Rapido Corren los Carros

There’s nothing like the first few weeks in a new country. Every sight, sound, smell and taste is new, exotic; the most ordinary tasks like catching the bus or ordering breakfast is an unpredictable and challenging event. It’s a lot like being a five-year old again: you can’t go anywhere or find anything without help from others, and attempts at communication are generally met with confusion and at times, amusement.

Time has flown by since I finished training and started a regular schedule at work. Now, at the end of my second week here, I finally feel like I’ve found a sense of rhythm and a certain level of comfort with my day-to-day life. I usually get up at about six in the morning and take the metro downtown, grabbing a pastry on the way before getting to work around 7 or 7:30, depending on where my class is scheduled. Like I said, many of my classes are one-on-one at large businesses, so I’ve had to figure out how to get to different parts of the city using the bus or the train. I’m lucky that this job forces me to get out of the center, where I’m surrounded by English speakers, and fend for myself in navigating the city. After getting lost about a half-dozen times I’ve become pretty confident about getting around here. My work day is totally dependent on when my classes are booked, so it can end anywhere from 1 to 9:30pm. So aside from the weekend my job has taken up most of my time, but I’ve managed to have a few interesting experiences anyway.

- On Monday morning, after refusing to even think about work over the weekend, I woke up to realize that I hadn’t prepared a thing for my first solo assignment at a bank that I had no idea how to get to. I went to the center extra early to try and piece together a lesson but got there to find the place still locked. While waiting for the other teachers to come I put together a make-shift lesson plan in my head, and then about 10 minutes before the appointment I was told by another teacher that the place was about 30 minutes away by train. Out of desperation I ran out to the street and hailed down a motorcycle taxi, who after looking at the address I scribbled down in my notebook handed me a helmet and told me to get on. Having never been on a motorcycle I clutched onto the guy as hard as I could with a bear hug (despite the fact that he was shouting at me to let go the whole time), while he weaved through cars on the highway at ridiculous speeds. I got there 20 minutes late to find that my student was also late, and avoided being caught unprepared by listening to his excuses until our time ended. As an added bonus I think I’ve gained some serious street cred – local people’s reactions to my moto-taxi experience have ranged from bursts of laughter to serious concern.
- During the weekend I went along with Augusto, my padrino (assigned buddy in AIESEC), and a few others from the club to a birthday party. The place was full of exchange interns from abroad and I had an amazing time – the local students dragged me to the dance floor and took turns teaching me salsa and meringue, and we danced until six in the morning.
- I finally worked up the nerve to try the infamous perro caliente (hot dog) from a street vendor. Though my stomach has a pretty impressive track record of avoiding traveler’s diarrhea in sketchy countries, it finally met its match here in Venezuela; for the first week I could only stomach about half of a normal meal. But after a week I felt confident enough to try the street food. The hot dogs here are loaded with about five different condiments and some kind of crispy potato chip, and on the stand there’s an assortment of about a dozen different sauces that people douse it with. It turned out to be pretty good and I think my stomach’s toughened up a bit more.
- Yesterday I went to a party at a co-worker’s place, and we spent the night drinking and listening to music by the pool until we crashed on the couch at five in the morning. We got up, made breakfast together, hung out at the pool until we got hungry again, then spent an hour making another meal. We spent the evening eating outside while admiring the view of the city from about 12 floors up. No one besides my friend from work spoke much English but I had an amazing day with them. I discovered some shared tastes in music, learned some new phrases, and even managed to convince them to jump off of a concrete platform above the pool while satisfying my jumping quota for Venezuela.

[view of the city from my friend's apartment]

After two weeks here, I’ve been pretty happy about my progress in Spanish. Though I still can’t really form sentences beyond “Hi, my name is…”, “I’m hungry,” and “What is that?”, my vocabulary and listening comprehension has been improving quickly. If people are speaking slowly I can usually figure out the topic of their conversation and I can also make sense of most signs and advertisements on the street. Today I was watching TV at my friend’s place with English subtitles, and was amazed at how many new phrases and words I picked up. I’m planning on adding movies with subtitles in my study routine in the future. The hardest part so far is dealing with the "rr" sound, which isn't in the English language but is in almost every sentence in Spanish. My friend suggested I try saying "Rapido Corren los Carros" (rolling your tongue with each "rr") for practice.

That’s all for now. I’m having a great time here and I couldn't be happier about coming. Hope everyone's well at home.

