As my occasional use of Yiddish words might imply, I have a vivid and sincere respect for my eastern European heritage. My family roots go back centuries to a tiny shtetl in Poland, and I have read of the dire poverty and frigid weather that often struck similarly isolated towns.Under these conditions the Ashkenazi Jews adapted ever since they first settled in that part of the world. But what happens when your fair-skinned Ashkenazi boychick, designed to brave cold winters and store precious body heat, is transplanted to tropical climes? Put simply: he begins to lose consciousness and starts to shvitz until a medium-sized Venezuelan city begins to flood. And if he doesn´t take a glass of water and Tylenol, he gets a headache by five o´ clock. I should be so lucky.
This brings me to the city of Cumaná, a medium-sized city on the Caribbean coast in eastern Venezuela. I will call it home for the next ten months, and it has been good to me so far. For starters, people go out of their way to help me settle down and feel at home. Cumaná has a much slower and laid back pace than Caracas, and a trip to a nice beach only requires a fifteen-minute car ride. However, it is hot. Oy vey, is it hot. On average, the daily temperature hits about 90° F. Some buildings have air conditioning, but this provides no respite from the heat when the power goes out. By the way, it goes out. A day´s worth of this heat sucks the energy out of any human being.
Venezuelans have invented an excellent mechanism to mitigate the mild case of heat exhaustion: the two-hour lunch break. Unaccustomed to this ritual, it took me about four days of late afternoon headaches and fatigue to learn the value of lunch plus a thirty-minute nap. Holding an electric fan less than a foot away from my head helps too. As I learn to adapt to the weather, I´m able to forsake the excessive nostalgia for “the old country.” But I didn´t want to get caught unprepared; I can always flip through my copy of Leo Rosten´s The Joys of Yiddish, which is probably the only one on the Caribbean coast. You never know when an emergency might pop up.
