Four years ago, I first visited Colombia at the behest of the friend of a friend who worked as the academic director at a bi-cultural language center in Medellín, the country's second-largest city, best known for its controversial benefactor, Pablo Escobar. I fell in love with the place, partially because of the hours-long conversations I had with a couple of paisas from the City of Eternal Spring: a spunky college student from the neighborhood and the well-read security guard (with empty shotgun) at my friend's apartment building. Unfortunately, the job I was offered at the language center didn't pay very well and I ended up accepting a better-paying university position in Colombia's fourth-largest city, Barranquilla. C'est la vie. Fly Brother welcomes your views. If this post hit the spot, please comment below and/or click.
These are some of the deals I've found for round-trip international travel in June, July, and August (some even extend into the fall, when the weather's heating up Down Under). Dust off the passport (or apply for one) and get them bags packed:
Newark to Sydney, Australia - $712 on United ($573 from LA!!!!!!)
San Francisco to Tokyo, Japan - $454 on Air Canada (early-mid June only)
Washington to Frankfurt*, Germany - $526 on Lufthansa
*Once in Germany or Ireland, you can hop over to almost any other major European city for as little as $40 each way.
And right now, round trips from the East Coast out West and vice-versa are also stupid cheap, often $200 or less, so not living in San Fran or LA is no excuse; DC people, hit that Chinatown Bus to The City. I found these fares by first checking the forums on frequent traveler website FlyerTalk, then verifying on the individual airline sites, or on Farecast, Orbitz, Expedia, Farecompare, or Airfare Watchdog (which is especially handy by alerting you of fare sales from any airport you desire). If you can, play around with the dates or destinations; I'm sure you'll find something worth salivating over. Fly Brother welcomes your views. If this post hit the spot, please comment below and/or click.
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. Fly Brother welcomes your views. If this post hit the spot, please comment below and/or click.
1. Happy Mothers' Day to all the women out there who have cared for someone other than themselves. It's called mothering and without that saving grace, humans would have extinguished themselves through general stupidity and excess testosterone millennia ago.
2. Happy (Late) Anniversary to my parents E&P, who, on April 30th, celebrated 39 years of marriage. I couldn't exactly call it bliss, but they still together.
On honeymoon in Nassau, Bahamas - May 1970
3. In keeping with my commitment to myself as a writer and you as my audience, I'm officially establishing a posting schedule that you can scratch yo back by. Starting today, fresh posts will appear on Fly Brother every third day. This week, look for new material on Wednesday and Saturday, followed by next Tuesday, Friday, Monday of the next week, etc. Dig?
Why not post on two fixed days, such as Monday and Thursday, you ask? Because I like variety and seeing different days in the postmark header. Nothing more.
In addition, I'll be responding to comments, should there be any, within 24 hours of receiving them, instead of each time I upload a new post. So comment, dammit, and then I can respond to the comments in a timely manner.
Meanwhile, I've seen some visual drafts of the blog redesign and I like, I like! Be ready, folk!
Often, just when we are in greatest need of motivation or inspiration, it comes suddenly and without warning. For me, these last few weeks have been marked with anxiety about my future, annoyance with my present, and a general ping-ponging between frustration and fatigue, feeling over-burdened and over-committed.
Enter Chris Guillebeau's 279 Days to Overnight Success, a succinct, engaging guide to establishing yourself as a full-time artist and/or social media guru, offered free-of-charge on his amazing site, The Art of Non-conformity. Having been profiled in The New York Times, on MSNBC, and here on Fly Brother, Guillebeau outlines his quest to hit every country on Earth by the age of 35 and to make the world a better place in the process. In his encouraging manifesto, which I read in a little under two hours, he discusses his successes and failures as a full-time writer, the expectations to succeed but not to receive much front-end financial gain, self-discipline and prioritization, the extreme importance of maintaining an accessible connection with your readers, and, above all, remaining true to your own voice to attract the right audience for you.
Amidst the chaos of increasing work and life pressures, reading this guide today was a needed splash of cold water, underscoring the intermittent messages I've been receiving from the varied reaches of the cosmos in one orienting, 79-page stroke. In forty-two days, I'll be done with high school teaching and Colombia, at least for a while. Between now and then, there's nothing to do but buckle down, prioritize, and get the documenting, grading, blogging, reading, writing, working-out, planning, and packing done. Over the next few weeks, I'll be making the necessary changes that reflect my commitment to my readers and my writing, giving voice to an under-heard perspective of international travel at Fly Brother and other venues, and I'll be utilizing many of the techniques outlined by Guillebeau and other young, successful, full-time writers who are doing exactly what I want to be doing—making a living while doing exactly what they want to be doing. And I urge anyone who's interested in that lifestyle choice to read 279 Days to Overnight Success.
Today, children, I leave you with three quotes that came to mind as I wrote this post:
From the aforementioned manifesto - "[Y]ou have to find a way to keep making art during the not-so-fun times."
A very shaky paraphrase of a sermon I heard a few years ago by Rebm, Jr. at Bethel Baptist Institutional in Jacksonville, Florida -"Sometimes, you cain't be waitin' on nobody else. You gotta hold your own hand up."
And something deceptively simple, profound, and oft-said to me, most recently by São Paulo trailblazer Kevin of Club Whirled - "You can do anything you want."
Stay tuned.
Fly Brother welcomes your views. If this post hit the spot, please comment below and/or click.
I'll be redesigning Fly Brother over the next month, and as a part of that upgrade, I'm asking you, my lovely readership, for your opinions and feedback.
I'd like to know what you like about the blog, what you don't like, and what you'd like to see more and/or less of. More music or video? More favorites lists or how-tos? More city snippets or personal narrative? More essays on race or history? What would you like to see that I haven't come up with yet? How can I make the blog better?
Let me hear it, folk; lay it on me. I appreciate and thank you for your comments and patronage.
Fly Brother tackles international travel in unabridged, unapologetic, full and complete color. It's also the blog name of writer and educator Ernest White II, a tall, ruggedly handsome, erudite, occasionally delusional Black American male living in Brazil's largest city.
Four years ago, I first visited Colombia at the behest of the friend of a friend who worked as the academic director at a bi-cultural language center in Medellín, the country's second-largest city, best known for its controversial benefactor, Pablo Escobar. I fell in love with the place, partially because of the hours-long conversations I had with a couple of paisas from the City of Eternal Spring: a spunky college student from the neighborhood and the well-read security guard (with empty shotgun) at my friend's apartment building. Unfortunately, the job I was offered at the language center didn't pay very well and I ended up accepting a better-paying university position in Colombia's fourth-largest city, Barranquilla. C'est la vie.
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