Cold Showers and the Present Perfect

[picture: view of Caracas from Mt. Avila]

Yesterday marked the end of my first week here, and I still haven’t found the time to even write about where I’m living or working, much less what I’ve been up to. Keeping up with a blog while traveling can be such a hassle but it really is worth the effort – it regularly forces you to think back on the things you’ve done and once it’s complete, it’s really a great memento of your experiences after going home.

Even though I expected the worst, I wasn’t quire prepared for the living situation here in Caracas. I’m staying in a single room on the floor above my host family, sharing a common kitchen and bathroom with a few other residents. Not only is the tap water undrinkable and hot water non-existent (yeah, even in the shower), the government had this awesome idea to save money by shutting off the water on the weekends. There were also talks of shutting off the electricity for four hours at a time every other day, but luckily they didn’t go through with it. (Turns out I arrived just in time for a pretty dramatic change in the local currency’s valuation, which is leading to fluctuations in the prices of daily goods. there's also been a lot of problems in energy and utilities, but I’ll talk more about that later). So my daily routine, after the first few soul-crushing experiences of taking a cold shower at six in the morning, includes heating up water in pots in the kitchen before showering and boiling water so I have something to drink. Security is a major concern in this city: though I live in the center of Caracas, which is considered to be much safer than the Eastern or Western ends, it’s not uncommon to have three or four gates/doors separating the street from the inside of a home, which is the case with my place. The fact that I need four different keys to enter my apartment from outside is both comforting and disturbing at the same time. On a brighter side, the family downstairs has been incredibly welcoming and warm. Vicky, my landlady who speaks zero English, lives with her husband, two daughters and grandson. Fortunately for me one of the daughters, Alkris, speaks a little bit of English so she helps me communicate when I need something.

As for my job, I’m working at a surprisingly nice building in the middle of the financial district downtown. I accepted a job at the Wall Street Institute as an English teacher without knowing much about the place, but it turns out it’s a pretty legitimate business. They’re one of the biggest global English-teaching franchises, and they cater to large corporations that want their workers to improve their English skills. So I spend about half of my time teaching in-center students, which have ranged from students in high school to 80-year olds, and the other half visiting clients in pharmaceutical companies, banks, etc., to teach on-site. The proficiency levels range anywhere from knowing nothing to conversational mastery, so I have to vary my lessons according to each student; luckily they have a really organized teaching method to make things easier. My training over the first week was super intense – I probably spent about 10-12 hours each day observing teachers and dove right into teaching classes after the second day. It’s been a humbling experience to see how little awareness I have about the technicalities of our language – being a native speaker doesn’t mean a whole lot if you can’t explain why things are the way there are to others. Words like past simple, present perfect, and gerund haven’t meant a thing to me since grade school and I’ve been repeatedly caught off guard by questions on terminology. Relearning everything will be a pain, but I think that learning to break down English to teach will help me understand the nuances of Spanish grammar as I learn it. It’s true in a sense that the best way to learn something is to teach it first.
[picture: Centro Lido, the building where I work]


So I haven’t had a chance to do much else besides work this week, but I’ll start a normal schedule starting Monday and hopefully try to find some sort of order in my life here. Again, and this seems to be a common thread in Venezuelan life, the people I’m working with and teaching are the only things that make it all worthwhile. The company recruits teachers from all over the world to expose students to different accents, so right now I’m working with a teacher my age from England, another from Romania, and a few others from here. Each day I have opportunities to have conversations on just about any topic (though they inevitably lead to a discussion about how awful the government is) with teenagers, college students, business executives, and elderly people. Venezuelan people in general love to tell you their opinions on politics, so I’ve learned quite a bit about Hugo Chavez’s exploits in recent years. But that’s a topic for another time…

Before I get used to everything, I’ll just jot down some of the things that I’ve noticed in the past week.

1. The most obvious, as I’ve mentioned, is the pervasiveness of the people’s disappointment and resentment toward Venezuela’s government and especially President Chavez. Talking about him is like a national pastime: in the classroom, at lunch, at the line in the grocery store, wherever.

2. Except for the gasoline, which is the cheapest in the world thanks to a government subsidy that makes zero sense to me, everything from food to clothing to entertainment is expensive. I expected to come here and eat like a king with the dollars I brought, but even after exchanging at a good price it’s impossible to live as well as I do in the U.S.

