden of connectivity

Throughout the course of my day, I probably checked my own blog for updates at least twice. I don't know why. You'd think I'd be smart enough to realize that the only guy that's going to be updating this would be me. Part of my problem is that I really want to hear about what's been going on in the states while I've been gone. Nevertheless, I guess I just have to check my blog all the time just to see if anything that happened during my day was worth me writing about.

Tonight was "American Cooking Night" at VENUSA. I thought that this would involve some actual cooking, but instead was simply eating hotdogs, condimented Venezuelan style. For those of you who've ever put potato chips on a sandwich to give it a little crunch, I invite you to try some US food Venezuelan style. My hot dog tonight had tiny little fried potato chips (think like French's (r) fried onions), coleslaw, mustard, mayo, and ketchup. It wasn't terrible, believe it or not.

I had a good discussion with my friend Marlyn (Mar-leen) who helped me make corrections on my paper describing my favorite place for my spanish class. She's a medical student who'll begin her second year sometime in October. She's pretty rockin' at english, so for the most part we just spoke english the whole time.

I was later approached by a fellow Venezuelan econ major, Elizabet (no 'h' on purpose), who was assigned to read a book in english for her econ class. She had me write a list of all the economics terms I could think of and explain them the best I could in spanish. I thought I did okay, especially when trying to explain the ideas behind some of the more complicated concepts like economies of scale. She had a bunch of questions about Macroeconomics which I could not answer, but I figured that somewhere along the road of life there would be someone else who could fill in the gaps in the swiss cheese-d knowledge which I imparted to her.

Life in general here has a fast paced flow. I often find myself at "Venezuelan Friday" before I know it. My roommate, our host sister Daniela, and I made lunch for the family today. The family thought it would be cool to crack a bottle of Chilean wine, so we had ourselves a nice little lunch of chicken cordon bleu, sesame green beans, and rice with veggies today.

Okay. Some of us have classes in the morning. I miss you all. I know our relationships are a little different while I'm here, but thank you for keeping in touch with me when you can. Goodnight.

New pictures!

My Camera Update 5 149, originally uploaded by runfoxrun!.

This is a view of the lake at dusk as the village would see it. Those little plants on the lake's surface were everywhere. I think they could be invasive exotic species, but our guide said he thought they were native. I guess I'll take his word on it.

So, if you click on this picture or the link to "flickr" you should be catapulted through cyberspace to my new photo sharing page, if all goes correctly. Click on runfoxrun!'s photo stream when you get there to see the rest of them. Enjoy!

The weekend trip.

Okay, so here's the dealy-o about last weekend. I got up at 5 am on Saturday morning and headed out with eight of my closest friends to see some lightning phenomenon at a place called Catatumbo. We took the bus to a place called Santa Barbara and arrived around 8:30 in the morning. We caught what we thought was supposed to be our next bus (it was actually a van) and started on what we thought would be a several hour long ride to Catatumbo. Ten minutes into the trip, the driver tells us in spanish "it's about 20 minutes from here." He also informs us that there are only two ways to get there, taking a bus which passes mighty close to the Colombian border, or by a boat in the town he was taking us to. We were all quite confused by our half understanding, which wasn't clarified much when he explained to us that he was "speaking as clearly as a rooster." So after much adieu about nothing, we headed for Puerto Concha to catch ourselves a boat to the lightning lake.



After being appraoched by a boat driver and finally agreeing on a price, we hit the river for the 2+ hour ride to Catatumbo... only we didn't finish end our trip there. As it turns out, the lanchero (boat driver) figured we wouldn't know the difference between his place literally in the middle of nowhere and the village we wanted to go to (also in the middle of nowhere). After telling him off, he brought us back to Puerto Concha to get ourselves another ride out there.



Finally, at about noon we got ourselves some honest guys to take us to the pueblo of Catatumbo. We spent some time on the beach taking pictures of the local kids, and the lancheros made us a fish and plantain dinner. Afterwards, we took a short little trip over to our posada. A posada is something like a cross between a guest house and a hostel, but they can vary greatly in the quality and services they offer. This one in particular was merely a large open room with a heavy steel door, cement walls, and cement floors. No one knew we needed to bring our own hammocks, so we ended up sleeping on the floor on our towels.



As far as this whole perpetual lightning thing goes, it seemed a bit disappointing. It was like expecting to tour all of the Disney theme parks and only riding spaceship earth. I heard from some of the lighter sleepers that we got a spectacular show while the rest of us were sleeping, but as it had been such an early morning, most of us were dreaming before 11 pm.



