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!

Another little adventure

"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun."

Christopher McCandless

So...uh...whaddya do up der in da winter?

And so travel season begins again.. the snow has finally melted, the trees are finally looking less sickly, and the bunny rabbits that inhibit my garden no longer leave tiny paw prints up the front steps. Spring has sprung.
So I guess the natural question is, what the heck did you do this winter?

Well, a lot. I could put up rather unfortunate pictures of me studying, watching Hulu, or I could give you a little look into the beautiful places I had the great fortune to travel to, and always in good company.

Let's start with Christmas Break:
The Brule river, where I spend every summer and winter with my parents, learning the words of the woods and the flow of the river.


Old man winter and I went out on the river on a cool crisp January day, drinking in the sunlight and spotting many eagles perched high in the pines.


I hung out at home, watched the snow fall, and fall, and fall once more. Only one "half day", first time in decades that the U of M has even closed for part of the day. The roads were so dangerous to drive on one day that pedestrians were found walking down the middle, mostly because there were no sidewalks to be found.