bus rides and beaches

Picture this: a jungle (a cloud forest, to be precise) growing in the mountains. Full of assorted banana trees and flowering things, hibiscus, and enormous bamboo stands. Clouds pass in and out of the trees and waterfalls crash down from cliffs and there are more kinds of birds here than any other part of the world. That is Henri Pittier National Park.

Now imagine a bus. A school bus. Loaded with 70 or so people, some with backpacks, some with bags of coconuts, and some even with babies. And there you are, wedged into this bus, your back sticking to the plastic seat because you are sweating so much in the humidity and there is a small child practically sleeping in your lap, which is no small feat considering you also have a substantial backpack invading your personal space. Back to the jungle. Remember the jungle? The beautiful National Park? Well, this school bus is barreling through this mountainous loveliness, on an 8-foot wide road, twisting and turning around switchbacks, for 2 and a half hours. Hope you don't get motion sickness.

That was just one small part of the adventure of this past weekend, which turned out to be an amazing time. I finally got to go to the beach! On the Caribbean! In Venezuela! It was definitely the best weekend I've had here, and the first time that I really that I really felt that "wow" feeling here. I left on Thursday night, along with about 14 other of the North Americans, and took a 12-hour bus ride to a city near the coast called Maracay. The overnight bus trip wasn't too bad; it was a "buscama" which means the seats recline practically into beds. Then there was the crazy trip through the cloud forest in the crowded bus, but it was completely worth it because the drive was amazing.

Choroni, the town where we stayed, was charming and colonial, lots of pastel colored houses and an old church and plenty of people willing to help the tourists. And then there was the beach! The beautiful, white sandy beach with palm trees and coconuts and turquoise water and seashells! I sat on the beach and read and ate ice cream and floated in the ocean. It was great, so relaxing. However, traveling with so many people was a frustrating at times. And I had heat stroke on Saturday, which was pretty miserable. I drank several liters of water at the beach but once I got back to the hotel I had a massive headache and was dizzy and pukey. Not at all how I wanted to spend the evening, but Sunday was much better. I just had to stay out of the sun. Watch out for the blazing Venezuelan sun.

Anyway, I'm done bragging about my beach trip. Back in the sort of real world this week, back to classes and such. Last night was my roommate's 21st birthday, so we went out to celebrate in true American 21st birthday style - plenty of drinks for the birthday girl! I was in charge of the drunk girl, being her roommate and all, and it was entertaining to watch the drunken action unfold.

Who can believe it's almost October? It's actually the "winter" season here - the rainy season. Sigh, I'm having an October without fall and Halloween. In my tropical mountain land.

P.S. Over half the North Americans have had some sort of parasite or intestinal bacteria (some have even named theirs), but me and my intestines are still holding strong against the invaders!

Today I waited for a bus for 10 minutes, tried flagging down three before one stopped to let a passenger off and I could get on. Then it was jampacked and I found myself holding onto a bar for dear life, hanging out the door while the bus careened down the road. Because that's what buses do here. They careen. It's like they're trying to dance to the salsa that is being pumped out of them at insane decibels. Bus drivers here (drivers here in general) are demented. They are heedless of everything - not only the lives of their passengers but probably their own lives, as well, and certainly the lives of any pedestrians who even think about stepping from the sidewalk to the pavement. My organs try to evacuate my body all at the same time every time I try to cross a road.

Sometimes being here is one of the most amazing experiences in the world and I love every second of it and everything I do... and then there are times when it's the most frustrating thing and while I don't hate it, I can't help but compare life here to life at home, and how some things are "better." And then I want to yell at myself, because things aren't necessarily better at home, they're just different. Today, for instance, with the buses not stopping. Sometimes I feel like they don't stop just because I'm a gringa and they can spot me from miles away. Then I remember that's just how buses work here and I just have to deal with it - plus, that's part of the fun and the reason I came here... to experience the culture. And part of the culture is being ignored by bus drivers.

Going on the teleferico on Saturday was amazing. It's hard to explain the whole thing here, but like I said, it's the highest and longest cable car in the world. The top station is on Pico Espejo, which is at an elevation of about 16,000 feet, and I went all the way to the top. It was so cloudy at the top that I couldn't see anything but the station itself and the statue of the Virgin Mary that resides there. And it was cold! Luckily, I'm a hearty Minnesota lass and can handle it. I don't think the Venezuelans quite knew what to do with themselves. They were all wearing heavy coats, hats, scarves and gloves. As we were coming down from the top, it actually started snowing. Just to put that in perspective, once we got all the way back down to the city, it was 83 degrees! It was weird to go through such a temperature change, not to mention the altitude difference.

