Caracas update

Sorry to anybody who might have been waiting for a new post the last few days.  The truth is I haven't been doing very much worthy of posting; I've settled into a nice little rut for the time being (which for now is rather welcome) - watching the World Cup matches in the morning, doing a bit of walking around in the afternoons, and working in the evenings.  I haven't been quite as productive as I'd like, but then again I think I set rather high expectations for myself in this regard.  I've gotten some practical things done, like getting a cell phone (not easy with a foreign passport) and figuring out how to exchange money and get food without too much hassle.  Mostly, though, I've been doing a lot of walking around, something that's not particularly practical but that I can more or less successfully rationalize to myself as such :-).

Yesterday I got a chance to walk around the campus of the Central University of Venezuela, which is rather striking to people who, like myself, are accustomed to the layout of most universities in the US.  Most everything is open air, including the book sellers, dining centers, and at least the ground floors of most of the main buildings.  There were students everywhere, which was hugely surprising after the relative ghost town of post-exam Cornell.  I really wish I could've taken some pictures as it seems like a very active campus with flyers announcing various marches and lots of political agitprop lining the walls in and around the university (from what I saw these were entirely pro-Chavez, or at least all of a radical stripe).  There is an absolutely beautiful mural right outside the main exit of the metro station, made all the better by the preponderance of listless students and vendors selling small trinkets on the plaza.  I will definitely try to at least get a picture of this mural and post it here when I do.  There also seems to be an interesting relationship between the UCV and and the nearby Bolivarian University, although I'm not exactly sure on the specifics as I've only ever read brief mentions about the UBV.  This is definitely something I'd like to learn more about while I'm here.

I've been working quite a bit writing up e-mails to people I'm contacting for information and interviews.  My Spanish instruction was almost entirely conversational, so attempting formal written Spanish has been required a bit of time and effort, although I think it's well spent.  I sent off my first interview request this afternoon and received a reply by phone within 15 minutes, which was completely unexpected and resulted in me being less than eloquent (to put it mildly) in my brief chat - mainly settling for a healthy variety of "bueno"s and "muy bien"s.  No doubt compounding this was my ongoing struggle with the Venezuelan accent (made about ten times worse over a poor cell phone connection), and the fact that this exchange occurred during the tail end of the Spain-Portugal match, which of course meant that I was more than a little distracted and had a beer or two under my belt.  Thankfully the woman was very kind and knew from my e-mail that my Spanish isn't excellent, so we managed to get the necessary information across and set up an interview for Thursday afternoon.

While I'm grateful that the reply came so quickly and that I can get my first interview out of the way very soon, this does not leave me much time to prepare for it, so I'll have to work quite diligently tonight and tomorrow to ensure that I'm ready for Thursday.  This is my first "professional" interview, so I'm a bit nervous; this kind of interview is very different from those I used to do for the radio news show I did back in college, and of course the language barrier will require me to be much more strategic and less impromptu than I usually like to be.  My plan is to have about 8-12 thorough and very specific questions on hand, hopefully catching just enough of the response to ask a few simple follow-up questions, and having the interview recorded so that I can translate thoroughly afterwards.  It seems like it should work, but as with all new things there are bound to be certain exigencies that will catch me off guard.

Given this, I'll likely not be posting again until Thursday night at earliest, by when I'll have some things (hopefully good!) to say about the interview.  Thanks to everyone who's been in contact with me over the last week - it's been great hearing from you.