Christmas 98
As usual, whenever I'm away from home (wherever that is now) OK, so whenever I'm  away from friends and family, it's a bit of a downer and I  feel the distance - we all do - but thanks to all the support from you beautiful people and some fun friends here, I passed the holidays with and events, and a party with close peace corps friends, some close local friends and a bunch of these underwater diver guys who were in St. Vincent diving an old shipwreck!  That was celebratory and festive!  Christmas day, the remnants of the party were lazy and we laid around, put together a 1000 piece puzzle, and ate too much left over chile.  New Years was fun and festive as well.  Not a lot to talk about.  You know
the usual go out dress up and dance til all hours kinda thing! And that's about Christmas.  Now for 1999...hmmm.  The deal is if there is a Peace Corps Volunteer to replace me at PPA then I'll travel for a couple months before and hopefully be headed through the states ion December and in Michigan for Christmas.  However, if there is no replacement, I may choose to stay on for a few months!  Time will tell as is always the case.  I do look forward to reuniting with all of you soon!

Off the Island Excursion - 'the real news'
VENNNEEEZUEEELLLAAA or bust... and we almost did.  So what was my favorite Christmas present?  A visit from Mom and our trip to Venezuela!  I promised many a full update so here goes.  We took two weeks and should have taken two months, to do three countries a boat, and a bus!  I mention the boat and bus because a lot, ok most, of our vacation had to do with one of those or another!  Before I forget for anyone interested in Venezuela I have a travel log and some tips and Lonely Planet's guide is a must have - it, generally, with a few love hotel exceptions, is a good bet!  Just let me know if you desire info. Let me preface this by saying we had only three set plans ....round trip air dates to Trinidad, round trip boat dates to Venezuela, and a stop over date in Grenada.  Everything else we decided to play by ear.  Strange how that decision made the trip ever-exciting and interesting!  Started in Trinidad where Mom decided to buy a steel pan (a really cool sounding instrument made out of the bottom of a barrel)....talked to the tattoo guy about what I wanted and visited this cool African art place.  We ate this really incredible Lebanese food with lots of garlic.  YUM! Set sail (on a ferry) at 7pm for Isla de Margarita (Venezuelan island)  By the way they make really cool hammocks on Margarita.  It's a great tourist place and pretty mellow but for someone who lives in the Caribbean one day was as much as I needed when all I had was 2 weeks, so we left for main land the next day!  Arrived in Puerto La Cruz, a really great hip town.  The waterfront at night starts booming with a local craft market up and down the sidewalk.  People are so freindly.  We ate good falafels and Middle Eastern desserts...and then grabbed a bus for Caracas!  The bus was arctically air-conditioned and we froze.  First  lesson - wear long pants and bring a jacket!  Arrived in Caracas at 5
something in the morning and decided 'hey let's just go on to the mountains'....so we were accosted in the process of trying to get
tickets and then ended up finally on a bus that got a flat tire an eighth of a mile outside the station.  Fixed that and were on the road
again - so we thought - until 3 hours later when the bus stopped at the side of the road for an hour trying to repair something....back on the road for a mile and then on the side of the road until 10pm (about 6 hours) waiting next to a military stop point or something which meant that every vehicle was accelerating and spewing fumes....we met a group of guys from Germany and Switzerland who we ended up strangely running into for the following three days. By the time we got to Merida, a funky little Andean city, we were filthy, but relieved....checked into a cute guest house and wandered around waiting to get the room!  After a refreshing shower, we meandered around town and decided to go paragliding.  Mom just about flipped, but ended up loving it.  It was much less of a thrill than expected, but the experience of paragliding 900metres at sunset in the Andes was amazingly peaceful!  The next day we took the Telefarico (the world's longest and tallest cable car) up to about 13,000ft. where there were amazing tundra flowers, a glacier, and other flora that combined the tropics and tundra in combinations I've never experienced!  Southwest meets Florida and lives happily!  We hiked 14km over the mountain and into a quaint little Andean village with no more than 100 residents.  They were amazingly friendly and welcoming.  The village lies at the end of a 4wd jeep path or you can hike to it so it is very secluded but gets a lot of visitors.  The posada (guesthouse) that we stayed in was rustic but charming and I actually got COLD!!!  Mom had sunburn in a way that skin should never
experience and I had enough of it myself.  Strange ironic experience!  At night I found myself wrapped in a rug style Andean blanket sitting on the grass watching the most star filled sky that I have ever seen and having a Merida guide/student point out constellations and discuss astrology in our limited Spanish and English (mine more limited than his).  Surreal...I definately didn't want to leave. 
Next morning we waited and waited for a scheduled jeep that never arrived and then 13 of us from nearly 8 different countries piled into a 10 person jeep and headed down the most 4wd path that I have been on.  Death on both sides and not much in the middle, but a lot of fun and loads of bonding!  Five hours later we jumped back on a bus to Caracas.  Goofed around in Caracas trying to get money exchanged and ate Garlic sauce covered veggies and TOFU...wow, that has been a long awaited pleasure!  Caracas is nice but just another big city....Jumped a bus to Cumana where we had the pleasure of being guided by our travel book to a love hotel.  My first experience with hourly rates....After much laughter and nervousness we ended up next door and I must admit I was a little anxious about crawling into bed. Luckily the room was plenty warm so sleeping on top of the sheets was a great option.  We awoke to a festival for some Saint and wandered around wishing we had more time...left for Guiria to catch the ferry to Trinidad.  Deciding not to get the tattoo but maybe another...left for Grenada the next day for three days of fun diving into waterfalls, hangin on the beach and enjoying good friends!  In a big nutshell that was vacation.  Too much in too little time but enough of a taste to fall in love with Venezuela....

Still Connecting..
Patience, love, quiet, solitude, peacefulness, stillness, and non-judgementalness!  Ahh the finer things in life.  If I could bottle
and sell all that I've learned about life from living here, I would still be this poor...but that is not to say that the lessons have not
been the most valuable that any of us can learn, it is just to say that they are not necessarily the lessons that we, as Americans, value.  They would never sell or maybe they would and I'm just a cynic - not possible:) !  What would we give to spend a quiet afternoon handwashing a load of laundry and watching the schoolchildren play next door?  What would we do if we were required to wait for unreliable public transport to take us to work, carry us home, transport our purchases from point A to B?  What we do if 'be there at 9' ended up more like 10:30 or 11?  What would we do if we were the minority in a world where we stood out in a crowd and we were the stranger, the visitor?  What would we do if we had so much free time that we were required to face our truest fears...to face our own

krissal@geocities.com