Beaching Issues

My parents live within walking distance from the beach. It'd probably take me at most 30 minutes walking from our house to get there, and I've been considering doing that but:

1. I can't swim in those beaches because they are quite polluted. So I'd have to walk there to get some sun, hang out, and walk back, and shower at home.
2. My old friends are busy, not in town, or have left town forever. How long could I last without swimming?
3. It could be very, very dangerous. I don't know what areas are safe to walk through. I'm still dazed and confused, and I'd be walking around by myself with no cell phone. And there's seriously high crime awareness in this area.

That feeling of danger is very prominent. It's a really lousy thing that if you've made any money you practically have to protect all your valuables (camera, smart phone) and not take them out in public. Here you really feel like you can't trust anyone, not even the police. You look around and every residence has walls 8 feet high topped with an electric fence and bars on every window, and nobody walks anywhere for fun. You see very few people on a bicycle, even if the streets are flat (in other words, perfect for riding a bike!). I'm trapped in my own home.

I'll wait until the weekend until more people are free to go to a swimmable beach and have some fun all day. In the meantime, I'll stick to the swimming pool crashing at my aunt's house.

Jet Lagging?

Although Venezuela is only half an hour later than eastern time (without daylight savings), I'm suprisngly having some jet lag issues. Because Venezuela is closer to the equator, the sun rises and sets very differently from the Pennsylvannia fall, so I wake up at the wrong time and am constantly unaware of what time it is. I suppose it doesn't help that I don't have a watch and my roaming cell phone stays at home.

The sun here rises around 6:00 AM, but it rises quite bright, so at 6 my eyes are fully open thinking it feels more like it's 10 AM for me but I feel super tired and try to go back to sleep, completely breaking my sleeping pattern. Sunset happens exactly at 5:30 PM, which is a just a little later than what I'm used to this time of the year, and the sunsets here also seem to happen much faster, too.

These little changes have really messed up with my eating and sleeping schedule. I think I'm getting used to it, though. That is, getting used to feeling totally confused all day long.

Back Again

I return home until the end of 2009. Let's see if I can keep posting as a travel blog every other day or so.

The flight back is always a long and tiresome one. This time I flew straight from New York's JFK airport to Simon Bolivar International in Maiquetia (commonly known as the Caracas airport). I don't live anywhere near Caracas, but actually five hours away by car (40 minutes by air) in the east coast at a smaller "metro" area referred as Puerto La Cruz, the nearest airport being in Barcelona (there's one in Venezuela, too!). Because I arrived in Venezuela at midnight, I typically go to this small "touristic hotel" down the street from the airport called La Parada which has a shuttle service included with the overnight stay. Finally, the next day I fly to Barcelona and call it a day, although the night in between is feels a little strange every time.

When I first land in Venezuela, I'm always tired, dazed, and confused. Everything feels foreign to me now days, and some regulations have changed in which immigration and custom procedures are similar but not the same. I got this friendly group of "Caraqueño"s to guide me a little bit so I wouldn't feel so lost.

Getting to the immigration line, I follow my new group of friends down the corridor in a rush to beat the other flights arriving from other exotic places (Europe) to get to the lines. In a typical fashion, there isn't enough people to attend the demand, and we run to the very last line, which says that it's attending the crew and disabled people, allegedly, but it's just a sign (regulations or signs mean nothing much around these parts). After jokingly saying that we are "disabled" from being in an airport all day, another station opens and another line is created, which doesn't say "Venezuelan Citizens" in the booth either (I think it also said "Flight Crew Only"). Finally, you meet the guy with a "Buenas Noches", he looks at the immigration form, stamp, stamp, stamp on your passport, and it's done.

You wait impatiently for your bags. Then you go through customs which is just give a form to some dude, run the bags through a giant x-ray machine, and that's it!

Once I get to La Parada, I fill out some information (my parents had made/paid for the reservation already) and set a wake up call. My flight to Barcelona was at 10, but the receptionist says she'll wake me up at 7am "because of bad traffic on saturday morning" and as soon I was ready they'll take me to the airport.

The room is tiny, with a tiny bed, a tv, an air conditioner unit too big for the room, and a small bathroom with a funny sunroof. Good enough for a night, and all I want to do is sleep, anyway.

