Mi Querida Caracas

Photos from my favorite city in the Spanish-speaking Americas, Caracas:



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It's the Weekeeeeeend, Baby! (Part 3)

This is the last installment of the Bogotá/Caracas trilogy. I'm now back home in Florida, and between getting settled, resting up, seeing friends and family, and fighting with Blogger over video uploads, I've slacked up on the blog. Sorry, y'all.

Here's video of Saturday night's Brazilian do, with Big G handling the ladies.

As I typically wake up every weekday morning at 6am for school, I woke up late on Sunday: 6:30. Bad idea. As typical of Latin America, even in a capital city of almost five million people, everything within walking distance of the Hotel Harmony was shuttered with metal roll-down barriers. Even McDonald's was closed; some pancakes would have hit the spot right then and possibly weighed the stomach and eyelids down enough for a quick pre-lunch nap. No dice. I ate a couple of stale ham and cheese pastries at a dusty li'l luncheonette on the corner and straggled back to the room under the increasing heat with day-old clothes, the desire but not the ability to sleep, and a vacuous hole in my social schedule, since no one in the whole damn city was sure to be up before noon.

Around ten, I caught the bus to Latin America's largest mall, Sambil, thinking that it'd be open, since shopping is Venezuela's most popular sport after baseball. Wrong. I headed back toward the hotel via Sabana Grande, another bargain basement retail district with bootleg DVDs and knock-off handbags. Some of the stores were just opening, and because of my tremendous shopping fubar in Bogota a few days before, I was in dire need of a couple more shirts and some jeans. All the stores featured t-shirts in Foreign English—"Look Me," "Red Knorth Crazy," "Nigth's Gangsta"—phrases that I couldn't even remotely pass off as intentionally ungrammatical or witty. For all my love of the varied permutations of vernacular English, I'm a purist when it comes to indecipherable gibberish and my wardrobe. Finally, the mall opened, I had lunch (Wendy's) and spoke to George on the phone, who was involucrado for most of the day, inspiring me to investigate the prospects for my own afternoon of being involucrado. Involucrado's how you want to spend an lazy afternoon in Caracas, trust me.

Later, I hooked up with G and Alaa and Alaa's brothers for little hookah (me, no) and some political convo: they look at Chavez pragmatically, saying that he's done many good things in addition to being a major fuck-up (and Alaa is a merchant and businessman, of a class directly opposed to the Venezuelan president) and are resigned to taking the bad with the good. They lamented the increase in street crime and ridiculous cost-of-living increases (renting a room in the capital now costs damn near US$700 a month!) and I lamented the near impossibility of living comfortably in Caracas as a foreign teacher who'd only make about $1400 a month at the most prestigious school. We compared the country to Colombia, their neighbor and my former home, and we acknowledged Colombia's superior system of education and (truly) stronger governmental institutions, while giving Venezuela the edge in social interaction and open-ness—with the odd exception of Cuba, no other country in Latin America comes as close to Brazil as Venezuela does in terms of genuine warmth and friendliness on all levels, regardless of skin-tone or nationality; I never, ever remember receiving shade of any kind after four trips to the country. After a late night street hot dog (which in Venezuela means keeling over with ketchup, mustard, mayo, lettuce, onions, potato chips, and pineapple sauce), I crashed from the fatigue of two relatively sleepless nights.

Monday meant scrambling for last-minute souvenirs and t-shirts emblazoned with symbols of the city (Indiani, baby), and I had lunch with the fellas before Alaa's brother, Jamal, offered to take me on his scooter to catch the airport shuttle bus. On the way, we were stopped by CCSPD for riding without helmets. I went "gringo," pretending that I didn't understand Spanish and speaking only English (luckily, Jamal had lived in Chicago for a while, so the bit worked). He did get a $200 ticket (sorry, dude), then they let us head on off to the shuttle stop, helmet-free, suitcase, and all. Ghetto fabuloso.

Here's some raggedy raw footage of the getaway, including some typical tropical driving techniques and my own Spanish commentary (still don't know how to add music to my movies yet; the theme song would have been "Guaio a Caracas" by Paul and Mark...can anyone help with this?). More photos forthcoming.

