¡Epa! ¿Que Pasó?

I´m very homesick this week. I´m a little sick of working at the cooperative, it´s very hard and tiring, and I´feel like I could be doing something better with my time. I´m taking the day off today to try to figure out what I´m doing, and organize a new game plan for my last week here. I need to accomplish many interviews in the next week, with many people.

On Thursday we went to a friends music and arts school, it was very cool. He runs the school, which provides the surounding community with free music lessons, instruments, group playing time, as well as singing, dance, painting, arts and crafts and whatever kids want to do lessons. We got a afro - venezuelano drum lesson, and then a big group of kids performed on drums and sang for us. They also tried to teach us to do the tambom dance (drum dance) which is pretty much immpossible to do if you´re white. I think it was more of a joke so they could laugh at us.
There´s an internaitonal solcialist confrence going on this evening and tomorrow, which we were all planing on attending, however when we got there we realized it was very hard to participate when everything is in spanish, so it didn´t really work out.

I´ve observed that when I hang out with my family, all they do, even their teenage kids, and kids in their twenties is hang out together. all the time. Just with their whole family, everyday. It´s a very different dynamic than i´m used to. They all get drunk together and speak really fast in spanish in the evening, and in the mornign they all clean together.
On the other hand all the wealthy families I´ve interacted with take pride in reflecting American culture, and while their families still live together, they do not hang out, but pass their time driving around in their cars listening to music, and swimming in pools, and eating out, or basically making fun of their house helo while they sit in their pool listening to music, and still always drinking.

Everyone here drinks all the time. They think it´s strange we dont drink all day with them. THey start drinking at about 10 or 11 and continue for the rest of the day. I think more money is spent on alcohol than anything else in this country.