Venezuela I: First Step in Venezuela
This is a series of three posts that I wrote back to my friends from Venezuela in 2003. I am sharing these with you now. Do let me know what you think?
Venezuela Series: Part-I . Part-II . Part-III . Part IV
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This helped me to understand how people from other cultures and countries might feel when they come to India!
I landed in Venezuela on a month-long project at Bell South International. The city is the capital of Venezuela – Caracas. Its a nice green city at the foothills of Avila. I reckon that beach isn’t too far off too. This place is a mix between New York and Bombay… without as much of life as we have in either of them. The infrastructure started out well but somewhere the momentum got lost.. though the chaos of Bombay is quite visible here too!
As I landed a cabbie was there to take me to the hotel. It didnt help matters much that he didnt know any English.. worse still he had a tough time understanding sign language as well! I asked him – or signed him – to phone the team manager that I was in Caracas.. and he kept asserting that his name was Miguel! “Thats great!” I thought.. but I need you to call up Antonio.. like phone him??!!
Then he would proceed to show me his ID to drill into me that he was Miguel! This exchange went on for the entire duration of my journey from the airport to the hotel, when the guy at the hotel lobby came to my rescue!
My first day at office was nice – all the folks speak Spanish .. well only few are bilingual.. hesitantly so! The others speak in Spanish and then open their laptop and type the sentence in a translation program and show me what they meant! Or some resort to a dictionary and let me know the main word of their sentence!
This is a good education for me to understand how people from other cultures and countries might feel when they come to India! Specially, say a guy from France walking into a Delhi street!!
Well, as expected the women are astonishingly good looking and they leave no opportunity to flaunt whatever they have! It must be sheer bad luck for a lady in Venezuela to be bad looking!! I mean.. you gotta be real damn unlucky to be in that situation in a country that has an assembly line for Miss Universes and Miss Worlds!!
A friend at an earlier project had mentioned that Venezuelan Chocolate is the best in the world.. well.. I had some hot chocolate here at hotel.. and boy.. was it good!! Thats how hot chocolate should be all over the world!! Maybe the Conagras and Nestle’s have machinized these things so badly that they taste really bad!
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