An Improper Bostonian?

There's something about wandering for 10 days around the Greater Boston that I loved and it was having the opportunity to know the city by walking around town without needing a map or anything like that and knowing my cellphone was in my pocket just in the event I had an emergency or got seriously lost -of course, the latter thing never happened because I was not in the streets of a burmese town in the mountains, but in the seconld largest city in the Eastern Coast of the US. The other thing never happened, B"H

Lissette had prepared a very detailed schedule of activities, which started taking a stroll down the Back Bay, starting at Boston Common, a place that used to be an area for cow feeding and herding in the 17th century, if I remember well. Now it is a park. Then we walked all down the Back Bay many areas in Boston are built on reclaimed land, like this one. The weather and the architecture helped make me get an impression that I was walking down the streets of a british city -where is that bloody Camilla?-

Having plenty of time to walk around town before and after attending ALL the attractions that Lissette included in the schedule and my curiosity (I'm an Aquarius, c'mon!) made me know a lot more than any regular tourist would. For instace, after visiting an attraction, like the New England Aquarium, infested with kids from summer camps, I decided to take a stroll down the area, after stopping at a CVS Pharmacy to buy a bottle of Dasani mineral water (it's mineral water, slightly sweetened with Splenda and a light touch of natural lemon, grape, raspberry or strawberry flavor, and it is just PERFECT) and then making moja štikla do the rest, taking me to the Financial District, to the Old State House, to Beacon Hill, to discover my namesake espalanade and finally reaching one of my favorite spots in Boston, The Shops at Prudential Center. That way I got to know lots of parts of the city in such a way that Lissette and Matt were surprised since they never expected me getting to know the city in such level of detail (well, maybe she did)

But what neither of them ever expected me to LOVE about Boston, apart from the metro, or what they call "The T" (I miss you Charlie, especially the Green Line), with its metrotrams that feel SO European for just a few seconds, you feel like you are in Birmingham, Nottingham, Newcastle, Leeds or even Dublin until the machine announces the next station in standard american, not hard-to-understand bostonian english which sounds like british english sometimes. But, the other thing I LOVED about Boston was the cows. They are scattered around the city, and you can find them at virtually every corner, and of course, since I have always wanted to touch a cow's nose to see if it's cold like those of cats and dogs, I took pics of every cow I saw during my stay in Boston. And believe me, there are MANY of them, even a cow like a piggy bank and another like Maya the Bee, with its bee-wings and antennas :-D

On a side note, I also liked the people in Boston a lot. VERY nice and friendly, and good-looking also! It's a culturally very diverse city where you can find people from Guatemala who speaks better Mayan than Spanish, a Brazilian Muscle Mary, an irish-american with a green t-shirt, an italian-american that looks more Sicilian than anything else, a Lithuanian jew and a Cape Verdean and three WASPs (one VERY fat) in the same elevator, oh, and I forgot to mention one ECA Alumni! SH*T, I saw quite a few of them down the streets! All those things -feeling like at home with my family, the people in the streets, the city itself .. have made me think quite a few times if I should think of hopping to the Boston Area as a next step in my life...maybe I become a Bostonian in the future!

Épale, prima!

I hadn't seen Lissette since April of 2005, when she came with Matt to Venezuela to spend Easter with my aunt Gisela and my uncle Oriel and we had lunch together at Maiquetía Airport while they waited for their flight to Barquisimeto. She came last March but I was very busy and since my trip to the US was almost a fact, we didn't worry about not talking in person then. Finally, after JOSTI, I took a flight to Boston to spend a few days with them. I was quite excited to see them, since we're very close and we have shared many things together since we were kids: her mom my kindergarden teacher, my mom & aunt her godmoms, my dad her godfather, spending our holidays together at my father's family's house at the beach with my peer cousins, sharing the apartment when I was taking my internships at Aserca Airlines while she was working for Banco de Lara in Valencia, going together to concerts, and so many things that would make this post endless. In a nutshell, she's my sister.