I don't sleep. I'm not home 100% yet, I have a rush/high from the flight, the air conditioner isn't cold enough, then later it feels like I'm sleeping outside in the middle of a Pittsburgh winter. I close my eyes and the next thing I know is daylight and I'm awake. I turn on my phone and realized it's 6:30 AM! But I feel it's like 10:00 AM for me because of the sun. I lay in my bed waiting for that wake up call, covered in bed sheets because the huge AC powering a tiny bedroom is still damn cold, and I can't turn it off. I realized that there's a weird panel behind me that has an off switch, and I finally turn the thing off:

Get up and I get ready. I remember not drying well enough from my shower with the tiny towel that was provided, but the tiny bathroom's sunroof gives me an idea. I stand under it and loand behold I'm fully dried in less than 5 minutes because of the humidity/heat/sun/magic. I can't pull those kind of shenanigans back in the middle of a Pennsylvania fall.

I get to the airport with one overweight bag, a carry on luggage, and a overfilled backpack. The person at the airline tells me that apparently my backpack is the carry on and that the carry on luggage is to big to be placed in the overhead compartments. She's being a bitch, like anyone working behind a counter in Venezuela, and so I make a quick decision to check in a carry on without a lock, full of non-pirated DVD gifts, and with brand new shoes. I made a huge mistake.

The security process was to laugh out loud. A lady three people ahead of me was wearing too much metal (big buckle belt and buckled shoes) and kept going through the metal detector with beeps, but other two people ahead of me didn't really want to wait, and were all trying to cross the metal detector at the same time as "Buckles" was coming back to put stuff in the X-Ray machine. There was some yelling from the security officer, but that didn't put things in order, so I tried to hold the line as much as I could until those three people got their issues settled and I was ready to go through. And damn, those metal detector doors are cranked all the way up because it frowned upon the same belt buckle that didn't matter going through the door in Pittsburgh. So I had to go back, too!

After that ordeal, it was still 8:00 AM, and I had to wait a couple of hours until I left. I spent most of those hours pondering why I checked in that bag without a lock and wondering what I could have done about it. I ended up getting a nice arepa with fresh "Palmizulia" cheese and a delicious tiny "latte" (we call them "marrón" (brown) here). While I was eating at the cafe, I spotted a mouse running from one hole by a counter to another. Nice.

The airplane gets to the jetbridge at 10:00 AM, and so we leave closer to 10:50 by the time we're all in and ready to go. The flight is only 40 minutes long, the Douglas-built jet is actually much more comfortable that those Boeings American Airlines love to use, and I believe that the Venezeuelan stewardess must be part time models because they're ridiculously attractive. For good measure, I drink a local Pepsi sweetened with cane sugar instead of that high-fructose corn syrup.

Hooray, I'm home. The Barcelona airport is under construction and the luggage carousel has disappeared. I get lost for a while and finally get to a sad excuse of a luggage pickup. As soon as I get my unlocked carry on, I take it out, open it, and get sigh of relief that everything is still there! Perhaps there is still hope in this country.

Then the rest of the day was spent eating good home food (including a Lebanese dish made with raw ground beef, it'd been years since I've eaten it! And I enjoyed eating it!), surprising my cousin who I didn't tell when I was actually arriving today (she thought it was much later), and wondering what time sunset was happening (5:00pm ish).

All in all, not too bad for day 1. I've still got a whole month left. Wondering what will happen next? Me too!

Hot Dogs: Venezuelan Style

While the hog dog may be considered to be an American fast food, I've found that surprisingly many countries have modified it into their own creation, and Venezuela is no exception.

Hot dogs are the definition street food back home. In the streets of any city in Venezuela, the easiest street cart to find is one that sells them. It wasn't until the 90's when they finally started to compete with other types of food such as falafel/shawarma carts. Tacos and other Tex-Mex like foods still remain a mystery.

