Gringo discount!

Poor Otto. He laments that his 97-year tenure in peerless Peru isn't enough to gain him cheap tickets on LAN Airlines because they automatically charge more for those with "gringo credit cards." Well I don't know about credit cards any more, but this is a great chance for me to inform you all how to fly to Venezuela for about half of list price. It only works if you have some dollars or Euros, a relatively wealthy friend in Venezuela, and some money in your bank account.

Let's say you want to visit here from New York for Thanksgiving. Mmm, guacharaca instead of turkey! American Airlines says "Holy cow, an economy class ticket will set you back $968.70! You sure you wouldn't rather just buy a nice TV and watch Venezuela from a distance?" To which you say "Don't worry pal. Just give me a reservation number." And she says "OK!" And you call your pal in Caracas and say, hey pal, you got VEF2,082.71 you can spot me?" Your friend says, "Sure, just wire me $473.34 and we're cuadrado." And you say "Deal! God I love currency controls!"

Your friend goes to the bank and pulls out 2,083 bolivars -- 2.15 for every dollar of ticket price, an exchange rate set by federal law in Venezuela. Goes to the American Airlines ticket counter, conveniently located wherever you find the globetrotting rich, and buys the ticket.

Then you wire $473 to your friend's U.S. dollar bank account -- something many if not most rich Venezuelans have. She is happy to have those dollars, as the exchange rate you just gave her was 4.4 to the dollar. According to our trusty Internet, she would have had to buy them at 4.5 on the open market.

Why does she want dollars so badly? Unlike bolivars, greenbacks lose their buying power at a single-digit rate. For her, Venezuela's inflation rate means that 2,000 bolivars now will be worth about 1,700 a year from now, even if she has them in a savings account at the mandatory minimum 15% interest. And regardless of disappearing value, there is the issue of imports -- if she or her pals want to import anything from perfume to airplane lubricant, they need dollars, which come slowly if at all from the central bank. Hence their willingness to pay 4.5 for a dollar that at the central bank costs 2.15.

The best part is that you can get off the plane, visit the beach for a day, and then take another equally discounted trip to anywhere you want. Like, say, Peru. As long as Venezuela is on the itinerary, this scam is legal. Sure beats Otto's lament!

When Venezuelans ask me how I like it here, it's always hard, because I want to empathize with whatever hardships they are facing, even while my life here is very good. My quality of life in this insanely expensive city is thanks in large part to this currency-conversion weirdness. My sense of comfort and ease here contrasts with the stress felt by most of my friends.

Walloped

A car finally struck me. It was a wonderfully Venezuelan experience. Though if I want to tell the story in a Venezuelan way, I guess I need to say -Se me choquaron -Me golpearon^*. "They hit me."

I entered the crosswalk at Av. Francisco de Miranda and Av. Principal de Las Mercedes in Chacaito. This is a six-lane 2-way street with tall office buildings intersecting another street with four lanes in one direction and a little country street (sans sidewalks) on the north side. It's a major intersection, big enough to have a painted crosswalk. Some guy in a pale green (!) sedan, a Mustang or some such, wanted to turn right from eastbount Miranda onto southbound Las Mercedes (click the map to understand. This is right in the middle of the map, south of the golf course.) Like most Venezuelans, he saw me walking the same direction as his car was going, and the other pedestrians in the crosswalk going the other way, and decided to just go, knowing that everyone is looking out for cars and will yield with the grace of merengue dancers avoiding other spinning couples on the dance floor. The rule, generally, is that once the nose of a car is ahead of you, it has right of way. I didn't care. I was in the crosswalk and I have decided that in this respect I'm not going to be culturally relativistic -- cars suck just as much here as they do anywhere else.

At first he let me go, walking along to the right of his car as he edged closer and closer. He nosed ahead of me. I kept walking, and right when I was about to walk around the front right corner of the car, he accelerated while turning, walloping me with his right-side mirror and then knocking my knee with the car's side panel. It was like he just couldn't stand the idea of some other guy taking right of way from him, and he needed to assert his insecurity in whatever way was available.

10 meters more and he was stopped at the back of a line of cars at a long red light. I know what you're wondering, and no, he didn't run over the other drivers for blocking his way. Drivers and pedestrians here respect the power of other cars (and of politicians, businessmen, and pushy bastards on dance floors) quite unduly. There is a willingness to submit to the power of others that I, as a long-time U.S. resident, find kind of pathetic.