Anyway, after saying goodbye to Khalil and Kaouthar at Washington-Dulles Airport (we shared a cab who happened to be driven by an iranian who spoke a little arabic and a little spanish as well, apart from farsi and french) I took my jetBlue flight to Boston-Logan, and despite the neverending rainstorm that delayed my flight for two hours, I enjoyed the flight, my blue potato chips, listening to XM Sattelite Radio and watching live TV on DirecTV while flying blue :-)

Lissette was waiting for me at the airport. As soon as we landed, I called her and she was right there in the bag claiming area. After the hugging, the greeting and the venezuelan-style chit-chatting, we headed for the car, while Matt was waiting for us; we loaded all my stuff, including my darbouka, to Lissette's amusement -she said "Holy Cow! You were not joking! you found an arab drum indeed!"- and then we went to a restaurant, because the three of us were F***IN' hungry. Bertucci's is a pretty good chain of ristoranti, whose trademark is the brick oven, where they bake pizzas and oh, the pasta! they claim they use only authentic italian ingredients, which I don't dare to doubt since the food is really tasty and well, good company makes the food taste even better. Then we headed home so I could unpack, take a needed shower and recharge my batteries for the next day since I was going to start doing what I did for the next 10 days -walking around Boston not as a tourist but something between a tourist and a wanderer :-)

Lissette and Matt's house is very cozy, very american-style, like those one sees on the tv series, and they have it very well decorated IMHO even though that is definitely not my style -Lissette's hand and style is seen in almost every corner, no wonder she's the queen of the house!
That red couch converts into a double-bed and it was my bed during my stay in Everett (the quarter of Greater Boston where they live surrounded by los tierrúos brasileños esos, according to Lissette, hehehe. One thing I noticed about Boston is that there is a Dunkin' Donuts virtually ANYWHERE in the city and one in almost every corner, which is awesome if you like Donuts and Bagels (like me) or if you haven't discovered how addictive iced coffee is (like me)


Yes, they even have it in traditional chinese characters! 大便!

JOSTI 2006 -part 3

JOSTI was a very interesting experience for me, not just in terms of meeting new people from other international schools, like Carlos from Discovery School (Honduras) or John and Susana from the American School of Mozambique. Those were moments I'll never forget, like showing my latino pride with my colleagues

and simple and yer great things from lending my phone to Sandra (Union School, Haiti) to let her call her family (and listen to her speaking kreyòl aysyen) to being shocked at seeing all of the guys from Pakistan (yes, all muslims and all long-bearded like ayatollahs) in the same bathroom brushing their teeth at the same time I did, to watch a movie in the laptop with Mazen and Khalil until the three of us fell aslept on the chairs while the movie was still running, to share beers and joke with Mazen and Michel about having him wear an israeli t-shirt in the streets of Beirut, to going shopping with Monday (Kenyan, American School of Tunis) and going downtown to the museums with Khalil, and of course, going to the National Mall and take pics with Nili (Israeli, Walborth Barboud American International School, Tel Aviv) as though she was my mom, or my sweet bube :-)


















But one thing I would never forget about JOSTI was realising that ECA is one of the most advanced international schools in terms of technology, if not the most advanced one; when some schools are still thinking of going wireless, we have been a wireless school for 6 years!

Something I also enjoyed a lot was learning PHP and MySQL with a kid (literally -he's 21) from Apple Computer and .. finding my darbouka on the top of several bags of junk and it even had the price tag on it! (albeit blurry) That was definitely a gift from G'd, because He knows how badly I wanted to have one for my moroccan-style apartment, and of course that was something I was never going to be able to get in Caracas. A few days after I got it, I saw one very similar at a store, with a price tag of US$40. Now that's a gift from heavens!

I come from a family of musicians and singers (on my mother's side) and I had always been told I was musically deaf, but I started pretending I was playing it (and getting lots of smiles and attention) while waiting at the airports (Washington-Dulles, Boston-Logan, Washington-Reagan and Atlanta-Harstfield) and now I can proudly boast of being a decent darbouka player, though a very basic one. Time will tell :-)

JOSTI 2006 -part 2

After settling in, taking a shower and changing my clothes, I needed something urgent. Well, three things: a shower, food and making a phone call. Since everything on campus was closed (Saturday 8:30 pm) I decided to walk into town to find anything that could be open. Man, it was a deserted town -either nothing seemed to be open or I was wandering around a residential area, which it happened to be then. But being so covered with trees, the light barely got to the sidewalks, so I was like "OK, where am I heading to?", which made me decide walking straight always on the same street; I walked for about 8 blocks until I saw something magical on the distance: two golden archs! For the first time in my entire life I felt as though I had seen the heaven itself!

