Where everybody knows your name

The title of this post refers to the Bogota Royal Hotel in, surprise, Bogota, Colombia. When I was a guest there I was told that the staff was required to memorize the faces and names of the guests for security reasons. Furthermore, they must address you by name, even to say hello

I spent 13 years working for RCA in Latin America and the Caribbean Islands. In that time I visited every country in South and Central America with the exceptions of Nicaragua and French Guiana. We had customers in all the Caribbean Islands whose market could support sufficient sales of our entertainment products. In those 13 years I accumulated nearly one million frequent flyer miles; spent countless hours in airports; packed and unpacked my gear over and over.

I didn't pack a camera on my trips. The last thing I wanted was to be seen taking pictures of the 'natives' in their natural habitat as though they were some curiosity of nature instead of human beings. All the pictures in this post are ripped from the internet.
In the countries I visited there is the small rich class, a large, poor underclass; and a tiny middle class. They live in parallel universes, indifferent to each other since one can't do anything about the others. I didn't think anyone wanted another American taking pictures to show other Americans how the little people live and work.

To be sure, there were visits to all those places people usually romanticize about -- places like Aruba, Barbados, Brazil, Costa Rica. There were exotic ports of call such as Port of Spain, Trinidad where I stayed at an upside down hotel; where I ran out of money and couldn't leave the country; where I visited a sanctuary for Hummingbirds high in a rainforest; Willemstad, Curacao, a Dutch architectural wonder on a desert island; Margarita Island off the coast of Venezuela, where I shared my breakfast with birds who waited for me to put bread crumbs out for them across the table. Even as I fought myself not to behave as a tourist, I straddled the Equator in Ecuador which, by the way, is not blue as you see on world maps. It is red. I was there. I saw it.

The upside down hotel in Trinidad

Willemstad, Curacao

Yes, I straddled the red line

I shared my breakfast with very polite birds

There were other places, too, which were not so exotic but still an adventure of sorts in every visit. Driving up the coast in Chile from Santiago to Iquique I saw towering sand dunes as high as any witnessed by Lawrence of Arabia. And I saw grafitti on the dunes; grafitti inscribed not in spray paint but with stones, painted white, brought in from somewhere since there are no stones on the dunes. While the method of messaging on the dunes was unique, the messages were as commonplace as any anywhere else in the world. On the other side of the road was a brown 9 hole golf course. The fairways were defined by white rocks and the whole course was a sand trap.

Sand dunes on coastal Chile

In Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, I bought a name brand watch at an open air smugglers' market for $15.00. It may be a counterfeit but it ticked along faithfully on my wrist for 17 years. San Juan, Puerto Rico, I learned, has Burger Kings every 3 blocks along its major boulevards; it also has 26 national holidays, so that, on average, workers have 4 day weeks every other week.

If you miss this one there's another one 2 blocks

away.

I didn't worry very much about my safety except for my visits to Colombia where my customers provided an armed body guard to ferry me to and from wherever I needed to go; or Medellin where the CEO's private bathroom doubled as a Panic Room replete with shotguns and handguns mounted on the walls. Argentine plain clothes police detained me briefly after examining my passport and searching my computer bag.

Technicians attending my training seminar in Maracaibo placed their handguns on the desks before settling down to listen to what was probably the best lecture I ever gave.

On my first visit to El Salvador in 1995, my host tried to convince me that the automatic weapons fire I heard at night was just a bunch of guys celebrating birthdays. The fact that El Salvador had just declared a truce in a 30 year civil war was not part of his less than persuasive argument.

Late one night a cabby in Trinidad made my heart go cold when he stopped the car on a dark, deserted road lined on both sides with tall sugarcane. A moment later a car coming from the opposite direction stopped in front of my cab. Both drivers got out and conferred briefly.Then my driver took his shirt off and the other driver who was shirtless put it on. As my now shirtless driver returned he gave me the weary look a parent might give a child as he explains something for the umpteenth time. Cab drivers serving the airport in Port of Spain are highly regulated to protect the tourism business. One of the regulations is that cabbies must wear white shirts and black pants. My cabby and his friend were sharing a white shirt.

At night, a road like this is very dark

The first order of business when visiting a customer was to meet with the CEO as a matter of courtesy and to explain the purpose of my visit. Though the CEO knew what my business was, this formality was always observed. In most cases, I was passed on to someone else to be my guide and minder. He would attend my seminars, see to it I had everything I needed, take me to lunch and dinner. Some of these men were highly educated and could hold forth on a wide variety of topics long into the night over drinks. My host in La Paz, Bolivia, provided me with bottomless carafes of Mate (mateh), a tea derived from cocoa leaves, to combat altitude sickness.

Mate for whatever ails you

She would sell me 2 lemons but not 12.

A Guatemalan minder knowing that I had 12 hours to kill before my flight took me to view some ruins dating back to the Spanish conquest. He recounted the history of the site and that of other sites nearby.

My job with RCA was to train technicians about our TV's, Stereo Systems, Phones, CD players, Camcorders, Modems, and Satellite Receivers. I worried about how competent my students would be since most technicians I knew in the U.S. were poorly prepared in electronics. To my surprise, I discovered that technical schools abound everywhere in Latin America. The schools are small enterprises but the students are taught very well.

My minder in Lima, Peru, explained that in his country most people were underemployed and rather than be idle, they attended classes to add to their skills. The tiny schools are run by underemployed university professors or other professionals. I became more observant and saw that I could be schooled in typing, sign making, iron work, plastering, carpentry, languages, accounting, electronics, or baking, all within 200 yards of my hotel.

My students ranged from apprentice technicians to engineers, frequently mixed for the same lecture. Class sizes were as small as 6 techs, in Panama, to as many as 200 in Guatemala where the satellite receiver seminar was held outdoors under a large tent. I lost my voice after 3 days of shouting over the noise coming from an iron works business next door.

Guatemalan coffee was my favorite. It made my throat feel all better.

In one memorable event in downtown Quito, our line of sight to the Direct TV satellite was blocked by tall buildings. Across the way, there was a rooftop that had good access to the satellite so we managed to convince the owner to let us use it for the hands-on part of the Direct TV training. We had to run 3 one hundred foot extension cords from one rooftop to the next for power and move all the equipment. Everybody had fun that day.

For the most part my students were well very respectful and eager to learn. Sometimes there would be wiseguys who pretended not to be interested then asked the most relevant questions and got the highest grades on the quizzes I gave.

I worked with RCA for 30 years, first operating an Authorized Factory Service Center, then as Field Service Operations Manager, Latin America, from 1994 through 2007. It was a fun job, hard to do but well compensated. Our mascot Nipper retired at the same time as I did January 1, 2008.

The lights went dark in 2008. The RCA brand and business was sold to Audiovox.