Too serendipitous to waste time being worried.

As you may or may not know, I spent today and yesterday in cars, planes, trains, and taxis on the way to Caracas, Venezuela. I will be spending the next 10 months on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Valera, Venezuela, a city in the Andes about 10 hours outside of the capital.

Some of you were faithful readers of my blog while I was in Tanzania (http://annagoestotanzania.blogspot.com- you can still read it!), and it was so fun to be able to share tales of visits from elephants, wonderful host families, terrifying bus rides, swimming with dolphins, and mass releases of prisoners from nearby prisons. While this experience will be very different from my African adventures, teaching English classes at the university level in South America will surely be interesting, given that I have never really taught English, have never been to South America, and regularly confuse Spanish, Swahili and occasionally English vocabulary.

I have to be honest, the weeks leading up to this trip were pretty frustrating and stressful, to the point where it was hard to be excited about the good parts of the trip. Some examples:
1) About 30 hours before my flight was scheduled to leave, my passport (with my visa) was in a Fedex truck somewhere between DC and St. Paul
2) I nearly missed our entire orientation weekend in DC simply because I was never informed about it
3) I took it as a bad sign that my flight into Caracas was Continental flight 666, and that
4) there was a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in Caracas about 12 hours before my arrival
The advice that I got from others regarding my concerns: “Don’t even worry about it… Just go—you’ll figure it out,” “Seriously, you probably don’t even need a visa…It’ll be fine….” I may have a tendency to be a little high strung sometimes, but seriously?! Go without a passport to a country that has less-than-good diplomatic relations with the US?! This was surely NOT good advice. I must admit that this trip didn’t seem like the best adventure I had ever planned… but as you know, I am pretty stubborn and have unrestrained wanderlust, so these things would never actually stop me.

A couple days ago, though, suddenly everything started working out so serendipitously that I couldn’t be more pleased. I got my passport with about 24 hours to spare, and had time to visit and call friends to say goodbye. I had two lovely goodbye dinners with my two families. At the airport, my bag weighed exactly 50.0 pounds, the maximum before you have to pay extra, so I wasn’t charged at all for checking baggage. The woman at the ticketing booth offered my Mom, Ron, Luke and Megan passes to come into the gate with me. We said sure, and I commented that, “I didn’t know you did that?!” and she responded, “We don’t—I’m just feeling generous.”

Once past customs, we glimpsed Air Force One through a window. As we watched, we saw people (including Obama, who had given a speech about 30 minutes before at the Target Center in Minneapolis!) get on the plane, and take off. On the plane, I spent hours perusing SkyMall, trying to imagine the people who spent hundreds of dollars on things like voice-activated R2D2 robots, the “keep your distance” bug vacuum, stainless steel wallets, yard statues of sumo wrestlers, yetis, and zombies, or “million germ eliminating travel toothbrush sanitizers.” I also spent time wondering if I too, might consider purchasing the “indoor dog restroom,” doggie doorbells, inflatable dog pools, or drinking fountains for my dog if I were to ever get one… As soon as I knew it, we had arrived in Texas.

Another Fulbright student met me in Houston, and we had time to hang out until our plane left at midnight for Caracas—and it turned out that it was flight 1666, not 666. Haha. In Caracas, there was a driver waiting for us at the airport and a bellboy at our hotel hoping to exchange money with us—at a decent “unofficial” rate. For how nervous and anxious I had been feeling over the last several weeks, everything worked out perfectly. We begin our in-country orientation, meet the ambassador, and get a tour of the embassy tomorrow. I am so excited!!!!!