But when I got there, something struck me -I realised that all cleaning personnel, and all the people who does the lowest-paid jobs in the US are Latinos. I had noticed that at the airport also, but for some reason I didn't realise it then. Who knows? maybe I was so focused on enjoying the experience that I ignored such details. But when it did, it hit me like a meteor!

Anyway, after eating, I walked towards a 24/7 pharmacy I saw nearby, and to my amusement, all the clerks were Desis. It was like being in "The Simpsons"! Those pharmacies are very much like ours Farmatodo and Locatel, but these guys lack something .. I don't know what it is, but there's something I missed. Anyway, I bought my band-aids, the phone card, and some sugarfree bubble gum (every Delta Nu oughta keep some in the pocket to make sure the ice-melting smile is accompanied by a fresh breath) and then back to GMU on the same way I took to get out of campus.

The student dorms at GMU are not THAT bad I think, apart from the plastic-covered matresses and the fact that I realised I had air conditioning on the 4th day of my stay at GMU. Anyway, the chiller was good enough, but I didn't like the levels of humidty in DC -no wonder the whole city has been built on a swamp! But it is certainly a beautiful one, with lots of greenery and wide forests even close to downtown

One always makes good friends at conferences and courses, even if you're not as sweet and handsome as I am *LOL*. A very interesting fact is that the closest friends I made during my stay in DC were all arabs: Khalil and Kaouthar from Morocco, and Mazen from Lebanon and, to a certain extent, Mahmood, Mona and Danya from Egypt. Why? I have no idea, but it might have helped that when I was just getting into my room I saw Kaouthar, who cam and introduced himself and, when he said he was from Rabat American School, I quickly replied that I attend a moroccan synagogue, which seemed to break the ice given the fact that moroccans have been very tolerant of jews (even King Hassan II's counselor was jewish) and that moroccan jews are as proud of being moroccans as arabs and berbers alike, even speaking arabic at ahome and keeping so many habits and customs that within less than a year I have started feeling as my own. I think the fact that Khalil's sister lives and works in Melilla helped a great deal also, since jews from Melilla are considered moroccan jews as well and the origins of the people that attend my synagogue are almost evenly divided between Tétouan, Casablanca or Melilla.















Of course, being with K&K and sharing some jokes in arabic made Mazen get close to us, and the same with Danya and Mahmoud, especially because all of us were techies.


Mona was a different case. She teaches at Cairo American College and she is a very conservative lady; she even wears a ħijāb! We shared a table one day because her closest friend was Celeste, an american lady who happened to meet Jean, my school's superintendent like 20 years ago and that was like our link, since she used to ask me about Jean and her family. So one day we sat down at a food court on campus, and I was wearing my famous coca-cola t-shirt and Celeste asked why I was wearing that shirt. So, we started talking and talking, and we exchanged so many different pints of view, and Mona's glad surprise when I told her than Umm Kulthum was a reference in sephardic and mizrachi music among jews and the fact that many israeli musicians release quite a few songs in arabic and many sephardic and mizrachi jews speak arabic very fluently with an accent like that of Egypt and Jordan. I even sung a fragment of "Inta Omri" to prove my fluency in arabic music :-)

JOSTI 2006 -part 1

Attending the JOSTI 2006 Conference was an amazing experience I cannot possibly describe with words, not even in spanish. It had many events that for some people could've been stressful or might have cause certain anxiety (not for me though), like:

• Going to a city I had never been before (Washington DC and its suburbs, including Fairfax)
• Travelling abroad alone (I have travelled abroad before, but never alone)
• Being hosted by some people I have never seen and at a place I didn't even know where it was (George Mason University)
• Attending a conference with people like me (techies) from schools like mine (international schools with an american-style curriculum) and in which most of didn't speak a word of my mother tongue (spanish) and for sure most of us used english as a second language
• Leaving my country for a long period of time (almost 3 weeks)

Apart from that, leaving Caracas by plane is a real pain now because the highway that connects the city to the airport in the coast has several briges across deep valleys and the longest one collapsed last January, and the government has just built a narrow road (if that can be called a road) to connect these two sections of the highway and there are schedules for separate kinds of traffic (personal cars, small buses, trucks and all that stuff) so one has to plan ahead in order to be at the airport on time. So, to avoid all this s***t, I decided to sleep on the night of the 16th of June at a hotel near the airport -I didn't want to wake up at 3 AM because I had to be at the airport at 6:30 just to find out that the queue down the road was stuck because the rains had caused a flood and the mud had covered it!