All in all it was a great trip, and everyone made it back alive - which is probably the most important thing of all. The other thing I need to mention is that I've been working on a flickr account so that I can share my pictures with you a little easier than on this blog. It's a work in progress, and I'm not sure how to link flickr on here so that it's accessible to everyone. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to shoot me an email or a comment.

Now, off to homework!

This weekend's plans

After much adieu, my plans for the weekend have finalized. I'll start by telling it this way...



What does Venezuela have that no other country in the world has?

Baby Venezuelas!

Just kidding, the real answer is a weird phenomenon where it lightnings CONSTANTLY near lake Maracaibo. The phenomenon is called Catatumbo, or something along those lines. The town we're going to is called Puerto Concha, and we've got a few options as to where we'll be staying. The location of where we'll be spending the two nights there has yet to be decided, but that'll be part of the adventure, I guess. We're headed out in a pretty big group, so it was a little bit of a predicament when we were told we had to bring all our own food. Since we may not have a refridgerator or a kitchen, our choice of vittles ended up being somewhat limited (but we have 2 loaves of bread of entirely different styles). We got it all packed up and ready to go, so we'll head down to the bus station before 5. Then we'll catch our buseta outta here at 5:30 for the gruellingly long ride to Santa Barbara, and finally to Puerto Concha from there.

We'll see how the trip goes, and I'll be writing about it when I get back. I love getting news from home, by the way. Let's keep it coming.

In the US, there is a lot of talk about our over-paid sports players. I would just like to point out the slightly more exaggerated view that the Venezuelans here take, where the futbolistas can make big bucks and earn international fame. I think that in South America in general, some futbol players have reached near saintly status. This picture illustrates that soccer players can do more than the small miracle of walking on water - they can play soccer on it!

It's...been...too...long.

You know you're getting comfortable in a new place when it's been a few days now and you're having trouble thinking about what to write about. At least everyone back at home's been great about sending me emails.

The one exciting thing that I've been witnessing all week is extreme action. I'm not just talking about gliding around with a parachute on your back or anything; I mean riding on top of a truck, overtaking the driver, and after driving your big-rig for a while deciding to disable a harrier jet. That's action right there. All as performed by Bruce Willis in "Live Free or Die Hard." I tried to figure out how I would say the film title in spanish, but the best I could come up with was something along the lines of "Live with Liberty or Die with Dificulty." It seems to me that my version wouldn't sell very well. I guess I'm still working on my schtick as an international merchandizing executive.

Cotton Swabs! Those are mighty exciting. My roommate and I finally caved and decided to get ourselves a pack of those little buggers. Whoo, Doctor Beaty would not have been pleased with what was in those guys. I think I saw Bugs Bunny attached to one of the ends of the cotton-y tips.

I've been trying to get some plans organized for the weekend, but my luck's been thin so far. Our fellow student Jack just got his own place here in Merida, so we had a small gathering to welcome him into his new place just tonight. It was pretty far away from where my roommate and I are living, but it's all good - taxis are cheap.

With a little bit of luck, I'll finally get to go out and dance like I've been itching to do for a while now. It's a bit tricky, because a lot of my US friends here don't seem to be into dancing as much as me. But, tomorrow I should be headed out with a small group of Venezuelans, so let's hope they won't mind a little two step.

Thanks for sticking with me, I appreciate the support.

Word works...say what?

So... got my unliscened copy of Microsoft Word (c) to switch to it's Venezuelan Spanish dictionary. The next step is to get that thang liscenced, but you know - one step at a time. Still feeling a bit under the weather with this weird respiratory infection thing I've had going on lately.

Today in my children's lit class we were asked to describe our first memory to "the class" - which is actually just another student and the profesora. I couldn't think of a fake first memory in the amount of time that "Sarah" effortlessly recited hers, so I went with what I had. I explained in broken spanish that my first memory was the very first time my ear drum ruptured, and the following trip to the ER. I didn't really have the words for 'woke up screaming,' 'cried the whole way,' or even 'dropped my 101 dalmations stuffed animal in a puddle on my way in,' (the dalmation was 'Patch' by the way) but somehow I did manage to get the point across that the best part about the whole experience was the technicolor fruit-roll-up that I ate afterwards. All and all it was a humbling experience to share that with "the class."

It seems that for me, this children's lit. class is all about humility. Reading aloud in another language is an experience I'd rather not repeat more than absolutely necessary. But, every time she gets the chance, La Profesora loves to request that we read "en voz alta." After stammering through the first several pages as if I am a one of the four to six year olds for which these titles were written, the three of us in the classroom concede that it's best if I read as few pages as possible.

It's not pretty. Really.