Foraging for green mangos, making jam

It's mango season again.  All over Caracas, trees are weighed down by green mangoes. It looks like this.

Scratch paper can still beat a Blackberry in a fair fight

People keep chuckling at me for writing stuff of bits of recycled paper instead of tapping it into a sleek digital device. They can keep chuckling. For the all the breathtaking advances in telecommunications technology, it’s still paper that comes through in the clutch.

Somehow, she found me

When friends visit my apartment for the first time, there’s nothing I enjoy quite as much as pointing to the paintings on the walls and saying “Isa did that.” Her glorious rendition of Venezuelan painter Cesar Rengifo’s Them and the city, with its dramatic Caracas skyline, is always a crowd pleaser. As is the copy of Mexican cartoonist Miguel Covarubias’ image of 1930s lindy-hoppers. The untrained eye is unlikely to notice her ceramics in our kitchen, the home-made lamps in the living room, the couch pillows she quilted herself.

Such an artistic streak often leaves people surprises that she’s also an electronic engineer. Perhaps nobody is quite as surprised as Isa herself.

Life by the Drop

Sometimes music is moving and inspiring even when I don’t get it. A song can strike me at some particular moment of my life or resonate with a given circumstance until it sinks into my mind, and I stop trying to figure out what it means. From time to time the question sort of nags me – what are they really talking about?

Bogota

It’s been nearly a month of strange limbo between visitor and business traveler in Bogota, maybe unusual enough that I’m only now sitting down to write what seemed like an obvious thing to blog about from the outset.

Bogota feels like the Andean sister to my adopted Caribbean hometown. The cleaned-up and orderly place where service is impeccable, streets are clean, poverty is well-hidden, history is visible and present. I’ve grown to love how it always feels like something between a warm fall day and a cool fall day, how the air feels fresh from constant rain, how bogotanos walk through a heavy drizzle without batting an eyelid or reaching for an umbrella, as if they were born waterproof.

Saudade redux

It was easier for me to leave Brazil than I had expected. Emotionally that is, discounting all this nonsense.

At times I try to remember the last time I walked the dog along the Aterro de Flamengo, watched the sun set over Pao de Acucar, or took a dip at Posto 10 in Ipanema. Truth is our last week in Rio was so horridly overcast and rainy that Isa and I were spared those last moments of sighing as we sipped a coconut juice by the water, pining to ourselves – the famous “saudade” that permeates Brazilian music – and wondering “how could we ever leave this place.”

It’s funny how saudade can catch up with you at unexpected moments. Listening to my Pilates teacher’s samba mix was one of those.

The existentialism of decaf

You never know what you might find at the bottom of a cup of coffee.

I rediscovered the marvel of decaffeination on my last trip back to the US, and I suddenly felt freed from the inherent constraints of being an inconsistent and somewhat repentant coffee drinker. No matter how much I love the aroma of a coffeeshop, the tingling sensation of a strong espresso on my tongue, or the richness of foamed milk, the caffeine is too much for me.

I broke my coffee addiction a couple years back, and can now drink a marron pequeño from time to time as long as I don’t get back into the habit. But the coffee buzz still goes to my head. It gives me a surge in the morning and then leaves me needing a nap by the early afternoon. In Venezuela I’d come to accept that these were the rules of the game, since asking for decaf is an invitation to a blank, uncomprehending stare.