Vacation time

I finally took my first vacation since joining the State Department, and I'm not done yet! Two weeks ago I went to Cartagena, Columbia, not for any real reason except to get out of town for a while. Since joining State, I had not been able to take anytime off, so the first opportunity I had to go I took it. Essentially, during my first year in training in DC, rules prohibited us from taking time off. (As a caveat , I won't say that I didn't have any time off while in DC in that I did have several admin days and three day weekends because the holiday schedule lined up perfectly, but nonetheless, I never took any vacation days.) Then, once I arrived in Venezuela, I had to wait five months to earn some seniority on the vacation schedule. But now that I'm racing up to a year and a half in the foreign service, my time finally arrived. My original plan was to go to Mexico City to visit some friends there over that country's bicentennial celebration, and even had my airline tickets in hand, but that fell through. My friends that live there were going to be assigned to temporary duty at other posts, so I ended up rescheduling that trip to January. Because I already had the time off however, and was nearing my breaking point of waderlust, I made a split second decision to go to Cartegena, a relatively short plane flight from Caracas, went to the travel agency, bought an overpriced ticket, and was on my way. For years, Columbia has had a well deserved label of being the epicenter of the world's drug trade and being a dangerous place to travel. In the last several years however, due to determined leadership by Columbian authorities and US assistance, FARC terrorists have been weakened, Pablo Escobar was killed and the drug trade had been pushed underground (or to Venezuela, which Chavez adamantly denies.) Note; the preceeding statements are personal in nature and not made in an official capacity, however they do interestingly enough mirror exactly what State Department has said about current regional conditions. Moreover, Columbia has been actively trying to shed the ghosts of the past and is now in the middle of a cultural renaissance, which was fully on display in Cartagena.

Upon arrival, one of the first things I looked forward to was using my bank card to pull money from an ATM. In Caracas, the crime situation is so bad, there is nearly a 100% guarantee that your card will be cloned if used at a public ATM, and besides that there is no reason the use an ATM because money is withdrawed at the official government rate which is 2 to 3 times below the actually going rate of the local currency. Essentially, one would just be throwing money away by using an ATM. When I opened my wallet up however, I realized I had forgotten all of my bank cards back in Caracas. Even after coming up to six month in Venezuela, the absurd economic reality that bank cards are useless here has not mentally registered, and it didn't occur to me that I would actually need to go dig my bank cards out of one of the many hiding places that I have around my apartment where I keep my cash and passports in case of a banking crash or violent government overthrow / crackdown. I panicked for a brief moment and started contemplating how I might actually need to have someone Western Union me some cash until I realized that I had several hundred dollars hidden in some of my travel gear that I had stashed there months earlier. Fortunately, I had already prepaid my hotel, and a few hundred bucks would be sufficient for four days, though it did limit the number of trinkets I could by at the gift stores.

I checked into a bed and breakfast that was recommended by the New York Times, an historical hotel located in the heart of the city's Old Town, then decided to go out for a stroll. I was surprised how warm and humid it was there, and it occurred to me that because I now live in the tropics, I should finally invest in a pair of shorts. (After spending so much time in Europe and Russia, where the notion that wearing shorts is public is taboo was so thoroughly ingrained, I recognize some of my preconceptions have to change, at least for the time being, until I can get back to Eastern Europe. That being said however, I still won't be found wearing sandals in public anytime soon.) Nonetheless, after having this realization, it reoccurred to me that even if I wanted to go buy shorts, I didn't have enough money to buy them.

Once I went out walking, I had my next revelation. I didn't realize how tightly wound up I had become living in Caracas. According to a New York Times article published a few weeks ago, Caracas is now one of the most dangerous places in the world, even surpassing Iraq and Juarez. Caracas had over 20,000 murders last year, surpassing the 18,000 who have been killed in the Mexican drug wars and the 8000 annual who are killed in suicide bombings in Iraq. Only a fraction of the killings are solved here, and those who are caught are often able to work their way through the corrupt legal system. Ultimately, crime here is committed with impunity and the local police are inept to stop it, after having much of their authority taken by the central government with the purpose of creating a national police force, which so far has not materialized. Local police are not even allowed to have weapons anymore, and are not in a position to make traffic stops, let alone solve a murder. As a result, the morgues overflow every weekend with hundreds of bodies, and those who live here can only be extra vigilant to ensure they don't become the next casualty. For those of us at the embassy, we don't go walking around in public, we drive everywhere we need to go with dark tinted windows, and we rarely go out after dark. We also develop a sixth sense / pair of eyes on the back of our heads and view everyone and everything around us as a potential threat. As I started walking around Cartagena, the streets were full of people and energy, and after about 20 minutes, I felt completely overwhelmed for my safety and I had to go back to the hotel. Even though I went back out a short time later, it took a good 24 hours to turn my nerves and instincts off and truly realize that I was absolutely safe. Once that happened, all I did for the next three days was walk and enjoy the freedom to be outside in public. I must have walked the entire old city 15 times. When I got tired, I stopped at one of the seemingly inumberable outdoor cafes in the city, or relaxed by sitting on the fortress walls surrounding the city, looking out over the ocean.

One of the nights there,I went to an early 1900's Cuban Jazz club that looked to be straight out of pre revolution Havana, and listened to live Cuban jazz until 2:00AM. Afterwards, I walked some more.

On the way home, for the first time ever, I managed to talk my way into a a first class seat. I'm sure it was partially attributable to my diplomatic passport, but I could care less. It was a perfect way to cap off my first vacation since becoming a diplomat.

Addendum; Just wanted to mention briefly my activities from this past week. I won't talk in depth about it because it was on the fringes of illegality, but by now I'm sure the Venezuelans know exactly what we did. Last Sunday Venezuela held elections for their National Assembly. These were the first real elections for the Assembly (Legislative body) in the past decade due wholly to the fact that the opposition party to Chavez boycotted the last elections, giving the Chavistas unfettered control over national politics. We, along with the rest of the Western world asked for permission to be election observes to help ensure that the elections would be free and fair. Chavez decided however, to ban most observers and only permit a select few friendly "observers" to be credentialed. So, after being told no, we did it anyway. Instead of observing, we went just to "get to know" the election process, curious to learn about how things work in Venezuela. About thirty people were sent across the country to try to talk our way into polling sites to "get to know" what was going on. A colleague and I were sent to Maturin, an industrial city in Eastern Venezuela, which is one of the most Chavista areas of the country. While most of the teams in the rest of the country saw few irregularities, we "got to know" some "interesting" things, but I'll let the State Department comment on the state of the elections. Either fortunately or unfortunately, only one of the teams was actually arrested. But, then again, what's the point of having diplomatic immunity if you're not going to use it right?

Next up, Puerto Rico!

M