Mercado Central

Today I'm going to take you on an adventure. You don't have to put on your seat belt (don't worry, I wear one whenever possible, even though it's rare to find a taxi driver who wears theirs here). We're going to walk through small urban streets, a few food vendors on either side, and around the corner we can faintly hear the thumping music from multiple radios. We've found the mercado, or market. On the outside, it looks like a maze, with many passageways and too many vendors to count (though not nearly as intimidating as the grand bazaar in Istanbul. Don't worry, this is manageable. After all, this is only Anaco.

Imagine a large football field-sized market area, with aluminum covered open-sided buildings each holding different varieties of food or produce.

As we enter the market, the first thing we notice is all of the produce, with the bold smell of fresh pineapple and guava almost smacking you on the face when you step up onto the hard concrete.  This part of the market is divided solely by long skinny tables, overflowing with lettuce, tomatoes, green onions, carrots, bananas, papayas, limes, passion fruit, guavas, and pretty much every kind of melon, and multiple men and women behind each shouting (however lovingly) to come to their table to buy their produce. 

To buy this lovely food, you put as much as you want in plastic bags, then eventually hand it to them, and they weigh it all together on hanging scales. They then estimate how much they want to charge you for it. A whole weeks worth of veggies and fruit to fill up a backpack and both of my hands costs a total of about 170bs, or a little under six dollars.The bags are heavy, and pockets only slightly lighter, but still full of bills, because the smallest bill here is 2 bs (or about 12 cents)

As you wonder further into the market, the aroma overwhelms you, pescado. (or pfish as my three year olds would say). Here you can also buy as much meat or fish as you want- I only bought chicken. It is actually cheaper to buy the whole chicken (already de-feathered but whole body in tact minus the head and feet.. but don’t worry, they sell the feet), a whole chicken costing a gringa like me a whole 1$. Though the currency exchange makes everything extremely cheap for me, for Venezuelans it doesn’t necessarily make everything as cheap (depending on how much they get paid or their wages have changed with inflation).

Most likely we will also grab a bite to eat at the mercado, from one of over 50 kiosks, all selling empenadas, tequenos, arepas, or another deep fried Venezuelan delicacy.. Yesterday we had empanadas, a deep fried pastry filled with a meat of your choice, we had chicken. We also had some freshly made passion fruit juice..mmmmmm.

The walk to the market, which was a little over half an hour, helps to burn some of the built up calories  from the empenadas and overly-sugared “natural” juice.But don't worry, on the way home we'll take a taxi.. that half a water-melon the size of both my femurs is pretty heavy.

I hope that you can see the colors of this market. The blood from the chicken stained lightly on the counters of the chicken market, the brown grit on the ground of all of the left-over fruits and vegetables trampled on by soft flip flops, day after day. The stark contrast of fresh watermelons piled in the back of a pick-up truck, to the fly-covered dried fish with a name I don’t understand and am not yet brave enough to try.

The market is a place of colors, of smells beyond your imagine (and no mom, not nearly as poor of smells as Dhaka.. only the potent smell of fish), and of joyous noise. Young kids run around chasing each other and offering you large plastic bags to carry all of your produce for a mere two or four Bs.

I hope you enjoyed your time at the market, now to make some watermelon juice! Ciao!

This is the universal sign for.... let's do another round.

It's 7:30 pm, it's been pitch black for about an hour, but it's still 84 degrees outside, but the high was 93 degrees earlier today. It's Monday, which means that I didn't have any classes in the afternoons and was lesson planning/grading/ meeting with our school director from noon to five pm (yes I'm aware, school ends at three...). The week started out well, however I did have to put multiple students in time out today.
I had a new student added to my class today, he is pretty darn cute but it's amazing for me to see how my three year olds already have the systems down and know how to sit at a table or how to line up at the door. They did well at helping him out, pictures to come soon! We are starting a unit on animals today... I really wish that I could take my kids to a farm or a zoo, they certainly would remember the animal names and noises then! We see our friend Mr. Owl (there are at least three Mr. Owls outside our classroom) who we say hi to almost every day and we count them, and we know how they flap their wings and one of my sweet little ones even recognized how these beautiful burrowing owls wriggle their bodies.

My writing classes has been fairly easy so far, especially since I'm getting a feeling of how competent my students are, what their strengths are, and what kind of support they are going to need. None of my students are native English speakers, which actually makes it easier to help them with their writing because they associate their mistakes with being an ELL learner instead of an incompetency. I will have to share some of their writing eventually, because I've already received some really great responses to our daily writing prompts.

