Living with the Enemy

Not wishing to burden my friends here by staying with them for an extended period of time, I had been living in a hotel since my arrival in Caracas. This week I finally managed to move in to an apartment, which turned out not to be as easy as it sounds. There is a severe housing shortagein Venezuela, probably in the ballpark of a scarcity of two million units. However the investment environment here is not exactly conducive to new construction. First of all, times are tight and not many individuals or companies have the capital needed to finance such projects. Government support goes nearly exclusively to developments that provide housing at subsidized rates to political allies. Second, the government has a delightful habit of waiting for private structures to be built and then expropriating them to “give” to those that need them. So you see some buildings for commercial use under construction, because those are tougher to confiscate and convert into apartments, but not many residential ones. Third, the Venezuelan legal code favors housing ownership over rentals. Fourth, real estate owners looking for tenants employ very stringent background checks because the potential for delinquency is high. Finally, most owners prefer to have longer-term tenants than me.

But eventually I managed to find a place in the neighborhood of La Candelaria. Follow this link to find where it is situated within Caracas. My apartment is located more or less in the middle of the western zone of the neighborhood, in the part that looks almost like a square. Here is a link to another map that gives a more complete picture of the city, but that does not include a label for La Candelaria. My apartment is right at the top of the label that reads ‘1’, indicating the Parque Central.

My room

I will now be living with a woman in her 50’s named Patricia who was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, but who has lived in Caracas for the past 36 years. I have my own room and plenty of space. It seems as though she will cook for me anytime I like, though I will not eat all of my meals in the apartment. We went to the grocery store this morning and implemented a division of purchasing of heavy items (me) and light items (her).We do not have an internet connection in the apartment, but there is one corner of it where I can consistently steal someone else’s. Thank you, ‘Tenda,’ for not securing your connection, whoever you are. She has one television set which is in her room, but I can bring in a chair and watch if I’d like. I did that for the first time this afternoon to watch President Chávez make his Annual Message to the Nation at the National Assembly, the equivalent to the State of the Union Address in the U.S. But he has been talking for over an hour now (beginning around 2:00) and has only reached page six of what looks to be a Biblical-sized book of prepared remarks. Patricia guesses he will finish talking at 10:00.

View looking out from the apartment. The building on the left looks pretty much identical to mine.

Biggest upsides to the new digs: a central location situated only a couple of blocks from a metro station. Easy access to the aforementioned park of dinosaurs. Interesting neighborhood, which many moons ago was a haven for Spanish immigrants, leaving a number of Spanish tasca-style restaurants nearby. Patricia has a Jorge Foremandez grill for easy preparation of arepas. And she is a chavista! Not a radical one or a particularly fervent follower of politics, but a true supporter of the president nonetheless. It is not always easy for me to converse with run of the mill Chávez supporters. Of course most of the media toes the party line and you can always follow the proceedings of political figures. But the urban and educated elite tend to favor the opposition and as a foreigner I tend to have more interaction with people from those groups. Chávez’s base is in the barrios with the poor. Some of those areas are frankly unsafe for me to enter, and in many others people are not entirely forthcoming with me due to mistrust or fear (that saying anything critical of the government will have repercussions), however misguided. So it will be good for me to have such easy access to chavismo.

Jorge Foremandez grill

Downsides to the apartment: traffic outside my window ranges from “heavy” to “extremely heavy” with noise levels fluctuating accordingly between 7:00 and 8:30. I make better arepas than Patricia does, and at the store today she bought many cans of sardines and tuna. I will try to be conveniently away for those meals. And she has a cat that does not particularly care for me at this point. I told it I like dogs better anyway.

My circle of friends here continues to widen, often in unexpected ways. I ended up having to use a broker to find the apartment. We got to talking and I have managed to get myself invited to her family’s apartment to learn how to cook cachapas, a local specialty that is something like a giant corn pancake with an equally giant block of cheese wrapped inside, and then get a tour of the Petare neighborhood, a chavista stronghold that I have been trying to learn more about. Monday I will attend a rally for presidential candidate Henrique Capriles Rodonski with a journalist I met last week, just to keep things balanced.

 
In the meantime the Tigers and the Sharks appear to be locked in a battle for the right to face the Carribbeans in the championship series of the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League. The Tigers are 6-3, a game in front of the Sharks and two back of 8-1 Anzoátegui. But they have three more games against the favored Carribbeans, including the next two, while La Guaira has only one. Down to the wire it goes.

UPDATE: It is now past 9:30 pm local time and Chávez is still speaking. He has not taken a break since he started. There is no way this guy has cancer. The most noteworthy moment of the speech came when opposition candidate for president Maria Corina Machado called the president a thief in the midst of a comment/question (members of the National Assembly are allowed to ask questions during the speech from time to time, though there is no rebuttal afterwards as in the U.S.)