Massimo's photoblog

I have no clue who those two little guys are. When yesterday we went to Mayli’s grandmother house (La Finca) I found these two with one of Mayli’s mother uncles. They may be some second degree cousins, or something. Anyway, the younger of the two caught my hand and told me: “come to see the pigs”. And there we went, along a path in the bananas field behind la Finca, to the place where the pigs are kept. The piglet in yesterday’s photo was one of them. I guess the little guy wanted me to accompany him to the piglet because he is not authorized to go alone. The pigs are in a place very close to a steep slope ending into the stream a hundred feet in the valley below, so he may be denied to go without adult supervision. Or maybe he just thought I would have liked the piglets (which in fact I did).

Today we went again at la Finca for lunch (where we had chinese food, and not -strangely enough- hallacas), but apart for that we didn’t really do much. I did go to walk Sniffer, Mayli’s mother golden retriever, and we went together to La Parroquia, the nearby Merida neighborhood, where we saw the “caravanas de los gandoleros” (dozens of trucks passing through the village blowing their horns, I guess as part of the Christmas festivities).

Something else about yesterday that I forgot to mention. When we were going to la Finca, we saw a very long line on the side of the road. We stopped and Mayli asked what it was, hoping it was a line to renew her photo id (apparently there is not an official place to do it, you have just to find the right line wherever it forms). A policemen said that the line was because they were giving pollitos (little chicken) at the government subsidized price. The policemen probably thought that Mayli intended to stay in line and get one pollito, because then added that, however, he could only guarantee that there were enough pollitos for the person arrived before Mayli, but not for more. Maybe he thought that the pollitos were not intended for somebody clearly not belonging to the intended recipients of the government aids... No pollitos for Mayli today.

Go to the next installment of my Venezuela travel diary.