On a balmier and more tropical note, the three other new teachers and I rented a taxi and headed out to Lecheria, this time for the whole weekend. We went out the first night and had some delicious pizza from a popular restaurant just off the main street in Lecheria about twenty minute walk away from our beach house's compound, passing the golf course and the a 15 foot deep hole in the middle of the side-walk which is now entitled "big ****'ing hole by one of my co-workers. After scarfing down some dinner, we attempted to get our bill, with me attempting to translate. Our wonderful waiter was aware that we had another waiter refilling our bills, so instead of bringing us a total of six beers, he made sure we only had four or five between the four of us. This brought us to thinking that when it was time for the bill, doing the universal signal for encircling the group to mean "put the bill together", he thought *of course they want to do another round*... we laughed it off and drank our cervezitas.

We then headed out to grab another tiny beverage on the steps of the restaurant/shop area and ended up being lured into conversation by some Venezuelan guys who were trying to hit on my friend Shannon. Once she explained to them in spanglish that her husband Jay was standing next to her, they stopped talking to us for a total of 20 minutes... we then chatted it up again when I realized one of the guys was saying some things in English. I asked "porque tu hablas ingles?" and he responded "because I'm English". We met the one guy from Manchester living in Lecheria, working at a software company (we think). We ended up hanging out with this group of Venezuelan/foreigner gentlemen for a couple of hours, and went to another bar with them. We ended up going home around 1:30 and crashing until the next morning. We spent five hours on the Lecheria beach eating fresh avocado with chips and getting supremely sunburnt.

Hope you enjoy these photos as much as I enjoyed my weekend.

First Day of School|

After spending my entire Sunday decorating my classrooms…yes I do have more than one… I went home, had a beverage, and prepared myself for the fact that I have indeed, become a teacher.

I did pretty darn well for not having our class’ schedule until 7am and having my assistant only a little exhausted after she and her family drove from the coast just this morning at 4am! I have eight beautiful and smart 3 year olds, all of whom had my assistant as their teacher last year, so they know her well. I convinced most of them to call me Ms. Morley or some variation thereof instead of “teacher”. I also taught many of them how to count to 5, though I’m not sure they understand what that actually means! I had 3 hours of prep today, which I used very well as I didn’t have most of my curriculum or planning available until Sunday when I found the class outlines and the Understanding by Design models used by our school.

So I survived. No crying from the kids during the day, only a few spills, and most of them actually listened to me! Here are a few pictures of the school grounds and of the drive from Puerto la Cruz to Anaco.

 

 Elementary classrooms...my writing classroom is just a little further down

  

View of outdoor cafeteria patio and lower elementary wing in the background

 View of the front of the school

 View of the front of Matts apartment, mine is just next door on the right

Where I play basketball a few days a week

Perks

One of the many perks of living in a foreign country where you haven’t known everyone around you longer than two weeks, you’re struggling significantly with the language, and you spend almost all of your time in a confined compound that is both your residence and your workplace, is that sometimes, just sometimes, the employer that allows you to be in such a situation, feels bad for you, and allows you to stay on the weekends in their beach house on the Caribbean coastline, with a bike culture, good sea food, and lots of beautiful beaches.

We call it Puerto; it’s official name, Puerto La Cruz (the area where our beach house is in is actually Lecheria…but let’s not get too technical). The other new staff members and I, along with some of the returning staff including our amazing secretary, her daughter, and the director, drove us out to Lecheria last weekend to see the 4 bedroom house which is a 2 minute walk from the beach. Yep..life’s hard.

Food poisoning and school starting

I´m going to attempt to ignore the fact that the entirety of my last post was about food, considering this post may also be about food...but more so about my body´s rejection of some of this amazing food.

Alright, the past 48 hours have been somewhat of a blur…. mostly because of all of the great activities I have taken part in, but moreover because of the intensely strong and impressively defeating food poisoning I obtained on Tuesday night. We’re still not sure what caused it, but I can say I lost some quick weight in a very short period of time.  I took the day off of orientation to take care of my body, much needed, but I certainly became acquainted with my house (more so my bano).

Over the past few days I have been going through orientation (nothing too exciting about that)… We have been working on getting our classrooms ready to go for school to start on Monday- I am not quite ready for either of my rooms, but we are getting there, slowly but surely. I have a lot to learn from the other teachers, but fortunately I have a lot of freedom in my curriculum for the writing classes I am going to be teaching in the afternoon (3^rd and 4^th grade together, and 5^th and 6^th grade together). The mornings will be what zaps my energy, as I will have Pre-K 3 year olds all morning every day, with my wonderful assistant Arianna, who is from Venezuela, has a high school daughter here at the school, and worked with all of our students last year in the nursery, so she knows all of them!

