Heading to Puerto La Cruz this weekend

Hello Awesome People,
Guess what, I am about to head out on my first big adventure outside of the capital. I´m going to visit a friend, one of my language partners, in Puerto La Cruz. It is her birthday this weekend so it should be double the fun. I´ll get to meet her mother and brothers too. None of them speak a word of English so it should be a very good weekend for me.
This week has been productive, but I haven´t gotten much language practice. Partly because one of my language partners has been in Puerto La Cruz for the past two weeks, partly because I lost my phone earlier in the week and it is hard to connect with people with a phone that I can send them text messages with. So I am looking forward to several days of Spanish submersion. We´ll see how I do! :-)
One of the guys at the office sat down with me two days ago and said that I really should be spending 6 hours or so a day just working with the books. I´ve explained to him several times that where I am weakest is hearing and speaking the language, but he doesn´t seem to understand that. I can conjugate on paper just fine, but if I´m not hearing the words correctly or pronouncing them correctly, it doesn´t do me much good to be able to conjugate on paper. This is why I am trying to spend at least an hour every day talking with a native speaker.
The woman that I am going to visit has been my main language partner. Originally we were trying to meet 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. I think that she has become too busy to do that for the rest of the summer, but we´ll see what happens when she gets back from vacation.
There are several other people that are also being incredibly helpful with practicing Spanish as well and I usually meet with them once or twice a week.
Recently I put up an add requesting volunteers to help us at the Prout Institute and on Tuesday I met a woman who I think will start volunteering in the office and helping me one evening a week with research for the Institute.
One of the issues that we run into is that most of us in the office are not Venezuelan so we have large learning curves about how things work here. Based on my Peace Corps experience I really want to work on all my projects here with locals. I think that my work will be much more viable and efficient if I work with locals. (I know that I need to tell you folks more about the projects, but I am still figuring out exactly what we have and thinking about what comes next.)
But, back to the volunteers: we can´t pay anyone for their time, however being able to put on their resume that they´ve worked in a bilingual office and I am willing to help them with their English, makes it an attractive volunteer option for some students. (Basically, they get free English lessons in exchange for helping us. But right now I´m only offering it to people who have a pretty good command of the English language already.) I put up flyers at two universities and spent Tuesday morning with a promising volunteer. Our conversation was all in English and then I lost my phone so I wasn´t able to meet up with someone in the afternoon to practice my Spanish. :-(
and without my phone, I wasn´t able to set up a language session for today either. :-( I did have a session Wednesday evening, but it was short and I didn´t get a lot of practice.
However today, the office, well everyone in the office, took the afternoon off and we went to the new art museum here. It was a good excursion. I have a new favorite artist: Arturo Michelena (1863-1898)
The museum just opened and it has some absolutely fantastic art!!! I´ve been to a number of museums in the states and in Europe, seen a number of special exhibitions, and was really impressed with their collection. It isn´t a huge museum, but they have wonderful stuff there.

After I´d looked at everything, I sat down to study and then Dada joined me and a guard came up and started talking to us about the pictures. He gave us a small private tour and told us a lot about the pictures, including my favorite painting in the gallery, Carlota Corday Camino al Cadalos 1889 aka Carlota Corday camino al patíbulo (Charlotte Corday marchant vers l’échafaud)
I am absolutely captivated by painters that are able to achieve 3 dimensional illusions. I wanted to touch the canvas to be sure that he hadn´t just packed a lot of paint on to achieve the 3D illusion - lol I resisted. However, I did look at the picture from just about every angle that I could reach without touching the canvas. :-)
The only bummer was that on the way home, Hans got his back pocket picked on a very full metro. We think we know how it happened because there was a little guy who started getting very agitated and Hans ended up with his hands on both of his shoulders. While Hans was distracted with the guy infront of him, a guy behind him picked his backpocket. Then the little guy got off the metro and a moment later another guy followed him off the metro. Dada noticed it was odd that two people got off at the same time but Hans didn´t realize that he´d been pick pocketed until later. :-(
Dusty was kind enough to show me where to buy my ticket and to catch the private bus to Puerto La Cruz. And, since it is a long drive, my boss was kind enough to give me Friday afternoon off. So I now have a ticket for 2:45 pm and I know how to get to the bus station. I´ve been warned that the bus will be freezing cold so I am supposed to bring a blanket with me on the bus and my sweatshirt. :-)
One of the things that Dusty and I ended up talking about while we were walking around was the exchange rate and how having access to US dollars makes it so much easier for us to travel than for Venezuelans to travel. My advice to him was to do as much as he can now because when the rules about buying oil changes and the dollar is no longer needed, the demand for the dollar will go way down.
Anyway, speaking of traveling and what to bring, I need to go and pack.
I have a language lesson tomorrow morning and then I will go get on the bus.
I hope that you all have a fantastic weekend!
Hugs
Mariah