Falke: Eight years later, I finally get the memo

I spent the better part of five years reading books about the most far-flung places and abstract social problems I could find. Fascinated by the Middle East, China and a smattering of cross-sectional studies about random social problems, the place I lived became something of a local-yokel backwater that I relegated to office hours. I came back to Caracas feeling like I needed to give Venezuela the same intellectual attention that I had been giving to Lebanon, the Nagorno Karabakh or the rise of the global sushi industry.

Caracas’ quiet renaissance

Hundreds of plastic bags filled with mock seaweed and fake fish lined nearly half a city block, lit up by Christmas lights beneath them, with an ambient sound backdrop of croaking frogs and echoing drops of water. The soothing effect of it had people crowding around in the warm evening air to take pictures and gawk. Incoherent performance art that sheds its veneer of intellectual seriousness actually turns out to be a lot of fun.

Our baby steps toward adoption

It’s official – we’ve gotten the ball rolling on adopting a Venezuelan kid.

A year after this process started kicking around our heads, we’ve made our first tiny step toward actually making it happen. We began the process in Brazil, and it got cut off for the obvious reason that we left the country. Somehow it always seemed like this was the place where it would make sense for us to adopt, and our first meeting really made it feel that way.

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?