Escape from Caracas from Fly Brother on Vimeo.

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It´s the Weekeeeeeend, Baby! (Part 2)

Flying to Caracas last Saturday, I sat next to a woman with a facemask who seized into a death cringe every time someone coughed lightly from a speck of dust. It wasn’t until I walked through the airport terminal in Venezuela that I realized the code-red-style measures transport authorities were taking in light of the A1H1400tothe17thpowertimes84≠3.14∞ virus, though the facemasks and surgical gloves worn in South America looked absolutely wimpy next to the full-body toxic waste suits the officials wear in Asian airports.

My good buddy Jorge/George (used interchangeably), who I met on my first trip to the Venezuelan capital in ’04, pressed his friend Alaa to scoop me from the airport in his tiny, dark blue Fiat with opaque, dark-boy window tinting I hadn’t seen since it was outlawed in Florida in the 80s. Three big-ass dudes piled into the thing (I’m 6’1, George is like 6’4, so I got the backseat), and we snaked down the freeway, through tunnels and past hills blanketed with the reddish constructions of the slums—called favelas in Brazil, cerros in Colombia, ranchitos in Venezuela, “the hood” in the States; all the same damn thing. It’s these areas, coupled with the vast and impoverished rural interior, where Chavez gets his support. After all, these are the marginalized people in what had been an up-and-coming capitalist society throughout the 60s and 70s, but as typical of developing countries, never had their basic needs met on a regular basis. I don’t know enough of the history to understand why counter-governmental forces like the guerrillas in Colombia, Nicaragua, or Peru were never formed, but Chavez has taken it upon himself to incite a social revolution, no matter how misguided, unorganized, or self-defeating it might be.

We bouncedrockedskatedrolled over the glistening asphalt path into the forest of concrete and glass towers of this mini-São Paulo, clowning around and snapping photos like this one (Grams pimpin’ the Z28 with Gramps ridin’ bitch), then dropped off my suitcase at Alaa’s clothing stall in the popular, populated, and poppin’ Chacaito section of town and hit Burger King for lunch. Damn all y’all…I wanted me some BK and they only just opened in Colombia this month. The plan was to find me a cheap, clean hotel that didn’t have a website (those that did were running at US$107 a night, the JW Marriott clocking in at $329), but that also wasn’t a matador (love motel).
Important side note: money is truly funny in Venezuela, and I don’t mean ha-ha, neither. There are two types of currency, the bolívar and the bolívar fuerte. The fuertes just have the extra three zero’s behind the comma removed (100,000 VEB = 100 VEF). That’s not the foolishness, though. The kicker is the exchange rate, which for me was almost at parity with the Colombian peso (100,000 COP = 120 VEF). But on the street in Barranquilla, a point of departure for many Colombians overland to Venezuela during the tensest times of the conflict and now point of return for home-coming Venekolombians, I got bolívars at three times the official rate. It involved a series of phone calls, dropping off pesos at one place and picking up bolívars at another, but for 630,000 COP I got 1,700 VEF. Cha-ching!

So, after some running around in the Fiat, stopping at in the driveways of various familiares and underground parking garages of various matadors, some of which wouldn’t allow check-in until 10PM, we found the enticingly named Hotel Harmony. At 160 fuertes a night, I slept under frigid air and beneath the worldly sounds of Nat Geo Music in a basic but clean room for $30: a damn steal.

G and A headed off to the store for a bit and once settled, I pretty much did the only thing you can do during the day in Caracas: cruised the mall. Believe me, folks, let Chavez try and change this country into a version of Cuba; that fool would be shot dead. Caraqueños are some shoppin’ mofos and won’t nobody tell them they have to give up their Gucci knock-offs and TGI Friday’s ribs in the name of some stupid social experiment. He might get away with some big industry privatization, but there’s just way too much deep-rooted foreign investment in the country at a level unimaginable in 1950s Cuba when the United Fruit Company was the only game in town. Anyway, looots of hotties, including this young lovely performing Middle Eastern dance at a Lebanese restaurant in the El Recreo mall.
In the evening, I met up with George in Chacaito and we took the Metro (fast, efficient, clean, quiet) out to Xica da Silva’s (SHEE-ka da SILL-va) house so he and Xica could get ready for a night of samba and stripping: George “dances” with a Brazilian samba group that performs for private parties, and there were three engagements that night (in Colombia, people always order mariachis for weddings and birthdays…to me, booty-shaking beats drunken group singing anyday). I went as unofficial group photographer snapping stills of the three garotas, the batucada drummers, and George’s samba-esque gyrations. Three birthday parties and four hours later, everybody was dead and we scratched the planned night of partying in exchange for some needed (and very short-lived) shut-eye.

