Looking for men who like arepas?

One semester into graduate school in a field of study that was far, far away from my electrical engineering undergraduate program, I decided to join a group of students who were going to Venezuela for a summer project.  I had no idea what it meant to do a research project for four weeks in a different country where English was not the official language.  But, I signed up anyway.

I suppose we do things when we are younger that we never even imagine doing when we are older.

Coming to America was my first international trip and within a year I was heading abroad again.  I could not have dreamt up such a scenario when I was an angst-filled undergraduate student wondering and worrying about my place in this world.

As an introvert who does not like to venture out of his comfort zone, I would have preferred to stay put in my apartment and not gone with a group to Venezuela. I have always been uncomfortably out of place.   But, the inner drive that got me out of the old country now propelled me to South America.

While wisdom that travel supposedly provides is an overreach for most of us, to be exposed to a world that is all alien and to learn from it is one of the best ways that I think I have made whatever little progress that I have made to understand the human condition.

Over the years, I have come to know well a trait of mine: when I travel to a country, then those, too, are places that I want to read about and understand, even though the chances are slim that I will ever visit those places again.  Those countries, their peoples, become my friends, and I want to stay connected with them.  As with "real" friends, I get excited if what I read about is positive and exciting, and feel awful if otherwise.

The graduate student group, of which I was one, spent only a couple of days in Caracas before we shifted to the project site--Maracaibo. The airline that we flew, PanAm, has long since disappeared from the world of business.  I was thrilled to fly PanAm; for the longest time, I thought that PanAm was the only American airline thanks to its outsized influence in movies and fiction.

I had no idea in that summer of 1988 that PanAm, the mighty airline, was close to bankruptcy.  It has now been more than three decades since PanAm disappeared from the industry that it once dominated.

Being together with the same group of people, who were all different from me in many ways, was--as I now look in the rear view mirror--when I started realizing that making friends with men was going to be difficult for me.

As we settled down into a work schedule after the first couple of days, evenings were about hanging out, sometimes at the rented house where we all stayed.  A couple of evenings, we went to the local bars.  At home and at the bars, I always had nothing but a soda.  I was the only one who didn't drink.  It is not easy to socialize, I came to understand, if I was the only one who stayed away from alcohol.  Nor did I become a social drinker, as some people choose to describe themselves.

If not drinking was a hassle by itself, the conversation topics didn't interest me either.  The group was pretty excited about the NBA championship games, about which I couldn't care.  The fact that the Lakers were a local team was nothing for me to get excited about.  So, when they talked about Kareem and Magic, I became a silent observer.  It has been the same story ever since; no alcohol and no ball-games makes one a boring social companion!

A few months ago, we spotted in the local paper that a food-truck vendor was selling arepas.  I ate arepas with cheese every single day in the streets of Maracaibo.  Travel exposes us to new foods and music.  As a kid, I hadn't known anything but the foods that we ate in my part of India, with the occasional North Indian dish.  Almost 35 years since the Venezuela trip, my mouth started watering for arepas the same way it gets ready for pooris.  But, we couldn't make it to the truck because they served only lunches.  For all I know, the memory of the Venezuelan arepa will any day be tastier than even the best one that I can get now.

Dinner today will be dolmas and pita with hummus, I announced.  A long way from dosai and chutney!

About the photograph: Before we left for Venezuela, with my highly limited student budget, I bought a point-and-shoot camera along with a few rolls.  During a morning walk, I clicked this in Caracas.