The street dog vendors developed a particular recipe for the Venezuelan definition of a hot dog, which you can make at home, too. The traditional recipe is as follows:

1. Pork+beef-based frank, preferably "coney"-sized. Boiled
   
2. Long bun, not sliced from the side like you'd expect, but sliced from the top of the bun!
3. Chopped fresh cabbage (not sauerkraut)
   
4. Chopped yellow onion
5. Crumbled chips (we call those Papitas, which translates to tiny fries)
6. The holy trinity of sauces* (Yellow Mustard, Ketchup, and Mayonnaise)

May also include:

• American-style bacon
• Your average yellow cheese slice (like Kraft singles)
• Garlic sauce
• Cheez-whiz-based sauce
• and/or grated Parmesan cheese on top

And it may look like this:

Photo by Carren Jao

Looks messy but trust me, it's delicious!

Now keep in mind that this are the kind of hot dogs I know of are in the eastern side of Venezuela, and they may vary depending in other regions. I've run into recipes of Venezuelan hot dogs online which I never even seen.

If you're interested in other kinds of hot dogs, check out Hot Dog Variations design article which is what reminded me to make this blog post. You could also read the Wikipedia, of course.

* The holy trinity of sauces is a very well known Venezuelan sauce combination which can also be found in sandwiches and hamburgers. Basically if you want any fast food to taste Venezuelan style, you add the three sauces.

Now Conducting LA

Young Venezuelan conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, becomes the music director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic:

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/10/06/dudamel.orchestra/index.html

Dudamel is definitely one of the most (if not, the most) talented persons to come out of Venezuela in recent years, and was the director for Venezuela's well-known national youth orchestra. Here's a clip from a few years ago of them playing Alma Llanera, which one could consider Venezuela's national song:



Felicitaciones, Gustavo!

Cacao

An interesting article from The New York Times:

"Venezuelan cacao beans have been coveted by high-end chocolate makers around the world since the 17th century. But cacao farmers today struggle against a daunting bureaucracy and emboldened squatters."

Video

Article

Venezuela produces very fine cocoa beans, though that production has been given less priority since the country's government focused on oil production.

Independence Day

Almost coinciding with the United States' independence day, Venezuela's independence is mainly celebrated today.

On July 5th in 1811, after a brief revolutionary movement on the 11th of April the previous year, the declaration of independence was completed and signed, thus making Venezuela the first Latin American country to declare itself independent from Spain. At that point, the war against the Spanish government began, and it wasn't until about 10 years later (due to a decisive battle on July 24th, 1821) where Venezuela pretty much drove the Spanish out and finally ending the war for independence in 1823.

Celebration in Venezuela does not involve barbecues nor fireworks, though. It's mostly a military holiday where the armed forces march out on the streets. People get the day off, anyway, so it's a good time to rest.

The celebration of independence is also divided into the three dates mentioned above:

1. April 19th: Proclamation of the Independence of Venezuela
   
2. June 24th: The Battle of Carabobo
3. July 5th: Day of the Declaration of Independence

The Venezuelan Happy Birthday Song

My birthday was last week, and although my (American) friends sang a lovely rendition the traditional Happy Birthday song, Venezuela has an extended version called Ay Que Noche Tan Preciosa (Oh What a Precious Evening) prior to singing the American translation, which goes something like this:

Ay que noche tan preciosa, Esta noche de tu día, Todos llenos de alegría, En esta fecha natal. Tus mas intimos amigos, Esta noche te acompañan, Te saludan y desean, Un mundo de felicidad. Yo por mi parte deseo, Lleno de luz este dia, Todo llenos de alegría, En esta fecha natal. Y en esta luna plateada, Brinde su luz para ti, Yo ruego a Dios porque pases, Un cumpleaños feliz!

Oh what a beautiful evening, This evening of your day, Everyone's full of joy, In this natal date. Your most personal friends, Give you company this evening, They salute you and they wish you, A world of joy. On my behalf I wish you, Full of light on this day, All full of joy, In this natal date. And in this silver moon, Shares its light to you, And I beg God that you spend, A happy birthday!

And then, Happy Birthday To You translated, with the same melody:

Cumpleaños feliz, Te deseamos a ti, Cumpleaños, [TuNombreAqui], Cumpleaños feliz!

Happy birthday, We wish to you, (Happy) birthday, [YourNameHere], Happy birthday!

Oh, and by the way, Happy Birthday translated has no copyright bearing by the Warner corporation.