That’s me on the right, your new correspondent in Venezuela. On the left is Willie Neuman, The Times’s outgoing correspondent in the region. It’s our first picture together on this colorful floor in the country’s main international airport.  Taking selfies of one’s feet at the airport here has become something of a trend. But unlike for me, who has just arrived, for many Venezuelans, the pictures mark their last photo in the country – at least for a while.  This Technicolor runway dates back to the 1970s, an invention of Carlos Cruz-Diez, one of Venezuela’s famed modern artists.  In the Instagram era, one final snap with a smartphone – usually of one’s shoes – has become a rite of passage for Venezuelans leaving the country. They use the hashtag #Maiquetia – the city where the airport is – in their sign-off.  Emigration has become a theme for a number of young Venezuelan professionals, many of them 30-somethings like me. It’s hard to have a future here in a country where the economy shrank by a tenth and inflation was expected to hit 159 percent last year.  Venezuela supports itself almost entirely on oil revenues, and the collapse of prices has left big shortages and little work. Its proven oil reserves are larger than Saudi Arabia’s, yet people wait in line for things like eggs and flour.  So the people who can pack their bags, take a selfie and hope for the best abroad.  I’m headed in the other direction.  The struggles and the changes afoot in Caracas are what brought me here as the paper’s new bureau chief for the Andes region. I’ll be covering Venezuela along with a range of countries down to Bolivia.  And Willie isn’t taking his last selfie just yet at the airport – he’ll be around for much of the month to show me the ropes.
Nick Casey, The New York Times’s foreign correspondent in South America, is sharing moments from his arrival in Caracas, Venezuela.