Here's a Venezuelan Fun Fact to shed light on the craziness of public buses:

Public buses do not have a set schedule here. There are no times for when certain buses will stop at certain places. Individual drivers decide when they want to work and will just drive around, stopping if someone flags them down on the street or if someone wants to get off. On the main roads there are set "bus stops" but on the smaller roads, sometimes you just have to look for people congregating and join them, with the hope that they're waiting for the bus, as well.

Can anyone explain to me why my feet are so cold, when it's 79 degrees and sunny out?

How I found myself packing up my stuff exactly a month after I did the first time, or, Sometimes you get a crazy host mom

From the first week we had some worries about living with our host mom, as she had a lot of rules for us. Some of her rules that were just cultural - like that she wanted us wearing shoes and/or socks inside all the time. Most of the host families don't really go for the whole barefoot look inside, so that was normal. Other things were a little weirder and were clearly just our mom's personal preferences and idiosyncracies - like she yelled at Steph one day after Steph didn't come home for lunch. Sometimes she wouldn't make dinner for us if we came home after a certain time (a certain time that varied each time) and once she made dinner for herself and not us, even though we asked. She told us that we had come home too late. She also wouldn't let us make food for ourselves if she wasn't there. She had a housepainter come and didn't tell us, and he got paint all over Steph's stuff. Steph took a lot of blame for things that our mom thought we were doing wrong, and we felt like we were walking around on eggshells half the time. All my friends told us about their families and how they would have good talks with them or their moms would just let them help themselves to food.

I'll skip over some of the details, but the main thing is that Steph and I talked to Astrid, the study abroad director, on Thursday and she took care of it all. On Friday we hauled all our stuff (packed rather hapzardly into our suitcases last minute) to school and met our new "mom" - and I love my new family! I live in a house now with a mom and two of her daughters, who are both in their late 20s, and one of their daughters, who is 8 years old. I've already had more fun with my new family and gotten to know them better in the past few days than I did with my old mom in a month. It's also nice having a little kid in the house. I played "El Juego de la Vieja" a.k.a. Tic Tac Toe with Mariana today and she is really cute and smart. Our house is also in a really nice neighborhood (the mayor lives down the street!) and it's only a couple blocks from a shopping center with a movie theater. Anyway, having to pack up all my stuff after only a month (two and a half months sooner than I expected) was frustrating but I'm really glad because it's turned out well.

Speakin of families, here's a Venezuelan Fun Fact!:

Family is very important to Venezuelans. Children will live with their parents well into their 20s or 30s, or until they get married (hence my two "sisters" still living at home) and all the people who live in a household try to make it home for lunch, the biggest meal of the day. And their lunch is usually bigger than any meal I ever eat at home - meat, rice, soup, salad, potatoes, plantains, fresh fruit juice, etc. It's a good thing that dinner is always light - maybe a tortilla (not like a Mexican tortilla; it's more like an omelette) or bread and tea.

On Saturday I went on the teleferico, the world's highest and longest cable car, and on top of the mountain I met a middle-aged Venezuelan guy who studied abroad at University of Wisconsin-Superior and lived in Duluth for a year! Of all the crazy things. But more on that later, I've got to go. Adios!

Looks like it's about that time here in blog-land and it's a doozy of a day to blog -the internet could probably not be any slower today. It's possible, but highly unlikely.

Last weekend I was going to go to the beach, to a place called Choroni, with several of the other students here, but Hurricane Ivan decided it was not to be. All the beaches ended up being closed and we had to change our hotel reservations and bus tickets to next weekend. A little disappointing but I'll get to go really soon. And my weekend ended up being really nice despite that, though the hurricane definitely affected the weather here. It was rainy and windy all weekend; usually it's sunny and hot here in the morning and afternoon, and then it rains later in the evening. It's nearly perfect weather.

Oh, I went to the ice cream shop that holds the Guinness Record for the most flavors of ice cream in the world! Anyone who can guess how many they have gets a cookie when I get back. Among the flavors being offered the day I went: cinnamon, passion fruit, salmon, shrimp, chicken and rice, garlic, ham and cheese, power ranger and I wait for you in bed (don't ask).

