I woke up this morning to no emails from the superintendent, which meant school was on as planned. I showered and got ready for my day. About five minutes from walking out the door, my cell phone started blowing up. Apparently, in the wee hours of the morning, the barricades started:
The buses had left school normally, but soon realized that getting students to school, and subsequently home from school at the end of the day, was going to be challenging. And apparently not worth the risk, so an hour before school was to start, we were advised that it would be a virtual school day. People scrambled around to call their phone trees and parents. We quickly realized that some of our landlines weren't working. Mine was, so Jason came up to use it. By seven, it was clear this was going to be a more interesting week than I had predicted on Sunday.
I went over to Holly's to eat breakfast. We both didn't have virtual classes this morning so we figured we would try to hit up the grocery store before everyone else in Caracas made the mad dash to hoard everything in sight. Around 8:30am we headed out, only to realize that the whole Centro Commercial was closed, including the grocery store, pharmacy, nail places etc. We were not easily dissuaded from our quest, however. We both needed water and diet coke and those were worthy causes. We headed up the hill, where a four minute walk up the road there was a gas station with a small grocery/bread store. At first we were worried about the safety of walking up the hill, as there were a lot of motorizados (guys on motorcycles), but we soon saw two older women and their dogs, who greeted us with "buenos dias amorcitas como estan?", so we figure we were okay. As we crested the hill of the gas station, we saw that the station pumps were closed and there were cars parked randomly along the road. As we turned the corner to get to the store, we saw a huge crowd milling around a sturdy barricade of trash, furniture, random bits of wood, etc, similar to the one in the picture above. The crowd was clearly swelling, so we ducked quickly into the store and kept our mouths shut.
In the store, we grabbed coke, water and delightedly, some milk too. As we were finishing our shopping, a woman in a Venezuelan flag baseball cap rushed into the store, speaking loudly in Spanish. Holly, who is fluent, calmly whispered in English into my ear "We need to pay and get going", so I promptly plopped myself into the cola (line) and waited to pay. Almost without speaking, it was clear that Holly was going to pay for everything with her debit card, so that I wouldn't have to open my big gringa mouth. Right away, we hit problem #3473 of the day, as it became apparent that Holly's card wasn't working. We had suspected that our cards wouldn't work, as another co-worker had messaged that the bank site was down. Holly rustled up some cash and we headed out the door, heads down, walking with purpose down the hill. Once we got partially down the hill and out of ear shot, speaking in English was allowed again, and I asked Holly what the woman had said. Holly reported that she had warned the store that it was time to close, as the crowd was getting bigger and rowdier. Holly then giggled and remarked that it's funny that this was my first experience abroad. My response? Hey, if the bar is low, than you can only go up from there! :)
We got home uneventfully and my vigilante (the building guard) asked for an update then shooed me back to my apartment and told me to stay there. The streets are no place for gringas today! I agreed. If that's as close as I get to the street revolution, I'm thrilled. And for now, I am more than stocked up. I have food and water enough to last me at least 10 days. And for now we (clearly) have Internet, so life is good. From my balcony, things are still calm looking on the streets below. I'm happy to stay put as long as needed for things to settle down. I've got enough diet coke to last the long haul, so bring on the barricades and let's see what happens!
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