A brief post to update you on our situation. I am working on a more extensive piece on a related subject, which I may or may not post here, depending on if it finds another home. We’ve moved into a room in a shared house, which is certainly better than a hotel, but not without its own problems. I was thinking that a post on our living situation would be a bit narcissistic, but the details are interesting enough to warrant it.

Firstly, we’re living with some hardcore anti-Chavistas: I’ve already heard several references to the “Cuban-style communism” of Chávez. The area is best considered “upper middle class,” but this needs explaining: it’s “upper” to distinguish it from the middle classes that inhabit the older, more dangerous center of the city, but the latter are only “middle class” in relation to the impoverishment of the barrios. So “upper middle” looks a lot like “middle” in terms of actual wealth and consumption.

The people we live with are sort of bourgeois bohemians, who consider the house a “collective.” You’d almost think there was some contradiction between their lifestyle and their politics, but I guess the real point is that there’s no contradiction at all…They all have a veritable phobia of the center of the city, which they racialize accordingly.

One member of the household—less right wing than the rest, having even voted for Chávez in 1998—explains that now, the president is too narcissistic and autocratic for his tastes. Revealingly, the conversation then turned to the fact that Chavistas, according to these folks, “invent problems where they didn’t exist before.” By this they mean issues of race and class war: according to these relative liberals, there’s no such thing as an oligarchy in Venezuela, and the common tendency to refer to one’s darker child as “la negra” and the lighter one as “la catira” (blondie) has no racial content.

The food is crap. But Sabana Grande isn’t far, so we tend to eat there or downtown. There’s one arepera and one good tasca, but other than that it’s all expensive pizza and Italian imports. There’s no good local fruit: the guanabana (literally “soursop,” but I have no idea what that is: tastes like cherimolla) and parchita (passionfruit) have been replaced by imported apples and pears. Even the lechoza is called by its international name here: “papaya.”

There is an insane cat named Feliz (“happy,” the Spanish equivalent of “Felix”) who wants to kill our cat, and who attacked me when I tried to prevent said killing. I was also stung six times by some particularly nasty wasps on the same day.

There’s a psychologist who practices out of a room downstairs. There’s also a photo studio: we came home one day to a casting of child actors for a Parmalat commercial—pretty disturbing stuff. Our other neighbor was refusing for a while to let us use “her” shower, the only functioning one in the house. Lots of excitement, and some stinkiness. And the number of gunshots (or firecrackers, one can never be certain) one hears every night in Caracas is pretty incredible [but I guess it takes a lot of gunshots to get to the reputed 44 homicides that occur in the city every weekend.]