3. Despite the fact that crime here is among the highest in the world, people tend to be very courteous, warm and polite. I remember smiling to myself as I rode the elevator at work for the first time: when someone walked in and said “Buenas Dias (good morning),” everyone replied in unison. It happens every time. Men and women greet each other with a kiss, even if they've just met each other. It's an endearing practice that I've happily adopted.

4. Trends and fashions are a big deal. For example, everyone in the city has or wants a blackberry, though they cost about three times what it costs in the U.S.

5. Almost no one wears shorts, despite the fact that it’s always sunny and around 80 degrees.

6. Driving is a precarious endeavor: red lights are meaningless, highways are congested, and it seems that no one takes drunk driving seriously.

7. Salsa and meringue are on just about every radio station, and people break into dance at night wherever there’s music.

Anyway, I had a great week and I’m excited about the one ahead. Hope everyone’s well at home!

Shane

Arrival

Good morning! It’s 4:14 am as I’m writing this in my place in Caracas. I’m up at this ungodly hour because 1.) I still haven’t fully adjusted to the time difference and 2.) If the past several days are of any indication, the only time I’ll have to reflect and write on my experiences is at a time like this.

I’ve been in Caracas for four days now, and the best words to describe my time here so far also represent my initial impression of this city and country: chaotic, exhausting, but most of all, exhilarating. I arrived here on the 11th after a 30-something hour journey from Maui and since the moment I stepped foot into the airport, there hasn’t been a single dull moment. For anyone who hasn’t traveled alone to a foreign country, let me give you a taste of some of the unfortunate situations you might find yourself in. I got to the airport with explicit instructions to meet the people I’ve been in contact with at AIESEC, an international exchange club that I used to find the job here, and NOT to take a taxi because of safety concerns (apparently robbers and kidnappers stake out near the airport). I walked into the airport having lost about two days worth of sleep, carrying a stuffed backpack, a suitcase and a massive duffel bag with no local currency and nothing aside from a pocket phrasebook to help me talk to people. I couldn’t find anyone resembling the guy I talked to a few times on facebook prior to the trip, so I wandered around the airport for two hours racking my head to figure out a way to contact him, getting more and more nervous with each minute about being stranded in an airport in Venezuela, of all places. I couldn’t figure out how to use the payphone, so I exchanged the three dollars I had left in my wallet to get about 5 Bolivares Fuertes (an usurious exchange rate) and hobbled into an internet café with the improbable hope of finding an email telling me what was going on. With no such luck, I posted a status about my situation on facebook as a desperate attempt to keep some sense of humor about the situation, and retreated back to the middle of the waiting area in defeat. Fortunately, they arrived soon after and everything turned out fine.

My first impressions driving and walking through Caracas: sunny, crowded, busy, dirty, polluted, noisy, chaotic, strange, and lively. It’s the capital of Venezuela and a massive metropolitan city, sitting in a valley overlooked by a huge, green mountain that separates it from the Caribbean Sea. Tall, grey buildings and skyscrapers inundate the middle of the valley while overcrowded make-shift homes stack on top of one another in the shanty towns spanning the lofty hills. The streets and highways are constantly plagued by traffic and fumes, the inevitable result of inadequate infrastructure and the cheapest gasoline in the world (12 cents per gallon!). So yes, as you might imagine, Caracas is not the most beautiful place I’ve seen in my recent travels. But unlike the pristine coastlines of the Mediterranean or the beaches of Maui, this place has an incredibly vibrant and exciting feel. And the colors lacking in the buildings are more than made up for by the people. Venezuela has an incredibly diverse population, with immigrant populations from Spain, Italy, Africa, China, and all over South America. And with the year-round climate of a sunny and breezy 80 degrees, it certainly beats shivering in my apartment in Ithaca.

The people I’ve met so far, whether the other interns visiting Caracas, the local members of AIESEC, or the people I’m working with, have all been astonishingly friendly and interesting people. Just among the people my age, I’ve met a German girl who speaks four languages, a guy from England who regularly hops through parts of the city even locals avoid, and an oddly pale Venezuelan girl who, despite having grown up here, speaks flawless English with a British accent (for reasons unknown). There’s also another intern here from India whom I’ve yet to meet, and a co-worker from Romania. Everyone I’ve encountered has made me feel extremely welcome and I can definitely see myself enjoying the next four months here. Though my work schedule is a bit crazy, hopefully I can get out enough to see more of Venezuela outside of the city, because I’ve heard of so many things to see and do here – the highest waterfall in the world, the Amazon rainforest, and even a desert (a chance to go sandboarding, finally!) I’ll write more about the place I’m living in and my work place when I can, though I have no idea when that’ll be. Now, to get ready for my first English lesson…


the view outside my window

T- 24 hours

So as I mentioned, I want to use a part of this blog to keep track of my approach and progress in learning Spanish. It might be interesting for those planning to learn a language abroad, but otherwise you might want to skip over this stuff – it’s mainly for my use later. With that said, I guess it would make sense to note my starting point before I arrive in Caracas. I took two years of Spanish in high school, although I haven’t used a word of what I learned aside from the four days I spent in Spain, during which I mostly relied on a phrase sheet or other people.


