Nursing a hangover

Man, I'm really eating my snotty words about flying around the world to party for cheap, aren't I? Although I guess it's not really ALL that cheap, cocktails are $2 or $3; a liter of mediocre Guatemalan beer goes for about $4 in a bar. Last night we had some red ale and Octoberfest homebrew at a bar in town; 50 cents more for a liter and totally worth it (I include this information because people always want to know how much stuff costs). Anyways, we made the rounds last night, two bars and a dance club. We went to a spot called King and Queen, which is the only place I've seen with beer on tap, but since they had a special on two liters of Cabro that's what we got. It had more personality than most of the bars I've seen so far, with some interesting murals on the walls and a PC playing music that the customers had access too.

Anyways, I didn't really want to talk about the places we went to, but I did want to say that what really made the hangover worth it was at about two in the morning this kinda strange seeming Canadian guy came up and started talking to us, and I wasn't too sure about him, and he kept reminding me of something... and it didn't hit me until today, but if you've seen the episode of Flight of the Concords where they hire the dry cleaner to pose as a music label executive - that was who I met last night. This Canadian guy almost seemed like he was doing schtick, like he kept walking up and kind of hunching way over and saying, "how are we all doing?" I think he was just a nutter, but maybe the joke is on me and it was all a Kaufman-esque method of self-entertainment, although the sense I really got was that he just wanted to get laid (but when are there EVER guys like that in a bar?). When the girls I was with went to the bathroom, he was standing real close to me and looked at me and said, "looks like it's just us now. How do you feel about that?" Just like the character in FotC, I wasn't quite sure what to make of him. Anyways, it hit me today while I was laying on our sundeck (an under-construction concrete platform on the second level that I think might someday be a room), and I laughed out loud for a while.

Speaking of characters, I was sitting out front with my roommate Zaynab, and this guy came up and starting talking to us in mixed English and Spanish, he seemed a few cents short, like maybe he had aspergers or something, and he had this bag full of bread and wanted to give us some. He also wanted to tell us his name, and then he wanted to show us his ID to show he wasn't fooling us. He kept saying, "please, for you, free, no problem, no problem. Thank you, thank you!" And then he wanted to kiss Zaynab's hand, and then touch her thigh, so we had to excuse ourselves. I guess even those who are differently-abled get horny.

It's warmed up here, so it's not below freezing anymore, chilly but not cruel. I finished Spanish classes yesterday, and am really glad for the break. By my third week, the afternoon activities the school organizes were on repeat, and there was a munch less interesting, and older, student crowd (not that those things necessarily go together, but it's more fun to hang out with peeps my age who are cool. A lot of older single travelers seem like they're that because they haven't been able to make friends back home, and they always seem to have crackpot conspiracy theories, like the guy I met who said the geothermal energy in Guatemala could power the whole world, but it will never happen because of "the oil companies." Sure oil only accounts for about 1% of electricity production in the United States, and electricity can't be stored and is difficult to move long distances, but hey, fuck reality, you know?). Also, five hours a day five days a week, one on one with a teacher, is really intense! I really feel like I need time to let things sit, and to have a chance to practice. I started on the present-tense subjunctive last week, and forgot all of my normal present-tense conjugations, always substituting the subjunctive. I think it's a sign my head is full. Just to explain, Spanish has way more verb tenses than English: present, preterite, imperfect, future (both common and grammatical), conditional, and imperative. Then there's the subjunctive, and there's a separate subjunctive for each of the above, so seven subjunctives to learn. Like I said, a lot. What is that, 14? Yikes. Anyways, my classes continued to be good, my new maestra Laura and I kept the conversation going with debates about how hard it is to be poor in the United States (her view: the poor in Guatemala can at least grow their own food and not starve. My view: stuff is actually way cheaper the United States a lot of the times, while we make more money; plus our country has a ridiculous amount of material wealth that is literally left out as trash, as well as programs like food stamps and food banks), and whether or not Spanish should be adopted as a second official language of the United States (her view: the American West used to belong to Mexico, and will be over half latino in the near future, so Spanish should be adopted as a second official language. My view: English serves as a common bond between an ethnically diverse citizenry, not to mention making Spanish an official second language would probably really piss off the Chinese, Filipino, Somali, and Brazilian minorities, just as examples, especially those who had just finished their English classes). I don't think Laura was as good about correcting me as Carlos, and I think Carlos was a better teacher overall, but I think the switch was a good call overall, just for the variety.

