CHRISTMAS IN THE TROPICS
La Guardia, Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, Thursday, 21 December 2006

It is hard to believe that Christmas is only a few days away. La Guardia and Porlamar seem a lot busier since the past weekend with more modern cars bearing mainland-province license plates more in evidence. The drivers seem more aggressive, too. We suddenly realise that the many beach houses that have been barred and shuttered since we arrived nearly two months ago, are actually inhabited. We notice this when we meander down to the nearby beach for our daily dip. School is out: there are a lot more kids playing down at the beach, sometimes tots with their mothers and fathers in tow. The cyber café has become constantly filled with clamouring 10 and 14-year-olds from early opening to late in the evening.

Our friend Jens is busily trying to wrap up his work and prepare for his Friday-night departure to Germany. He will be gone for about two months. In the meantime, we shall be helping out at his posada (pension) by picking up and dropping off guests at the airport or ferry. To this end Jens frequently comes by on short notice and whisks me off to the airport or various ferries to explain the drill. We already have a set of keys for his house and cars and we will keep his little car at Venamor.

One of the projects I have been eager to see finished is the installation of new storm drains for the patio. The hard part was getting it started but today, Francisco and Chilo will complete the job and will have also installed new lighting for the dark driveway where village people walk through at night and, more threateningly to us, where some drug dealing and drug stashing is done. Occasionally some people have been using the alley as a convenient toilet as well.

It has taken the guys two weeks but not only have more-than-adequate drainage pipes been placed under the patio but there they have even opened a direct hole in the wall for real Deluges and built a very large open culvert down the side of the house to the street to carry off nearly anything Mother Nature can throw at the house. Since a heavy tropical rain can come at any time of the year, I am glad to have the job done before Jens leaves.

Yesterday afternoon Jose (a.k.a. “JR”) and his wife Amelia drove by unannounced (how would they announce themselves anyway except to come by?) to invite us to a fiesta at their house in the village on Friday evening. Their children are all going to be there for Christmas and I assume there might be some who speak English. Neither Jose nor Amelia speak anything but Spanish. Actually, maybe Amelia is multilingual. But she generally just smiles seraphically and says nothing: that’s all right since Jose, 75, is exceedingly sociable and extroverted. He fancies himself a singer, we think, which is part of our attraction for him. I promised him I would sing at his 76th birthday on 03 February but, as Kathleen pointed out, probably Jose wants to sing. We are taking Jens to the aeropuerto for a 2200 Condor flight that evening so we said we would bring him first to the party, too.

Tonight, in fact, we are having an Abschiedsfeier for Jens. We agreed to have it at Jens’ own place. He has a German couple stopping, paying guests here for a month of vacation with their small child. We want to meet them, too. We’ll throw together some food and grill some meat on the BBQ set-up that Jens is so justifiably proud of. With the building work done at Venamor and Jens in Europe, we shall no doubt find life less interesting. Jens would come by once or twice a day ostensibly to check on Francisco’s and Chilo’s progress and sit around chewing the fat with us. We have grown to like him a lot.

On Wednesday, he whisked me over to Juangriego with him in his SUV. The trips are always “interesting” in part because Jens represents the “I-Am-Driving-a-Tank” school of motor-vehicle management, an approach also referred to in the scientific literature as “Nothing-Can-Happen –To-Me-Because-I-Have-The-Bigger-Truck” approach (sometimes also called “Denial”). This is of course totally disregards the fact that SUVs have been proven repeatedly actually to be more dangerous than any other type of passenger vehicle: they are far less manoeuvrable in a tight situation than cars, for example; they do not have a uni-body construction for protection in a crash; and an SUV’s braking distance is nearly double that of every normal passenger vehicles). Do I digress? Very well, I digress.

We are actually going to pick up a small fridge for one of the apartments in his posada. On the way back Jens spots a roadside ad hoc fish market and pulls on the brakes. Leaving the SUV half-parked into the street, he marches over and starts looking inside the plastic ice chests under the trees. We wind up buying three pargos each (red snappers) and a kilo of swordfish, the latter of which the fishmonger’s wife hacked into five large steaks before scraping the scales and gutting the snapper. Altogether we paid Bolivars 70,000 ($28) including Bs. 20,000 (ca. $8) for the 2 kilos of swordfish and we now have a freezer compartment full of fish. We eat the first snapper that very evening cooked Chinese style the way our friend Albert Pang showed us back in British Columbia: steamed briefly with onions and ginger and then with very hot oil and some soy sauce poured over the whole fish at the end when it is laid out on a platter: Delicious! Delicious! Delicious! Delicious! (Since Francisco and Chilo go fishing every weekend in partnership with Jens -Jens supplies the boat and motor-, maybe we can get connected that way to a steady supply of pescado.)

For my part, I am sure that I would never have stopped to buy at such a street-side fish market. But there were lots of people buying and now I would not hesitate. The fishwife and her six-year-old daughter, both dark brown and barefoot, standing in the sun, were hard at it scarping scales and scaling fish, negotiating with the customers, the fishwife digging with her right hand into the left half of her brassiere for plastic bags and into the right side for change. Again, you are dealing with actual people, a far remove from the sanitised, impersonal and boring fish section of a supermarket like SIGO. The argument that large supermarkets make food available much more cheaply than little mom-and-pop shops was shown to be false in this case. The fish and the fishwife were local, the fish was fresher and the prices were lower. Go figure!

The fireworks continue unabated. We have finally realised that the fireworks have to do with the masses being sung every evening late over at the parish church. A man has a “rocket launcher” made of several vertical pipes and, while the mass is being sung, he sets them off outside the entrance using a cigarette to light the fuses. None of your silent, hushed, communing-with-thy-Maker style of religiosity here! It’s noisy and meant to be. Get God’s attention!