Next up: me, at the ass-crack of dawn on a Sunday morning in Caracas.

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Ghetto Fabuloso -or- Where I've Been: Caracas

They say Caracas es Caracas, lo resto es montes y culebras—Caracas is Caracas, the rest is just shrubs and snakes. With serpentine highways jack-knifing, double-backing, and clinging to mountainsides before plunging through tunnels that connect the country with the Valley of Caracas, that statement is beautifully obvious. The capital of Venezuela, at once cosmopolitan and ghetto, sits at the northern edge of South America, separated from the Caribbean Sea by the looming green wall of Avila Mountain and ringed by red-bricked, ever-expanding shanties that drape the hillsides.

As the principal city of the largest oil-exporting country outside the Middle East, Caracas combined the flavor and openness of the tropics with the verve and sophistication of a cosmopolis; in the 70s, Air France even ran the Concorde regularly between Caracas and Paris. Its glory days clearly over, I was last in Caracas in 2005, when Hugo Chavez still seemed harmless and funny, with his "Bush, joo are a donkay," and the comfortable controlled chaos typical of large Latin American cities still seemed intact.



Within the conglomeration of 4.5 million people, freeways course through the valley bordered by countless billboards and high-rises sprout indiscriminately like a real-live version of Sim City. Boisterous, loud, dirty, crowded, and hot, Caracas ain't pretty. But it's sexy. And what struck me most about the place was the swift friendliness (and attractiveness...hotties everywhere) of the people; how you can go up to random folks on the street doing random things, and they take you into their world for a few hours, showing you their hobbies and houses, introducing you to their friends and trying to get you drunk, their diverse interests and tastes spanning place and time. One of my friends does flatland x-treme biking while listening to Lou Rawls on MP3!

Politically speaking, I haven't seen any of the so-called reforms Chavez has put into action to nationalize major corporations and entire industries, fight labor groups (who should be his natural allies), and essentially destroy the middle class, but from what I hear from my friends in the country, things are not going well. I had intended to return over Spring Break to compare the changes I saw, but logistics made that impossible. As much as I love Cuba, I do not believe changing Venezuela into the 2.0 Beta version is the right way to achieve social equality.

Caracas is straight hood, and besides Rio de Janeiro, it's the only city where I actually felt nervous about my safety; stray bullets are common and crime has exploded. The city, it pains me to say, is on the type of downward slant that takes a place decades to rectify. But on the flip side, you got tan chulos in wifebeaters rolling through the city blasting the latest reggaeton or hip-hop in heavy '83 Chevy Malibus with their brick-house chicas smacking gum in the passenger seat. The nightspots go crazy with house or salsa til sun-up. There's ice skating on top of Avila Mountain (outdoor ice skating in the Caribbean!) and baseball outshines soccer as the nation's pastime. Afro-Latino syncretic religion is strong, as is the obvious African cultural element to the city, from the swagger and slang of Venezuelan Spanish to the proliferation of brown faces on the streets. It's like Harlem in the early 80s or DC in the 90s, not just ghetto, but also fabulous. There's something appealing about having your name engraved on your belt buckle when everyone else has, too.

I think the cosmos saved me from a great life disappointment by not allowing me to find a suitable job in the city when I was searching back in 2004. I do love Caracas and would have hated to be forced out of the country when Chavez siezes all foreign-held bank accounts.

To catch some of the true rawness of CCS, look at the first few scenes from the crime drama, Secuestro Express; very much in the vein of New Jack City and City of God. Any time I see images of the city, I remember the rush of being on the edge of anarchy. And I like it, at least in short doses.



And here's an excellent, admittedly anti-Chavez blog about the goings-on in Caracas.

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