Case in point about stuff being cheaper in the US: canned tuna (chunk light was the only type being served up) costs about $1.35 here, compared to what I want to say is about $.50 in the States. I also bought a couple of apples imported from Washington state, which were about $2/pound, which seems about the same or more than back home. Even the bananas are $.60 or $.70 cents a pound, and they actually grow a shit-ton of those around here. The tuna also came packed in either water, oil, or mayonnaise. At first that seemed really gross to me, but then I remembered that probably 90% of the time back home people open up a can of tuna and then immediately add mayonnaise to it. So why not cut out the middle-man? Fuck those guys over at Hellman's. Still, the commitment to mayonnaise is Latin America is pretty incredible, just like the commitment to soda and fried starch. In Guatemala, like in Bolivia, a "salad" just means something that is cut up and served cold, smothered in mayonnaise. Popular in my house is julienne-cut carrots and green beans - smothered in mayonnaise. Put some black pepper on it and it's OK. Still, a lot of Latin cuisine really grosses me out. Is it any wonder I lost 20 pounds living in Bolivia? I should start my own celebrity fad diet; just come live in La Paz with me for 6 months.

The food is generally good at my house though, which is one reason I'm staying for another week or so. The notable exceptions have been the Cup o' Noodles breakfast, the starchy broccoli soup breakfast, and the cold processed meatloaf type stuff that was in the vein of "visible pieces of eyeball and snout" stuff I mentioned my first day (it actually tasted OK, although I found the grainy texture disturbing). It's only about $6 a day for a room and three meals (well, two and a half, the portions are kind of small and I find myself supplementing often), and there's still a couple of things I need to do, like climb Volcano Santa Maria, and go to the Xocomil water park. In between, there's yoga classes in the morning (God, I'm all the things I hate, aren't I? Way to be a white dude from the American North West, Devin! Who wants yoga and tofu? We're healthy!!), gym or day hikes in the afternoon, and reading and people watching in Parque Central in-between. Plus, I've made friends here, I have a nice little core group to hang out with. There's Scott and Ed, the rugby-playing Brits next door, who I yell at from my sun deck if we want to go out, and my roommates Zaynab (British) and Alleen (Mississipian); Brian, friendly and laid-back in that stereotypical Canadian way, and Bethany, a cool girl from Boston who used to intern at Democracy Now and was in Belize volunteering on AIDS education and outreach for 3 months before coming here. And of course Elise, and I think I've neglected to mention it but she's here on the Adventure Learning Grant, the grant I had in South America (she's studying microfinance and women's cooperatives). And, being an extroverted introvert, I find the process of making new friends somewhat tiring and time-consuming. So I think I'm looking at another week or so in Xela; after that the plan is still to head to the Ixil Triangle. I've bumped into a lot of folks who seem to be heading there at some point, so hopefully I won't have to do all the hiking alone.

Just This

From back left: Zaynab, from London; Roberto, from Korea (not his real name); moi; younger host brother Roni; Roberto's Spanish teacher (it was his last night); house mom Esperanza; house dad Geraldo. It's OK if you think "Rivera." That's how I remember it.

Volcano Santa Maria. I took this from the back of a moving picop, so I'm pretty happy with it. This was the day we went to Fuentes Georginas, the hot springs.

Does Greece look like this? I was going to make a joke and then I realized I don't really know. It's the central park in Xela.

Is the machine for sale, or just the bootleg t-shirts?

The market in San Francisco el Alto

My picture on the sly, camera held by my side. The only one that even approached turning out cool.

Chicken Bus!! In a picture taken from a Chicken Bus!!

It's my house. That open door leads to my room.

My neighbor's door. It's way cooler than our door, which is black metal and not worth a picture.

In the background is the city of Xela, where I live, and in the foreground are the hills, where the poor people live.

WOW that's wacky!! Seriously though, the story of what the painter was on has been lost to history.

I didn't take this picture, but as I understand it this is an exact representation of Lago de Atitlan:

By popular demand (that is to say, one person asked me, and that's 1/3 of all comments I've gotten on this blog), I attached some relevant pictures to previous posts, if you're interested. Also, I added some pics in my Facebook profile. Also also, Blogger is kind of a piece of shit about pictures, the formatting is a huge pain in the ass, but I'll do it anyways since it's Sunday and I don't have a lot going on.

Update: I remember just one reason why posting photos sucks with blogger. Because no matter where your cursor is, when you post a photo, it goes to the top of the post. So if you want it someplace else, you have to drag it and drop it, only the post won't scroll automatically, so you have to drag it a few lines, drop it, screw up your text formatting, scroll down, repeat. So I've added photos to the top of this post. If you've read this far, you probably regret it. Sorry.

