The most meaningful intellectual experience I had occurred the last time I had the chance to visit my home country, Venezuela. It was late July of 2010, and I was visiting the only family members that remain in Caracas. The moments I arrived I was immediately confronted by the immensely deteriorated state of the airport. The walls were peeling in places, the duty-free store was only the size of a small supply closet, and even the baggage claim carousels were dirty and undulating in weakness. The entire airport was empty, pathetic, and gray, and the people arriving were just as sad to be arriving. In leaving the airport and entering the hot and humid Venezuelan summer. The instincts inside all Caracas city dwellers awoke inside of me, and my eyes instinctively moved from side to side, from person to person, as I scanned all of my surroundings. In Caracas and in Venezuela, I was raised to always be aware of my immediate vicinity and of any suspicious character that could be of possible harm to my family and me. The roads were in an absolutely awful condition: unfinished, unpaved, broken up and worn down by years of use and no rehabilitation. Cars that were broken down in the streets has parts stolen from them and cars on the road were outdated and decrepit. …show more content…
Never before, in Venezuela or in any other country, had I seen half-constructed high-rises of dark concrete with no windows as the homes of hundreds of people with clothes lines across the empty hallways and windows. I had never seen the exterior walls of finished buildings in nice areas covered in mold and appear like candles, with the tops of the buildings covered in dirty, black, melting paint. The whole city was rotting. Since trash pick-up services were indefinitely discontinued, ten to twenty heaped bags of trash, the entirety of Caracas smelled like decaying