I Live Vicariously Through Me: Venezuela- a slightly less depressing retrospective

Now that I have told you about all the horrible things that happened to us in Venezuela I can show you some pictures and discuss the good times we had there. We could no longer afford to travel to the south and climb the table top mountains we´d planned on climbing, but we could afford to sit on a beach all day and thats largely what we did for the next four weeks.

Sante Fe is a small crappy little fishing town that doesn´t feel safe to walk around during the day and it is highly advisable not to walk around outside your hostel at night, but it does have beautiful beaches. During the week there were maybe a handful of other locals and tourists on its long stretch of golden sand. During the weekend maybe there was 20 people. It was relaxing and a good place to try and forget about being robbed.

You might see these pictures and think Venezuela can´t be so bad afterall. We often laughed at ourselves when we´d be sitting on these amazing beaches talking about how much we hated being there and wanted to leave. Similar to the times I´d complain about my steak being overcooked at Google.

The thing you have to realize is that when you get up off the beach and turn away from the crystal clear water is that you´re in Venezuela and not some modern first world country. Everytime we wanted to brush our teeth or flush the toilet in Santa Fe we had to ask the hostel owner to turn the water on. Every hotel room we stayed in had cockroaches, even the ¨nicer¨ ones. Buying a ticket for the ferry took us four and a half hours because the computer system went down. The food is bland and the men are disgusting. I´ve gotten used to South American men oggling Gemma. She´s beautiful and fair skinned and much different then the women they see everyday. But in Venezuela they are the worst. And here I thought I wasn´t going to make this a negative post. Ha, moving on.

Venezuela´s sport of choice is baseball. Some Venezuelan students returned from universities in America with baseball bats and gloves in the 1890´s and its been popular ever since. They have a professional league there with ten or so teams. We were in Puerto La Cruz home of the fighting Caribes and decided to go to a game. We bought the cheapest seats in the house (maybe 2 dollars) out in the outfield but when we walked through the gate a nice employee told us our seats were terrible and gave us house tickets behind home plate.

It was alot like attending a minor league game back home. The ballpark was roughly equal in size to Victory Field in Indiana although far less nice. It was Gemma´s first baseball game. They played the same reggaetron music the entire game and the teams mascot got down and dirty with some female fans. In the pic below he´s grabbing this girls head and pushing it down to his thusting pelvis.

Here he is behind another gal gettin low. Pretty comical stuff. They played Take Me Out to the Ball Game during the seventh inning stretch but it was a reggaetron version and no one sang the words except us. They would have to change the words from ¨buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks¨to buy me some arepas and fried doughy things filled with cheese.¨

Here´s the arepa stand.

One really random place we went to in Venezuela was a small German town of 6,000 people called Colonial Tavar. It was settle by Germans in 1843 and remained isolated from the rest of Venezuela until they built a road there in 1960. It was really charming and crazily expensive. There was black forrest architecture everywhere. It was entirely possible to forget that you were in Venezuela because it was so isolated from the other towns and looked exactly like a wealthy little town in Germany. Unfortunately most of our pictures from our time there were on my camera which got stolen in Buenos Aires before I could upload them.