Steppin' Out

First there was Ignacio Perez Borrel, ex-member of the Buena Vista Social Club, he was on Thursday. The tickets said "Starts at 8:00 pm," although they should have read, "Doors at 8:00 pm," because once we finally got let in, we were given leaflets with programs on them, which stated the music actually started at 9:00 pm. And when eight o'clock rolled around, and there were a bunch of Gringos (and some Guatemaltecos) lined up, so used to things being punctual, we weren't let in for almost half an hour. It was almost as if they crew, so nicely dressed in black suits with black shirts, half a tub of gel in their hair (oh so common in Latin America), realized it was 8:00 and thought "oh yeah, there's a concert." At about 8:15 they decided to try and hang up the giant Gallo sign on the stairs (Gallo is the national beer of Guatemala), but it fell down a few minutes later and was left to rot where it lay. At 8:45 or so we got to start coming in, after they frisked us for weapons and confiscated water bottles so we would have to buy the special, expensive concert water.

The concert was in an old hotel in the center, upstairs in a large ballroom-esque area, festival seating with a large bar in the corner. Before the music came on, we had to hear from the Gallo girls - a couple of skinny young Guatemaltecas in skin-tight Gallo outfits, along with their Jheri-curled lead man who could have been pulled from some jack-ass morning talk radio show. These three had the stage until show time, as the reps. from the event's main sponsor tried to get people to do ridiculous things for free Gallo shirts, and Reggaeton bumped and the girls grinded. The funny thing about this was, first of all, 4/5 of the crowd understood little or no Spanish; second of all, it was a fairly older crowd, or at least not really the crowd who had been tailgating for the past few hours and so was wasted and ramped up to win free shirts and get their picture taken with easy-looking chicas (making the whole thing slightly more comical was that one girl was dancing as if she'd done it for years, the other as if it was her first day). So as this charade went on for the better part of half an hour, I kept smiling and thinking, "are they fucking serious?" Eventually Perez came on, looking EXACTLY like his photo on the flyer, a grizzled, kindly-looking old man with a warm smile, well dressed in a conservative suit, flashy tie, and newsie cap. He played a warm-up song, and then asked (in Spanish, of course), "is everybody happy tonight?" No response. Then he tried, "how are we all doing?" Sporadic, isolated cheers. He seemed to get irritated, and you could almost hear him think, "these mother fuckers don't speak a goddamn word of Spanish." He got over it after a few songs, but you have to wonder what he thinks of the whole thing, like how much he feels like he gets to create art and how much he's just a prop for a picturesque gringo vacation. His most popular tunes by far were the old Buena Vista Social Club ones, not his own newer stuff, and I don't know if it's familiarity or if they're just honestly better songs, but the old songs were definitely my favorites, too. But with all this pop mentality, Perez, after so much time in Cuba, and also so much experience around the world as a musician, probably thinks, "everything they told us about communism was wrong, and everything they told us about capitalism was right. These people don't care about art, they care about commercialism." Or I dunno, maybe he's all about it, maybe that look from the photo is painted on his face at all times (saw him up close once before and once after the show, always with that same serene smile) because it's a brand, an advertisement, and he lives it up.

Anyways, despite my usual ability to rhetorically lead the reader to a different conclusion, I enjoyed the show. It wasn't awesome, but it was good, it was fun. By the end, almost everyone was dancing salsa, including me, even though I can't really dance much salsa. It's a lot easier when a bunch of other principiantes (beginners) are dancing too, not like at the beginning when it's only the 8 Guatemalteco salsa instructors who manage to appear at every gringo event and steal the show (and the women). It must be super fun for the girls, because if you watch them go from an expert partner to a beginner partner, it seems like the dance ability of the person following rests almost wholly on the lead. So great fun to dance with a pro, and so boring to dance with... me. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Stop looking at your feet. OK, spin. Damn, she's hurt." But once everyone started dancing, I got some dances in. It was fun.

