Malas Palabras

Last night, a young man was stopped for disturbing the peace outside of the apartments where I am staying. The police rather undermined their own cause with the sirens and lights, but no matter. Carina, David, and their neighbors in the the apartments up and down the street all came to the balcony to watch the guy get searched and to add their own reprimands. There were quite a few things yelled, and David started laughing and asked whether I understood any of it. Obviously, this is obviously not your common schoolbook vocabulary. Carina became indignant that they were not in her Spanish-English dictionary and is going to file a complaint with the publisher.

Sarah told me that when she and her host mother returned home from the store yesterday, she met a man who is the father of the guy who sat next to us on the plane from DC to Miami. The man gives accordian lessons to the host mother, and when Sarah was introduced as an international student at UCV, he asked whether or not she was a public health student (insert weird freak-out stalker moment here). He then said that his son went to Harvard and had mentioned the two Yale students from the plane to his dad. So now we might have dinner with a German Jewish accordian player and his Harvard economist son in Caracas. Weird, right?

To assure you all that I am actually working, today I talked with people at the INH (like our NIH) about dengue caseload and I obtained GIS files with streets and city outlines for the country. It's exciting to be getting the information after all the time spent preparing. I'm still working on the logistics of getting to Mérida, my first field site in the Andes, since the lab truck needs repairing. There is a lot to do, including eat dinner, which I am going to do now. ¡Ciao!