Rancho Grande

On Sunday F and I went with his cousin and his girlfriend to Rancho Grande. Rancho Grande is a biological station within the Henri Pittier national park. It was originally built as a hotel by a dictator in the 1960s, but what with military coups, changes of dictatorship and whatnot, it was never finished and was left to go to ruin. Somewhere along the lines the Universidad Central took over the top floor and they use it as a study centre, and the national park guards use the bottom floor. The building hasn´t been refurbished however and it is like a secret ruin hidden in the hills. There were quite a few birdwatchers waiting for birds to arrive (there is some incredible quantity of birds there apparently) and a couple of park guards but it was basically deserted.


We did see some pretty cool birds and also an amazing butterfly when had beautiful orange and black wings and when he closed them he looked just like a leaf. Amazing.


Also on the wildlife front we found clumps of bats sleeping in the old cookers in the kitchen. Yuk yuk. I still haven´t got over the time a bat fell on my head in the church porch.

Driving

When I first got here I´d forgotten what a terrifying experience being on the roads here is. Drivers pay absolutely zero attention to traffic lights or who might have right of way. It´s like an endless game of "chicken" to see who will get out of whose way first. However, it´s only taken me about a week and I´ve managed to develop an immediately attainable state of zoned-outness every time I get in a car. I blithely watch the cars whizzing past about 20 centimetres from where I´m sitting and I don´t even flinch. Perfect.

The other thing I´d forgotten was the Venezuelan penchant for keeping the world and his dog up to date on what is going on in their lives by scrawling it across their windscreens. It´s like an extension of the facebook status update. The updates can be anything from celebrations: "my daughter is graduating" or "my grandson is starting school" to more everyday occurences: "we´re going to the beach". The funniest one that Guillermo told me he´d seen said, "At last! My mother-in-law is dead!"

Coffee!

Last night Novio and I started to produce our own coffee. Well, perhaps that is a bit of a misleading statement. We have not started any kind of large scale production, nor have we sown any coffee seeds, but his dad has a couple of coffee plants in the garden and has a couple of pots of beans that he´d already harvested.I love coffee and drink it endlessly. I also have a fascination with all things coffee related from cafés to coffee cups and the beans themselves and the sacks that they store them in and the haciendas where they grow them. Last year I visited a café hacienda with my sister in Colombia and it was fascinating.

The coffee process from this stage is that we have to crush the beans to get the top layer of shell off, then the second layer. Then we have to separate the clean beans from the outer shell. Then we will toast them and then we will grind them and then we will make delicious coffee.

Filled with enthusiasm we began our crushing...

...which consisted of putting the beans in a pot and using a large and heavy gardening implement. Fairly quickly are initial enthusiasm gave way to sore hands and aching arms. We only managed to crush about a third of the coffee we had. We will undertake phase 2 (the rest of the crushing) tonight.... At the current phase we have acheived what looks like a bucket of pebbles.


Novio´s dad (El Suegro) says that there is nothing better than drinking a cup of coffee that you have grown and harvested and crushed and roasted and ground yourself. I may not have done the sowing or harvesting but with my achy arms and sore hands I think that this is definitely going to be the hardest I`ve ever worked for a cup of coffee. I can´t wait for the first cup!

Nutricious-delicious

Last night I went to the supermarket with Novio and his cousin to buy the ingredients for a Shepherds Pie. I said that today in the morning I would stay at home and cook them a delicious-nutritious Shepherds Pie for when they came home at lunchtime. Alas, the supermarket did not have any butter, margarine or milk so I fear my delicious topping of creamy mash might not be as creamy and smooth as I had hoped for. Novio´s cousin helpfully pointed out that if we went to a Mercal, then we would be able to get the required ingredients at cheap (government subsidised) prices. He may be right, but having struggled through from 6am to 8pm just wanting to go back to bed, the thought of joining the Mercal mega-queue to get my litre of milk and 250g of butter was not an appealing one.

