Galipán In The Clouds

Galipán is a small town on top of the mountains overlooking Caracas. You can hire a driver to take you up the steep roads in a four-wheel drive vehicle. The driver can be arranged by one of the restaurants. Our driver was arranged by a chocolate shop. Most of the roads are paved but it's easier letting a local take you since they know the little one lane roads around where we needed to go. We ended up going on a beautiful day since the clouds passed around us but also gave us clear views every now and then.

Parque Los Chorros

Parque Los Chorros is a park on the edge of Caracas near the bottom of the Ávila. It's narrow and follows a creek with walkways, bridges, and stairs under big shady trees and tall bamboo. It's a family park with kids playing in the water and a couple of playgrounds. The main feature is a beautiful waterfall. The stairs to the side of it lead up to another pond and a smaller waterfall. It's a fun little park to explore.

It has attended parking available under the elevated Avenida Boyacá. The price was 50 Bs a year ago but it's now 80 Bs. I won't tell you how crazy cheap that is at the current parallel rate because the math is fractions of a penny. There's a little restaurant selling lunch but we didn't eat this last time. It was decent food when we last visited. Overall it's a nice place in the city to relax in nature and is one of of our favorite parks along with Parque del Este (Parque Generalísimo Francisco De Miranda).

Sietemares

Sietemares is an ecoposada & spa beach resort on the Venezuelan coast about 2 hours drive from Caracas. It's a wonderful weekend getaway with all-inclusive meals & drinks, an infinity pool, massages overlooking the ocean, and 7 beautiful private coves with interesting rock formations all along the coast.

The bar and dining are outside and covered. There are plenty of shade or sun spots. You could sit or lay out by the pool or the ocean. It's easy to relax how you want to there. The ocean is a little rough for swimming and the protected area by the resort is small. However, the beauty of it all makes it more interesting for us compared to a nice pristine beach suitable for swimming.

Los Roques

A 3 day weekend in the Los Roques archipelago!

It's approximately 350 islands, cays, and islets in a total area of 40.61 square kilometers. The archipelago is located 128 kilometers (80 miles) north of the port of La Guaira. It's awesome to see and relaxing to be. There's very few people overall because you have to fly out to Gran Roque in a small plane and take a small boat to any of the other little islands. It's not made for having a ton of tourists so it's a special place to visit in Venezuela. It's also a bit isolated from everything going on in Venezuela.

I highly recommend La Gotera with their beautiful seaside porch for dining and hanging out. It looked like they had one of the best setups of any of the other posadas there. The gourmet food was outstanding and everything was wonderfully done. They really took care of us.

I took lots of pictures so I think I'll just let some of them speak for themselves. Click on the pictures for larger versions or scroll through to at least take a quick look at this beautiful place.

3rd Tour is... Riga!

Next stop is Riga, Latvia!

I've been to Riga for a weekend but that barely scratched the surface for experiencing a place. I wasn't bidding completely blind since it already left a good first impression as a nice place to be. The earliest we can leave Caracas is August which should put us in Riga around September 2018.

Mid-Level Bidding Continued

I'm heading into the home stretch for Monday when handshakes can be offered. I have a good feeling now for my next assignment in Sep 2018 but there were some bad feelings along the way. I'll end up somewhere on the planet, so the game right now is about trying to get to somewhere I prefer. I definitely think it's a huge game and I haven't enjoyed it very much. Read Mid-Level Bidding Game for way too much information on what this is about.

Mid-Level Bidding Game

The first two tours in the Foreign Service are directed. My first tour was a competition of 23 people for 23 positions (just my class) and second tour was 42 people and positions (all first tour people moving that summer). We ranked the full list from 1 to 42 and provided a little narrative explaining why we needed or wanted the posts we picked. A Career Development Officer (CDO) reviewed it all together and considered personal constraints like family and medical needs. The CDO put people in positions in one big step. It seemed like a fair system for balancing service needs with individual needs and desires. I miss that system.

This blog post is about the completely different game of mid-level bidding. It's not unlike Sheldon's Friendship Algorithm. However, imagine a huge diagram that has a bunch of people engaging in this diagram with a bunch of posts in order to narrow down about 50 options into 5 to 10 bids for each person.