I told you we were going to have this conversation

Today most of what I thought about...was food. Many people in my life have informed me that they only spend time with me due to my voracious appetite and my interest in anything edible- so I'm going to talk a bit about Venezuelan food, and the markets in which one can find them.
Today we visited the mercado centrale, while is apparently open on Saturdays and Sundays, and it had anything local that is grown that you could want.
I purchased
-guavas
-avocados (GIANT AND DELICIOUS)
-peppers
-lettuce
-green onions
-limes
-little bananas

The opportunity for fresh fruits and veggies is amazing in this market, all covered but fairly "open-air", heavy with Venezuelan radio and vendors yelling "mira" or the prices of their foods, and the smell of pineappele and guava heavy in the air. In other parts of the market is the fish (Venezuelan is big on fish and seafood..hopefully soon I can convince myself i am capable of cooking fish), the meat market (lots of blood, pig heads, feet, and lots of really bloody meat). At the market our director bought Matt and I cachapas, a sweet corn-bread dish with sweeter cheese on top... it was OK but the corn was very heavy for me and as it was freshly cooked, it was very warm on top of the 80 degree weather!



For dinner the director and his wife had us over for tequenos, a deep fried pastry with cheese inside, and a green sauce to put on top (cilantro, green onions and other ingredients..we labeled it green goo). This coupled with some brownies and two glasses of peruvian white wine, and it's been a great food day.

¡Bienvenidos a Venezuela!

My first full day in Venezuela was full of adventure... if by adventure you mean waking up at 10am after one of my co-workers knocked on my door and rang the doorbell to have me join him at the director's house for breakfast. I spent the morning unpacking my bags, and exploring my fantastic new apartment. It has two bedrooms, both with full size beds (for all of my visitors...), two bathrooms, a really big shower, a living room with a giant tv and cable, a kitchen with a frigo, dining room table, and wifi internet (whenever the power is on).

The school is in a fairly commercial area, with government housing units nearby. The school area is entirely enclosed by a large concrete wall with barbed wire around it. Inside are large beautiful trees, many of which are mango or lime, and all of which have many colorful birds (mostly yellow).

After eating some breakfast (a cheese, ham, and red pepper spread sandwich), I headed off with a few others to explore all of the grocery stores and food/liquor shops in the area. Pretty much anything you'd want to find, you can find in the pharmacy or large grocery store, almost exactly a mile away from the school along Avenido Jose Antonio Anzoategui. I bought a few items to add to my stache, including 6 bottles of some of the cheapest beer I've ever found that still tastes like beer...about 10 cents per beer.

We also filled up the tank for gas in the director's car.. for 25 liters of gas, it was almost 5.5 bolivars, the equivalent of about 15 cents. I was baffled. More on government surplus and inflation later.
I spent the rest of my evening hanging out with the high school literature teacher Matt, who is from New York, and wondering how one can feel so tired and ready for bed at 7:45pm. 

End of one chapter; start of another

Time to start writing again, a task I did not take the time to do nor did I find relevant when living in Duluth, Minnesota. For the past two years I have been serving in the AmeriCorps program- Promise Fellows at a public middle school in Duluth, working with 7th and 8th grade students, and they taught me far more than I ever could have taught them. We did awesome service projects, I coached 7th grade girls basketball, and I am super happy to get to know such an impressive group of young people.

There will likely be more posts about my AmeriCorps experience and how it helped to get me to my next adventure: Venezuela.

I will spend (at least) the next ten months:

-bumbling around Anaco, Venezuela

-learning as much español as possible

-sweating

-teaching pre-kindergarden and elementary writing to wonderful kids

-making guava smoothies 

I arrived at the Barcelona airport, about 60km from Anaco, on Friday August 2nd. It was over 80 degrees outside when we finally touched down. I arrived with two other teachers, one returning, one new to the game, who I met up with in Miami. We were selected by the customs officials to go through the line in front of many others (apparently they can even smell the gringos), and with a quick "si, si, soy tourista" we were (mostly) legally allowed into Venezuela.

 Getting our bags was an amusing feat- imagine an airport baggage claim, but without the carousel. The bags were chucked through the hole in the wall, and all of the passengers swarm around the hole, happily pulling out their own bags and passing the ones that aren't theirs to those behind them. The majority of the bags are wrapped in thick plastic wrap, so it was relatively easy to find my giant duffel bags. Once we found all of our stuff, we met the director of the school who was waiting at the arrivals gate. We quickly piled our stuff into the truck and drove for an hour to Anaco and onto the grounds of the school!