What About Caracas?
Thursday, August 18th, 200517 August 2005 (Wednesday) – Caracas, Venezuela
What about Caracas, indeed? I really have to admit, I had absolutely zero idea about this city before I came. So, I was really delighted these past few days to make little discoveries about it, comparing its similarities and differences with other cities that I know, noting its own little idiosyncracies. OK, I am here for just a few days, I am probably not going to get everything right but this is my travelblog and hence, my observations.
‘Chevere’
Just like the Argentines have their ‘Che’ (hey, friend, etc…) and the hand-shaped-like-a-chicken-head-and-rocking-to-and-fro gesture and the Brazilians have their ‘Ta’ (OK) and their thumbs-up sign, the Venezuelans have ‘Chevere’. They use it all the time to describe something or someone good, to end a conversation, anything.
– Did you sleep well last night? Yes, chevere well.
– I have a friend, very chevere, who is now working for…
– OK, thank you, yeah… see you later, chevere.
Very Caribbean
The mood I get in Venezuela was very different from Brazil. One of the things I noticed was that many people had called out ‘¡China!’ at me. This never happened to me in Brazil. But here, like in Cuba and in Mexico, people just amused themselves by hollering out to women, Chinese, or whatever.
And also, I saw piñatas!! These are the toys that get hung at the ceiling during children’s parties and the children would whack and whack, blindfolded, til the toys shatter, raining down sweets and toys. How very Caribbean!
Telephone tables
Gosh… Remember that last Sunday when I arrived at the bus terminal and I bought a telephone card but found that I could not use it on any of the public telephones? At that time, I just thought something happened to the telephone network in that area. Later, I tried to use it a few times, and to my disappointment, I kept encountering problems at various telephone booths.
Now today, I walked from Capitolio metro more or less down Av. Universidad to Parque Carabobo, gosh… I was actually very surprised at the NUMBER of telephone tables set up along the entire downtown area. On these telephone tables, the ‘operators’ would place a few cordless phones and a handful of cellular phones. I had mentioned 2 days ago something about people setting tables up for passers-by to use the phones but gosh, these people were just merely 5 metres or less away from one another! What competition!!!! They were EVERYWHERE!! And then, I later learnt that the reason why the public telephones do not work was because these telephone ‘operators’ hijacked the lines destined for these public telephones to be used for the lines on their own telephones. Sheesh…
Food and Drinks
Arepas must be the traditional favourite food item here. It is a round bland tortilla-looking thing made from wheat and thick enough to be sliced or ripped open. In-between, the Venezuelans would put the yummy fillings that can be anything, from tuna to cheese to chicken to meat to eggs…
The Maltin Polar Ice malta drink was also something that I had, so far, only seen in Venezuela. I later learnt that it came from Germany. These were drinks bottled in a dark-coloured bottle. At first, I was shocked to see parents buying these drinks for their kids as it looked positively alcoholic. When I decided to try it today, I realised it was advertised as beer without alcohol. Hated it.
Chicha de arroz is a refreshing drink made from boiled rice, milk, sugar and chopped ice, after it was way overcooked and blended. You can see chiceros which are chicha sellers along the streets or in the malls. I tried one with a sprinkling of cinnamon. Loved it.
Coffee, taken here in Venezuela, is almost always black, and they often come in plastic cups just a little over an inch tall, much like a shot-glass. How very tiny.
Here’s a listing of more of Venezuelan cuisine.
‘Interesting’ Sights
I was very pleasantly surprised by a series of murals painted by a genius cartoonist along Av. Mexico, to the west of Parque Carabobo. There was no mention of these murals in the guidebook or whatever, of course, but to me, they must be the most delightful things I saw today.
The cartoonist drew the history of South America, particularly of Venezuela, in a continuum of caricatures and various representative symbols. He started with when the Spanish conquistadores arrived; when the El Dorado (Gold Fever) hit them, creating a horrid part of the South American history as they tried to hunt for this mythical place, resulting in the deaths of thousands of native Indians; then mestizos were created with the unions of the Indians and the Europeans; slavery; evangelists preaching about Catholism to the natives; Simon Bolivar and his war that eventually gave birth to the independence of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia; etc…. There was even a picture of a military general sitting on a barrel of OIL. To me, it is indeed a very beautiful mural with deep meanings.
The other… ahem… ‘interesting’ sight I went to was Parque Central. In the map, I thought Parque Central was a really huge park, with some greenery at least. Gosh, how wrong I was! It actually was a huge massive series of inter-connected buildings, very very grey, ugly and old. At the basement, there was a maze of shops and restaurants but I was highly amused by how RETRO this place looked. It was built in the 1960s and has two of the tallest towers in Venezuela. One of the towers, Torre Este, had a huge fire in October 2004 on the top handful of floors, and so, that part of the ‘park’ is a complete disaster now as workers closed up certain areas to restore the tower.
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