Venezuelans' favourite sports

We venezuelans are fond of many different activities that are a product of our mixed heritage:

• Drinking beer -due to the influence of the US in our culture, being Venezuela the most americanized latin country (apart from Puerto Rico, which is not an independent country .. yet)
  
• Competing to see who's the most attractive; this is SO freakin' embedded in our DNA that might be the main reason why we are the country with the highest number of beauty pageant titleholders (for both male and female beauty pageants)
  
• Baseball, see item No. 1
• Partying until dawn; see item No. 1
• Shopping as though tomorrow was the end of the world. A proof of this is that we have Centro Sambil, the largest mall in Latin America, and before it was built, we had the largest Mall in Latin America also, CCCT. And yes, before CCCT, we had Shopping Center Mall, the largest Mall in South America. Yes, "Shopping Center" is quite a stupid name for a mall but, alas, it was built in the days of the petrodollars-packed Saudi Venezuela!
  

Shopping happens to be myself and Lissette's favourite sport. During my last weekend in Boston, we decided to behave like proud venezuelans and do what we do best: shopping, drinking, partying and ...being beautiful people, hehehe :-D

We started the day, after a stop a Dunkin' Donuts for some iced coffee, munchkins, donuts and my favourite, a spiced bagel with cream cheese and onion, to Pier1 Imports; Lissette thought the midEastern style stuff sold at Pier1 was going to catch my attention, which it quite did. I bought these table linens


but what I really wanted was these pieces of furniture, but it was not economically practical to have them shipped home even though they were on sale! OMG, I wanted them SO badly! :-(We didn't buy candles or anything like that since I can find homemade scented candles in Barquisimeto, at prices that are absolutely unbeatable, so after wandering in the store for some time, we walked to a shoestore in the same mall, where I got a very nice pair of Skechers (but I didn't get them autographed by La Aguilera though, which is a real pity) and then ... food again! It was time for lunch: a grated broccoli soup with cheddar cheese, and a HUGE veggie sandwich with Brie, Emmental and Gouda cheeses; of course, a homemade lemonade that tasted like real homemade lemonade, hehehehe -it's amazing how these guys in the US eat so many processed food full of preservants.

After the lunch and before the mid-afternoon snack, we went to Target to check some suitcases because we already knew by then that I needed another one but of course, nothing like my Mario Hernández' suitcase, ever! This store is a little like our BECO or Fin de Siglo, being K-Mart and Wal-Mart more low-budget, in my opinion. Nice stuff and lots of people doing shopping!

Now it's time to drive to another HUGE mall to buy something for tía Gisela and some errands I had offered to bring (some CDs and DVDs unavailable in Venezuela due to the currency exchange control system imposed by the Chavez Government) but as usual, I came across another shoestore, and of course, I found something for me, hehehe... afterwards, while Lissette was choosing some skirts and blouses for my aunt, I was checking out some suitcases, but the culturally different body odor of a guy next to me kinda offended me so I decided to take a look somewhere else. I was about to suggest this fellow "Sir, there's something sold at stores called deodorant, and it is advisable to have it applied on the armpits" but my cousin was clever enough to remind me that such a polite remark could've offended him since "we are in the US and we must respect his cultural diversity". I just replied "me saben a culo las diferencias culturales, que se vaya a dar un baño antes de salir a la calle, no'joda! en este continente la gente se baña, usa colonias y desodorantes", to which she just giggled and said "oh brother ..your tongue is as sharp and wicked as usual, just like your mom's and your grandma's"

Oh, the music store! that was such a funny incident! We entered this store, with my list of errands, to which one young boy literally jumped to service me ( no pun intended!) but after five minutes, my cousin noticed something weird, so she said in spanish "andáte con el carajito que está babeao por ti; dejálo que sueñe por un ratico que se levantó a un latino" while walking towards a distant aisle where he told her her favourite music was. The boy luckily never got what we said, hehehe. Then we stopped at a pastry shop to buy our mid-afternoon desserts, a dutch cheesecake with blueberries for me, and a turtle cake (no, it does NOT have turtle meat) for her, and then we headed BACK to Target to buy the other suitcase since the price was definitely the best one, even in comparison to what we saw at tía Gisela's shopping paradise, Macy's. After we were done with shopping, we stopped AGAIN at a Dunkin' Donuts to buy some munchkins and smoothies to get back home, take a shower, fix dinner and then out to clubbing. Lissette prepared a roasted turkey breast, and sautéed green, yellow and orange peppers with a dressing I prepared with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, dill, garlic and dried parsley and we drank a bottle of an italian sparkling water whose name I can't remember.

Then we went to 209 @ Club Café, located in downtown Boston, where a bartender told us about his venezuelan ex being the love of his life and where we also received extra pickles and snacks for just being venezuelans. I agree with Lissette, this guy's best f**k of his life was with a venezuelan! We also went to Lissette's favourite club, 33. It is a very fancy club with two dancefloors. Of course, we went there to give a lecture on reggaeton -I hadn't liked reggaeton until I noticed that non-latinos dance reggaeton as though it was meregnue, and with NO hips moving at all! that was a major shock for me, so I was determined to show them how to dance it. And we did. With lots of perreo.For nearly 3 hours. You can imagine all eyes turned to us during that time, which, at the beggining seemed to bother me a little, but Lissette was more than happy -poor girl, she never gets a chance to shake her ass off like that! and man, she does dance like a beast! Well, after all, she is a venezuelan ;-)