Haven't been blogging much because there is so much to talk about and so many things that happen every day, but obviously I can't write about everything! This past weekend felt like a turning point in my time here. It was by far my best weekend here - my best three days here, period - and I feel like I made it over some invisible hurdle of culture shock and homesickness. Obviously, it's not over just like that, it's a continual process of adjustment, but I finally feel like I've settled in here and started making connections with the culture and with people. There isn't as much struggle with certain aspects that were hard to deal with the first few weeks - like comments from guys here, and the noise, and getting stared at everywhere I go (seriously, it's like they've never seen an American before; sometimes I feel like I must have an ear growing out of my neck the way these people stare). Well, you get the idea. Anyway, now I feel like I just take all that in stride and can even laugh about it, and I feel at home now.

And there are still no parasites making a nice little home inside me! I did have a cold but it got better quite quickly. It feels like colds last longer at home, probably because it's cold and gray. But here in this land only five or so degrees north of the Equator, there is no way my pores could hold on to a cold forever.

In the meantime, I'm ruining my feet by wearing showah shoes all over the city. Anyone who read this entire blog also gets a cookie when I get home.

New on mostly true: Fun Venezuelan Facts! Time for a fun fact about Venezuela. Are you ready, kids?

You can't flush the toilet paper here because the plumbing can't handle it. TP goes right in the garbage. However, count yourself one of the lucky few if you happen upon a public bathroom that even has toilet paper. Or soap.

And in completely un-Venezuela related news...

Can this man be stopped? And do we really want him to be stopped? Look at that friendly Mormon face!

Merida is one noisy place, let me tell you. That has been one of the harder things to get used to, maybe more so than not having a car or not being able to use the phone or the language barrier. And by noisy, I mean, all the time noise. This noise doesn't stop when the work day is done nor when the sun goes down or even after a certain point in the middle of the night. This noise continues, round-the-clock. Cars zooming. Cars honking. People yelling at each other. The turkeys that live beneath me from dawn til dusk. Music being pumped at varying decibels at all times, from cars and from doorways, even on public buses. The bus drivers here love their merengue! Drunks wandering down the street at all odd hours of the night, singing very loudly. (Public drunkenness is a-okay here.) Dogs barking. Frogs that sound like birds and windchimes. And the pollution, which is another kind of noise. The por puestos (public buses) spew exhaust all over the road and I've had a sore throat every day since arriving. I've gotten used to it somewhat but there are moments when it's too much to take in, and I just want to find some private place to hide myself.

Then there are moments like this weekend. A bunch of people went to a National Park called Sierra La Culata. It's in the Andes and you get there by driving through a beautiful valley surrounded by the mountains. We took a rocky trail up through the valley, passing by groups of cows and houses with scary looking dogs tied up outside. And then I got stomach cramps and felt dizzy and almost passed out and had to stop. Which was really frustrating... but it's good that I didn't try to push it, as everyone else who went on ended up stopping as well. And Anna stayed with me while everyone continued on, and we just sat and watched the clouds roll by. They were so close it looked like you could touch them, and the air was so clean and it was so, so QUIET. Absolutely quiet. I also took a nap on some very soft grass, in between a couple of petrified cow pies, which was lovely. I imagine that's probably why the grass was so soft...

This is a place of such contrasts that it almost fails description. Things like that - the noise of the city and the secluded calm to be found only a half hour away - seem so normal here. It rained during the night on Saturday and when I woke up, there was snow up on the peaks of the mountains, and yet it was 77 F at 10 a.m. down in the city. Maybe it's just a big contrast for me... for instance, going up in the mountains I'm used to seeing things like pine trees and such... here, there are banana trees and riotous overgrowth of tropical plants and colorful flowers.

Anyway, classes have been fine (one was cancelled today, hence the blogging) and I would like to announce that so far, I am parasite-free! And injury-free! Hard to believe, I know. Alexis went to South America and has gone hiking and gone out dancing and has yet to hurt herself? Fascinating. You would be even more amazed if you could see the sidewalks here and what I navigate on a daily basis... tree roots have broken through the cement making the sidewalks a crazy rollercoaster ride for your feet. It's a good time.

Anywho, I have another class in a few minutes and I should get going. Chao!