So, after leaving school at 4:30 I picked a cab to drive me home to take my luggage and then leave me at the station where the buses that leave for the airport are parked; it was very funny to me that the cab driver happened to be Ecuadorian because during that week, Ecuador had showed up as the surprise cinderella team of the Football World Cup, so we were talking about that. How I found out he was Ecuadorian? he had folded a car's flag next to his seat, and you know how curious I am :-)

Then, I took the bus to the airport, I stopped at the international terminal and then I picked up another cab to the hotel. Bloody hotel! I had such a hard time trying to find a hotel room, and c'mon, finiding a room at a cheap hotel on a Friday, is not an easy task at all! I called every single hotel in near the airport (many were motels, actually) and none of them had rooms, so I asked the superintendent's assistant and she called the last hotel I had just called, and after she identified herself as calling from the school, they booked me a room! SH**T!! Anyway I did NOT sleep in that hotel, as it was a motel, and the cab driver offered me to drive me to a decent place. It was ... a very sui generis place, with its curtains with all the solar system printed on the fabric, Israeli sattelite TV on the system, and many same-sex couples dining on the hotel's so-called restaurant.. what the hell was that? I have no idea.

Anyway, I watched TV until I fell aslept, but I woke up earlier than the time set by the watch; in fact, I woke up, took a shower and got all set even before it rang .. I was like anxious to leave everything for quite a few days and "disconnect" from the reality.

When I arrived to the airport, I saw many kids from the school, with their parents, of course. Well, only one and her mom greeted me very nicely and we chatted a little, but not too long since they were on Business and I was on Coach -anyway, it was Delta - the official carrier! ;-)

The trip was OK -good entertainement, but a little poor if you compare it with what I had flying jetBlue (which you can read in a next post) but oh well, the in-flight service (including Mozart's 250s, "Failure to Launch" with Sarah Jessica Parker and Will&Grace) was good except for those perfect scrambled eggs that come out of a box, which I despise and the latino steward trying to speak spanish with a mixed mexican-argentinian-puertorican accent, hehehe. That was funny!

Once I landed at Atlanta's Harstfield-Jackson airport, my journey continued. Man, that airport is HUGE! The inmigration procedure was very smooth, it took me less than a minute standing at the booth with the officer, then picking up my suitcases .. and then the train to my next gate, because my flight to Washington DC was departing in less than an hour, so I had to move my ass off!

But I hated the connection time -too short! I had to take a bala fría from a Taco Bell Express fridge and literally gulp it in front of the gate while waiting for my flight to DC. I am sismply not used to eat while walking or out of a table; as a venezuelan, I need to sit down at a table and eat like a cow. Finally, I boarded my plane to DC and as an observant jew, I opened my siddur in the plane and started to say the prayer for the traveller (Tefilat ha-derech) and to my surprise, there was an american man in his early 50s, looking at me with his eyes widely opened and with an expression on his face that mathed that one of disgust! After I finished praying, I closed my siddur, and looked back at him (I know, my face said something like "what? got any problem with that, mister?") and he said something I didn't recognise and then said clearly "why don't you go back to your contry, camel shepherd?" and stood up and looked for another seat. Ha! I think this guy thought I was a muslim .. and to be honest, I don't care. Fu**in' redneck!

At the end, I arrived to Washington-Reagan Airport exactly in the time the captain calculated (excellent timing eh?) and looked for my bags, and then for the Metro station, to catch it and take a ride to Fairfax-GMU station. Given the excessively high tariffs charged by cabs in DC, I was decided to save as every penny as I could. And so I did! Once I arrived there, I took a cab, driven by a very nice Eritrean man -our ride to Mason consisted mostly on a conversation about coffee, and the awful cofee americans drink. Finally, I arrived at Mason, after 15 minutes wandering around the campus, looking for my building. There it was, Hanover Hall (for registering and checking out towels and linens) and Amherst Hall, the bulding which was set to be my home in the next week.

Washington DC, here I am!