This morning I decided to go into the office rather than stay at home. Novio and I dropped his sister off at the office and then went to buy us some breakfast. We had empanadas which is a very typical breakfast here. It is a flour, water and sugar dough, filled with cheese, meat, fish or beans and then deep fried. Delicious-not-nutricious!! When I was here a year ago, if I ever ate empanadas I used to pay 3-5 bolivars for them. Today we saw some in the supermarket for 10 bolivars, and the ones we eventually bought from an empanaderia were 7. Still, after a year without eating empanada, I was most willing to spend (Novio´s) 7 bolivars to get my mitts on that greasy goodness! Enak enak. (I also rang Freddy and told him the shocking news about the price of empanadas but he assured me that in Caracas in the place under his flat you can still buy a big empanada for 5 bolos. Phew.)

We went to a different supermarket this morning and managed to get some milk, although alas no butter still. The girl in front of us at the til was sporting some very tight lycra clothing and had rather large breasts (not real ones). She also had her mobile phone stuffed into her bra and peeking out of the top. The cleavage is quite a popular place to keep mobile phones here. I´m not sure why it is preferable to a pocket or a bag…maybe it makes pick-“pocketing” harder. Anyway, as the girl finished paying and walked out of the supermarket the boys who pack the bags were all sitting by the window. Novio said to watch them and as she walked past every head swivelled around to follow her out of the shop. I initially was filled with feminist outrage at the objectification of women but actually had to concede that it was an amusing sight. It did reminded me of a conversation I had with an English friend here last year. He´d taken an English conversation class with some girls at the Central University (one of the best in the country) and they´d been discussing plastic surgery. Henry described them as really intelligent, “sassy” women and he said that what they told him was that a lot of men here tend to stray from their relationships and that even though women know that they are doing it, that a lot of them (although by no means all) tend to accept it so that they end up in these kind of semi-bigomous relationships. I don´t know why this is….perhaps just because of the practical difficulties of life as a singleton. I know one friend of Novio´s is in the process of divorcing her husband who was cheating on her. Her mother tells her that she is wrong to do it though – she married him and she should therefore stay with him as she made those vows for life. I´m not sure how they explain why the vows don´t apply to him too though… The next conclusión that Henry and his sassy ladies reached was that women tend to slice themselves up and undergo major surgical procedures in an attempt to meet the “ideal” image of a women and thereby discourage their partner from straying. I know that men everywhere cheat, and I know that women everywhere strive for particular images that are promoted to us as ideal, but here it is done so openly – the cheating and the extreme actions to be the most “attractive”. I´m sure it is only a matter of time before someone helpfully suggests a boob job to me as it used to happen quite often. At least then I would have somewhere new to keep my phone.

Heat and monkeys

It´s wierd but there are lots of things that I had forgotten about here. Or rather, I knew that they were like this in a kind of abstract way, but I´d forgotten what it was actually like. For example, the heat. I mean, obviously it is hot here. But it had been "hot" in England before I left (for 2 consecutive days!!!), but that is nothing like the heat here. The heat here is like a pressure you can feel in your whole body. But I like it....

I think that I´ve managed to get my body clock in time with Venezuelan time now, after waking up wide awake at 6am yesterday, and then wanting to go back to bed just as we had to leave for the office at 9am.

I´d also forgotten the people who sell food and drink outside their houses or in the street. Well, I´d remembered that there were people doing that, but I´d forgotten actually seeing someone with one small ice box and a scrap of old card with "Cold fizzy drinks" scrawled on it. I always remember asking Novio about the people who sell toy monkeys at the traffic lights when they go red. I mean, if they are selling a toy monkey for say, 25 bolivars (and to be honest I am not sure of the market value of a toy monkey in Venezuela these days), they would need to sell 31 each month to reach the minimum wage. But, I ask myself, how many Venezuelans as they pull up at a red traffic light (if they bother to stop for the red light that is), see the man and his monkeys and think to themselves "ah yes, that´s what I meant to do today - buy myself a toy monkey"? (Having said that, I did buy one for F as a present!) If at least 3 people a day are inspired to buy one then that chap might be able to make minimum wage. But I earned well over the official minimum wage last year and I still struggled to make ends meet, and that was just for me, let alone a family as well. I wonder how the monkey man or the lady with the cool box big enough for maybe 4 cans of coke at a time, makes ends meet. I have no idea.