My compliments to the abuela !

Throughout our trip, we've noticed that the best cooks are always men or grandmothers, never younger women. So we asked our Venezuelan friend Eduardo.  He says (though others dispute his claim) that here in Venezuela the young women do much less housework than in other machista Latin American countries.


Was Venezuela an anomaly in this part of the world, a bastion of feminism where household chores are equally shared between the sexes ?


- So what do the women here do ?, I foolishly ask.


- They look pretty, Eduardo responds.  And when they get old and ugly, they learn to cook !

Whale Song Contest

Now I always thought that cows and horses slept at night.  Cows sleep on the ground whereas horses sleep lying or standing, right ?


But here in Venezuela, high up in the Andes, they don't !  For two nights, we camped in the Parque Nacional de la Culata next to an old broken refuge that offered no refuge.  And those cows and horses spent the whole night next to our tent.  Any of those beasts could have easily tripped up one of the tent cords and flattened our nylon house.  Luckily, we survived both nights.


But on the second night, right there next to the refuge at 3 o'clock in the morning, those cows starting a Whale Song Contest.  Now I don't mean that they were moo-ing or lowing or even bellowing.  It was more like a cross between Heidi yodeling and Westley screaming in the Pit of Despair.  And let me tell you, I was scared !

The worst kind of wife...

Interestingly enough, the Spanish word for handcuffs, esposas, is the same word as for ''wives.''

What's your cédula ?

Since arriving in Venezuela, we’ve been on half a dozen buses, and more often than that to the supermarket.  And after almost every purchase, the bus driver / salesperson asks the same question : “What’s your cédula ?”


“What ?”


Cédulas rang a vague bell for me.  I remember in Spanish class that James Woods thought there were life-and-death important in the film Salvador.  But why would the overweight busdriver of the La Grita - La Fria line be asking me the same question as the right-wing death squads from El Salvador ?  Here's a little extract from the film :

What's going on here, man?

I think they're checking cédulas.

What's a cédula?

Birth certificates, voting papers.

If you don't have a cédula, you're in deep shit

Put your hands on your head.

"What's your cédula ?," he repeated.

I start looking for the nearest exit, ready to flee with my life.

“Identificacion, por favor.”

Ahhhh, thus I learned that, apparently, all Venezuelans have to carry national ID with them at all times and that someone keeps track of their movements and purchases.

Well, I didn't get shot or handcuffed, but I did receive a frustrated glance that he couldn't track my whereabouts and purchases.  Oh well, this story's not nearly as interesting as the movie.