Getting gas in Venezuela

It’s a routine errand, expensive, kinda smelly, and utterly unexciting, for millions (billions?) of people. Filling up the tank. Getting gas. Burning dinosaur bones. (And you were worried this was a chronological consequence of the post on Venezuelan food. Tut tut, I'm classy.)

You pull into the station, maybe wait in line, park your car, turn it off, no smoking, no cell phones, stand there bored while the thick black hose squirts thick black sludge into your car, the sun is hot on your neck. Then swipe your card to pay your $30, $40, $50...$60 per tank?

It’s pretty much the same in Venezuela, with one major difference. No, it’s not that there was no brand name necessary on the shelter. No, it’s not the absence of muzak “radio” piped in.

Can you guess the difference?

If my math is correct, with it’s flurry of units of measurement, and depending on what rate you actually get for your dollar (no one uses the official rate, so I’m using the average rate one gets in a hotel, about 45 bolivars per dollar), a gallon of gas that day, and every day, in Venezuela costs about $0.008 per gallon.

A gallon of gas costs less than a penny.

How do you feel about that?

But that’s Venezuelan gas, we Americans get the finer stuff, the Saudi Arabian stuff, the moral stuff, right?

Guess who is, and always has been, the number one purchaser of Venezuelan oil. I don’t even need to tell you.

(And we can get into the relative morality of Venezuela versus the Middle East another day.)

How do you feel, right now, about the subsidies oil companies receive? How do you feel about the fact that the profits they make are the highest in human history?

Let's sing a little song to make you feel better.

Cuba doesn't let your eyes get bored

Pics OF tuktuks while IN a tuktuk!
Asia's gonna be so much fun!

When you first get to Southeast Asia, you can’t stop taking pictures of tuktuks. They’re just so...interesting! A week later, maybe two, and you barely notice the three-wheeled vermin. This is often the case when traveling: some local item grabs your attention at first, before blending completely into the background.

But, as is so often the case: it’s different in Cuba.

This is one of the first pictures I took, on the bus ride in from the airport, and the eye-catching was just getting started.

These are all from my first day.

Nearly three weeks went by, with art, music, and dance, not to mention culture, experience, and friendship.

I was saturated. I felt overstuffed with experiences and images; I’d need a spare lifetime to process the photos alone.

A neighbor gave me a ride to the bus station in his clunky Moskvitch, a Soviet block of metal homage to the right angle.

I rode to the Che Guevara Memorial in an antique Peugeot with hand-carved wooden arm rests, walked past Russian Ladas more ubiquitous than sandals, and ridden five hours in some dude’s claptrap Hyundai (which he claimed was a legal shared taxi, but when we’d pass a police checkpoint he’d roll the windows up and say “If they ask you, we are friends, and you have been staying at my house for a week. My name is Javier, what is yours?”)

And finally, I’d ridden in a couple of the classic “Yank Tank” American cars, first a Pontiac, then a Chevrolet from the 1950s. Both now chug along all day as shared taxis, which will take you anywhere along their route for 20 Cuban pesos, about $0.80, and were two of only four times I got to use the national Cuban currency, instead of the “Convertible Peso” used by the tourism industry.

And yet, after all those days, all that sweat, all those miles and exhaust pipes, here are some of the pictures from my last day.

I’m not normally a car guy. At all. I would happily drive a Honda Civic until my dying day (hopefully unrelated to the aforementioned Civic), but there is just something about those cars, in that place…

It’s just different in Cuba.