Feliz Navidad

In Venezuela, Christmas is a big holiday, especially with 96% of the population coming from a Roman Catholic background. However, Christmas Day is just like any other day, except that the stores are closed, and usually families go out and about. In the Puerto La Cruz area most people go out to the beach.

Christmas Eve is the big event. There is usually a dinner party with plenty of food, beer and/or blended scotch whiskey, and desert. The whole family gets together, and I'm not talking about just mom, dad, and children: Uncles, grandparents, second cousins, third cousins, great uncles; anyone who is related and lives nearby, basically. While adults sit and chat about all kinds of topics, kids run around and sometimes play with fireworks, which are used to celebrate Christmas/New Year's Eve and not Independence Day.

Decorations are typical: A Christmas tree that is usually a synthetic tree instead of a real pine tree, those usual red flowers and plenty of sparkle, lots of pictures of Santa Claus all over the place, and those red Christmas hats. There is also plenty of references to snow, and for some reason everyone thinks of snow and Christmas as the same thing, even though it only snows up in the high mountains near Merida. A lot of families create nativity scenes, too, and they can get pretty big; my grandmother created one once that took a whole wall! I think she won some kind of contest, too. Baby Jesus is added to the nativity scene at midnight.

There exist a dispute of who bring the gifts to the children: It's either Santa Claus, or San Nicolas, or the one and only Baby Jesus. When I was kid it was always Baby Jesus who brought me the gifts, but in recent years it seems that the middle/upper class has started calling this mystical creature Santa Claus (in English). So now the government, trying its hardest to promote Latin American identity due to the obvious subculture blend, is not allowing any images of Santa out in public places.

Venezuelan Impatience

I often wonder why Venezuelans, at least the ones from eastern Venezuela, seem to be so impatient. Everyone is always trying to get through everyone's way, as it primarily demonstrated through their driving. I may have found one of the many reasons.

I arrived in Caracas a few days ago, and I needed to get on a flight to Barcelona (Venezuela, not Spain) which is close to where my family lives. My flight was going to take off at 7:40 AM, and I got to the airport at around 6:15 AM to meet with a line longer than what the check-in area can hold. When I get my boarding pass at around 6:50 AM, the airline person told me that the boarding time was going to be at 7:00 AM. I thought that it was soon enough and headed for the security area, and on my way there I noticed that the boarding pass said that the boarding time was 6:45 AM, and when I check on the monitor with all the flights it said "Abordando" (Now Boarding) for my flight. Already knowing what to expect from a Venezuelan airline, I knew that it had to be an error and that they weren't really boarding the plane.

So I sat close to the gate and at 7:00 AM, nothing happens. I sat there waiting. I checked the time, kept waiting.

It was 7:10 AM and still nothing. The sign by the gate still said "Abordando". Voices kept coming from the loudspeakers about boarding other planes and nothing for us. At around this time, people got desperate and started to form a line by the gate, which became quite long after a few minutes. I didn't panic; I saw the same thing happen a few months ago when I came to Venezuela and I knew that it wasn't going to work. I also saw the same thing happen at the Miami airport the day before. An attendant for the airline came by and started yelling and breaking off the line. She said that they would call people by rows, and that they would have to wait.

At 7:20 AM, there was still no call for our flight, and a smaller line started to reform by the gate. No attendant came to break off the line.

At 7:30 AM, I notice that some guy by the gate is giving an aggressive gesture to someone by the plane and then starts calling people by rows. He calls rows 11-22 first, and because I'm in row 2 I sit and wait. I notice that after a while the seats by the gate are getting emptier, so I stand up and get in line. It turns out that I was one of the last people to get in the plane and he never really called rows 1-11.

When I finally got to Barcelona, which was surprisingly almost on time, we had to wait once more. It took about 20 minutes for our luggage to get to the carousel, and we were the only flight that arrived at that time!

So, the whole time we were given false hope, and we lost trust with the airline and became desperate for some kind of action. This is why there is impatience, because when it not only happens in the airline but the same principle happens everywhere else, you start to lose trust on time and on people.

So, let's review the events:

1. Ticket boarding time: 6:45 AM. For a domestic flight? That's actually quite optimistic to be boarding almost an hour before the flight.
2. Written boarding time: 7:00 AM. Still too early.
3. "Abordando" on all signs. Were they really boarding? Why did they tell us that if they weren't ready?
4. People start forming without being called in typical Venezuelan fashion. Someone from the airline breaks them off like everything will work out.
   
5. Boarding at the last minute. It's never fun to rush.
6. Not calling the other set of rows. By this time I lost all hope that it would happen, anyway.
7. Luggage takes too long at a small airport with one arrival. Why?
   

How does one ever fix a society that doesn't run on time and that gives false hope to people that have already lost trust?