Piece #3

Pieces #1 and #2.

From the AV Room: Titicaca!

LMAO!

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How to Reduce Four-Plus Years Into a Box, a Suitcase, and a Carry-On in 12 Easy Steps

Photo by charlieontheradio

You've got 26 days left in Colombia; here's what you do:

1. Rip all bootleg, copied, burned, and otherwise unoriginal CDs to your computer. No need to carry home all that plastic (and the joy of this is rediscovering old tunes and artists who hadn't crooned from your speakers in a while...some good ol' Donny Hathaway, anyone?).


2. Give towels and your $50 DVD player to the sweet old lady you live with. Or to the sweet old lady next door. Or to the sweet old lady who cleans the floors at your job. Either way, there's always a sweet old lady somewhere to give something to. She can get the tube socks, too ($10 a bag at the flea market).


3. Donate Before the Mayflower (681 pages) and The Brazil Reader (544 pages) to some inquisitive English students; they'll be grateful for the cultural insight and you'll be grateful for the lightened luggage. If you really need those books again, that's what Amazon.com is for. Do NOT donate first editions or autographed copies of anything.


4. Give plastic CD and DVD cases to the art teacher who can do something creative with the images; a collage, montage, melange, or some other artsy-fartsy but interesting crap. She can also get the old in-flight magazines and back issues of Men's Health and Ebony (the Obama issues should get packed in the box, along with the CD carrying case that holds the actual DVDs).


5. Give I'm-too-sexy white crew-neck and V-neck t-shirts to friends at the gym, who are the only people your size in the country anyway; you can always get more at Target. They can have the tubs of Hydroxycut Hardcore, too, especially since the gubment said not to take it.


6. On that note, if it ain't been worn more than twice in the last four years, there's somebody else who'll wear it tomorrow.


7. Give old curriculum circulars and blank grade sheets to your students during final exams to make paper airplanes and turn the classroom into Hartsfield-Jackson.


8. Sell the roller-blades. If you ain't learnt by nah...


9. Re-write the scribblings on every other page of the six composition books you've had for years into one small notebook. Or better yet, throw them shits away. Along with all the peer-edited copies of your thesis fiction project that you've kept for the interminably-impending re-write.


10. You might have to make a Sophie's choice about the porn collection.


11. Get back to me on the shoebox full of ticket stubs, museum guides, mini-maps, boarding passes, and the Cuba Offers You government tourist guide. There has to be some kind of use for all this memorabilia. And you know the Prince poster gets rolled up and packed (stuff some dress socks in that mug to retain the shape, then break out the iron when you get home!).


12. Place regrets, fears, doubts, and other assorted baggage out by the curb.
    

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Colombia Mía: Paisas

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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Stupid Cheap Summer Airfares That You Would Be Stupid to Ignore

Photo by Gun Sydney

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:

Chicago to Dublin*, Ireland - $498 on Delta

Chicago to San Jose, Costa Rica - $277 on TACA

Los Angeles to Buenos Aires, Argentina - $598 on United

Los Angeles to Frankfurt*, Germany - $517 on Delta

Los Angeles to Manila, Philippines - $588 on Delta

Los Angeles to Panama City, Panama - $297 on American

New York-JFK to Santo Domingo, Dominican Rep. - $341 on JetBlue

New York-LaGuardia to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - $513 on United ($541 on Delta)

Newark to Berlin*, Germany - $519 on Continental/KLM

Newark to Cartagena, Colombia - $393 on Continental/Copa

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.

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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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Piece #2

Here's Piece #1.