This picture, the crushing result of my attempt to order iced coffee at a café, serves as a testament to the uselessness of my prior studies. So aside from maybe a few vocab words, it’s safe to say I knew next to nothing prior to the past two weeks I spent studying on my own.

Since I plan to learn more languages in the future, I want to figure out the most effective method for me personally to acquire a new language. After studying Tim Ferris (his blog, which I’ve linked on the right, and his book are amazing resources for avid travelers), I’ve come to believe that typical language classes by themselves are an ineffective way to acquire a new language for a multiple of reasons: they tend to focus on impractical material – for example, written vocab/grammar assignments that make things easy for the teacher to grade students, but don’t help to actually hold a conversation; they don’t offer the practice and exposure to native speakers that are necessary to understand and use proper pronunciation, colloquial speech and idiomatic phrases; and they move at a pace that accommodates the slowest learners in class.

So one of the major reasons I decided on this trip was because I think living in a country where the language is spoken is the fastest and most effective way to learn. Pareto’s 80/20 Principle (20% of an input produces 80% of the output) also applies to language learning – a select group of words makes up the vast majority of everyday conversation. So, I think the best initial approach is to focus first on learning the most commonly used words in the spoken language, which are easy to find by searching for usage frequency lists online, and to learn just enough common phrases to get conversations started. Beyond that, the fastest way to learn is to get out, talk to people, make friends, and make as many mistakes as possible. Avoiding embarrassment and the desire to have engaging conversations with the people you meet will be much more motivating than scoring high on a test. I’ll also see if I can supplement my experience with a language class there to speed up the process. Hopefully, I’ll be able to reach a decent level of conversational fluency by May. Of course, this is my first time learning a language as an adult so I have no idea how far I’ll get.

I’ve also been listening to an audio course by Michel Thomas, which I really enjoy so far and hope will cover the basics. But despite my efforts, I completely expect to be clueless during the first few weeks. I’ll be arriving in exactly 24 hours from now as I sit here writing this in L.A. Wish me luck!

Welcome (or bienvenido)

Tomorrow my short vacation at home on Maui comes to an end, and I'm off to a new adventure. Looking at my itinerary, the sheer distance I'll have to travel over the next few days has suddenly dawned on me. Kahului, to San Francisco, to Los Angeles, to New York; an international flight to Bogota, Colombia; then finally my destination and home for the next four months: Caracas, Venezuela. This one might actually beat my 30+ hour odyssey from Japan to Nova Scotia... not too excited about this part.

First a brief background on the trip, since I haven't explained to most people why I'm going where I'm going. I decided to do this months ago when I realized that, after graduating in December, I had an entire semester free before moving on to start a career. So, I figured, I can spend five more months suffering through another brutal Ithaca winter, or I could get out and see another part of the world. After a little research I settled on becoming an ESL teacher, and decided this was a great chance to try my hand at independent, extended overseas travel (which I've been reading about obsessively recently, via Tim Ferris and Rolf Potts), where I would be forced to adopt a new language, adjust to a change in lifestyle, and integrate myself into a completely foreign culture. Venezuela was the first offer I got and a perfect match: the only thing I know about the country is that they speak Spanish, which I've been meaning to learn. If all goes well, for the rest of my life I'll know I have what it takes to just take off to a place I know nothing about for months at a time. And that, I think, is worth more than anything I could learn or accomplish by spending another five months at school.

I'll be using this blog from time to time to let friends and family know I'm still alive, reflect on my progress in language acquisition and cultural assimilation, and maybe recount some stories about the inevitable battles with TD (you SASers know what I'm talking about) or other unexpected events that come my way. I plan to have many more extended trips like this over the course of my life, so this will serve as a kind of test run to learn and experiment with. Thanks for reading, and leave some comments - I'd love to hear from home!

P.S. For those of you who have no clue what or where Venezuela is (like me a few months ago), here's a cool map.