As he drove off, some guy near me yelled "Demasiado!", obviously shocked. A couple of women in white told me I should have gotten the license plate and told a cop. I realized I didn't particularly care. I thought about how I coulda keyed the car, or kneed it, both of which I would have done when I was younger and in a country where drivers rarely shoot people for small acts of vandalism. It didn't feel worthwhile. This was one little act of unjust power in a city where these things are rampant. Cops, companies, politicians, and just about every driver will take advantage of any little opening to behave in awesomely antisocial, unfair ways. Drivers always, always cut the line in traffic. And I'm no saint, I use my unjust power at times -- I think about getting searched by security schmucks and how you can wow them by mentioning you have a laptop in your backpack. Suddenly they almost always just let you go on through. And besides, I knew I had won. I didn't submit. I just kept walking. That's all I was trying to do, and I did it. I wasn't even bruised.

Such antisocial behavior was, for me, the biggest shock in arriving in Venezuela, with its banner of socialism. One thing I've found -- most people here are incredibly, over-the-top nice. They will do anything for you. Once you've met their eyes. Before that, there is a substantial minority who will fuck you six ways to Sunday. It is pretty easy to join the "us" side of us and them. But until then, beware.<sup>*

*</sup> UPDATE 9/5: Pepito, in comments, notes that my Spanish sucks. That is true. This is why all of my generalizations need to be taken with a grain of salt. Also why I refused to write or speak publicly about Venezuela in general for my first year here, despite goading from friends abroad. As is, I edited the first paragraph to have a better Spanish sentence. I changed the last one from extreme overgeneralization to regular overgeneralization.

PS: Welcome, drinkers of Inca Kola News. And thanks, Mr. Rock, for the link. Very kind. You sure have friends in many places. Hello Buenos Aires! Hello Krung Thep! Hello Sinaloa! Hello Lyngssa! Hello Burnaby! It occurs to me that the Blogger comment software is a bit of a pain. If anyone wants to return the salutation, it's very simple.

Transport for Caracas

Ken Livingstone was here today, rubbing salt in my wound.

As mayor of London, Livingstone made a very odd deal: Cheap diesel from Venezuela for his city's bus system in return for providing cheap(er) bus fares for the poor of London, pro-Venezuela propaganda on London buses, and urban planning assistance for Caracas. This deal was a foil for all sorts of political types: People said Chavez was nuts to give aid to a country as rich as England, that Livingstone was nuts to help out a guy like Chavez, that this was a brilliant move combining socialist policies from rich and poor, that the whole thing was hogwash. Yawn. For me, any effort to enhance the livability of Caracas is worthy of attention, no matter the political weirdness behind it.

Sadly, it wasn't to be.

Transport for London, the transit agency, supposedly send some people here and set up a little office. Half the diesel fuel, about $7 million worth, did make it to London. But for all the talk, we will never, Livingstone said, never see any report from the planners. That project is over, he said. Instead he will offer a bit of advice himself, with the goal of making this a "first-world city in a first-world country in 20 years." (The Spanish translator initially translated first-world as "first-class"; "first-world" isn't a popular aspiration for Chavistas. It's like telling a hipster that he could be in wearing a nice suit in 20 years.)

So, even though no one will give me $15 million in funding, maybe I should offer a few thoughts. It seems to me that the most central problem in Caracas is the lack of street life. Most streets are dead from dawn to dark, and the rest from dark to dawn. The busiest streets tend to be those connecting Metro stops to nearby shopping malls or major employers. (For some reason the stops never seem to be exactly adjacent to the most important destinations.) The lack of human presence is an auto-alimentación: a positive feedback loop. (Positive in the cybernetic sense, not the value sense.) The lack of people makes it easier for miscreants to prey on the few who are there, to leave piles of trash in the sidewalk, to park on the sidewalk, to design buildings with curb cuts across the sidewalk, and worst of all to eliminate the sidewalk completely. I'll post some pictures soon of the most depressing lack-of-sidewalks situations, but suffice to say they are manifold. (Was that pretentious enough phrasing for you?)

Happily, we have a role model for some aspects of this just 1,000 km away. Colombia's capital, Bogotá, was rescued with incredible haste -- a three-year mayoral term was enough to turn it from a fatalistic deathtrap into an optimistic deathtrap with many more bicycles. In one term, a mayor fixed a host of my biggest pet peeves: He brought back sidewalks that had been caved out to make unpermitted parking spaces, created a real car-free day, and made a citywide bus rapid transit system. Perhaps instead of Mr. Livingstone with his 20-year timetable, we could use a visit from Sr. Peñalosa?