Mérida and its People

I just visited Mérida for a whole week. From the Puerto La Cruz area it was a painful 18-hour bus trip, but it was definitely worth travelling there.

In southwestern Venezuela, right in the very end of the Andes, you can find this picturesque, town-like, city. It is surrounded by moutains, and the weather is quite breezy most of the time. Sometimes it feels like a cool spring day, and you might have to wear a sweatshirt.

The people of the southwestern Venezuela region are called Gochos by the rest of us, and they are quite friendly. They seem to be much more polite in stores, driving, etc. Their accent is also different. They speak Venezuelan slang but slower with a Bolivian-like accent and call everyone by Usted, a formal version of you that most people use towards the elderly. I´m guessing it must be the general Andean way of speaking.

Mérida is perhaps known as the moust touristic city in Venezuela, and it has a large population of tourists. There are a lot of Europeans there, and you can spot them everywhere. I met some from the Netherlands and Belgium, and I saw and heard some tall blonde people who were wrinkly and sunburned with light-colored eyes and spoke a germanic-like language (that wasn´t actually German) or Spanish with an accent. Venezuelans also come to visit, and you can differentiate them easily from the locals because they actually wear jackets, gloves, and hoodies, so they really stand out from the rest of the crowd. It does feel quite cool for the average Venezuelan who doesn´t live there, though; when I visited as a child I did wear all that stuff, and I thought it was the coldest weather, ever. Well, back in those days even Orlando, FL, seemed cold to me.

Currently, in Mérida, the government is building an electric trolley system called the Trolmérida that will run in the middle of major avenues, covering most of the city. It wasn´t the best time to go there because of, as I´m now calling it, the inefficient efficiency of Venezuela, they´ve torn down most of the avenues to build it all at once, and the traffic is painfully heavy at any point in the day. I bet in a couple of years, though, it will be awesome having that transportation system running with the avenues nice and clean again.