So that was Thursday. Friday was Carnival, which in Guatemala basically just means more people go out to the bars, and I got tired and fell asleep (actually one cool thing they do is have these dyed eggs, real eggs, only instead of egg inside there's confetti. I have no idea how they do it, but you crack them over people's heads. This might have something to do with the young girls I saw with *real* egg in their hair at the market last Friday, but maybe not. I didn't even know to ask). Last night, Saturday, we went to the gay bar. I say "the gay bar" because there's only one, and in fact it's the only gay bar in the country outside of Guatemala City, where apparently there's a couple of others. I'm surprised there're any. Anyways, my friend Elise and her flat mates had been before, Elise tends bar in town and a couple of her regulars were supposed to be a drag show, which I guess we couldn't pass up. Before we went, Elise, Marie, and I, we had some beers at Ojala (it means "God willing," but isn't usually used so literally), where I finally tried Moza, the Guatemalan dark beer. Like most places I've been, there are only a couple kinds of beers, and the majority are generic American-style lagers, although here they also have an "ice" beer that I have yet to try, and will probably never try, because I'm not 14 any more (no matter how much the exploding blue logo on the bottle tries to convince me that it's muy fuerte!). Anyways, this is the first time I've been out and haven't been buying liters to share, and Moza only comes in the little bottles, I think they're 350 ml, or just under 12 oz. So I had a Moza, and it was really, really malty, so it was pretty sweet, almost candy-like. Not really my thing. Those of us who are from or who live in the Northwest United States are blessed by an abundance of wonderful beer, but we're in for a shock if we try and go, well, just about anywhere I think. I guess the UK and Germany have beer heritage, but other than that, pickins are slim. At least the Moza was better than the stout I found in Cambodia: I was so excited after months of drinking lagers in Thailand, and when they brought the circa-1930's can out (that's made of steel and feels like it could be about 50% thinner, and complete with the pull-top that comes all the way off), and took a quaff, it tasted like they had made a stout, but then instead of letting it ferment just added turpentine to it. Oh well.

As a side note, Moza is a "girl's beer," like a hefe or raspberry ale back home. It's also used by nursing women to make their milk taste better, after it's boiled with some secret recipe of herbs and spices.

We eventually made it to the gay bar, which I don't remember the name of because it doesn't have a sign. It's not really all that discrete, but the door is kind of tucked into the right-angle of a building, shielded by a set of metal stairs, and has a large metal grate blocking would-be entrants, I guess until they're deemed inoffensive. It's also just below a discoteque, which I suppose gives entrants a reasonable amount of discretion to casual passers-by. Inside, the dance floor was populated by ten or so metro-sexual men, while the wallflowers looked more working class. It wasn't a big place, 6 or 8 small tables and a mini-dance floor, plus a small, dingy bathroom with the grimmest looking urinal I think I've ever seen (think glorified hole in the floor). We were the only gringos inside. The atmosphere was casual, although there was one skeezy guy who kept coming over to bother the girls I was with (isn't this a gay bar? "I prefer women," he explained when I asked him What the Fuck). I had to play boyfriend to both girls, and try and be intimidating to this guy because we was really being assertive, which I hate doing because I'm not particularly intimidating and I haven't been in a fight since second grade. When we went outside to smoke (can you believe they just initiated an indoor smoking ban here? It's even occasionally observed), he followed us, and I basically had to physically remove him. Fortunately he was pretty meek, just a horny guy who wound up feeling bad for bothering us, and we saw him making out with a guy in the bar later, so I think his night went alright. While we were outside, we saw an actual fight, which was some sort of spillover from the next-door taqueria, and also some of the best street-pissing I've ever seen: a guy just wandered into the middle of the road, unzipped, held his hands out and to the sides, as if being hit by the mystical, radiant light of God, and let it rip. He loses in audacity to the guys in business suits I used to see in La Paz, who would stand on the sidewalk in the middle of the day and piss into the road, but he wins for form.

The drag show, by the way, was pretty low-rent. Like most of my posts, I spend a lot more time writing and noticing little stuff than the main event. There were only two drag queens, and each lip-synced a song; one did one of the new Brittany Spears songs and I don't even remember the other one. The choreography was OK, but Guatemalans just can't pull it off like the Thai guys can.

The gay bar supposedly turns into a hot-spot for all kinds after 1am, since it stays open until 4 - bars are supposed to close at 1, and most of them do. When the hour rolled around, the doors were closed, the music snuffed, and hisses of "shhhh, chicos! Shhhh!" attempted to keep the small crowd quiet. But the cops came in anyways, with rather blase looks on their faces as they wielded AK-47s and herded people out the door. Marie said she'd been coming here for four months, and the cops had never come inside. Maybe they were bored or something. They did just double the police force, and they have lots of fancy new trucks, four of which were parked outside. Apparently it was a raid or something, although there was no sense of urgency. Still, and even though my paleness would probably go a long ways towards shielding me from police interest, we beat feet out of there. Cops make me nervous. I pretty much assume that all cops are psychotically violent and crooked to some degree, it's just a matter of a lot or a little. If they don't join the force because they're that way, they become that way from adrenaline overloads and hatred of paperwork. Anyways, we didn't stick around. It was after-hours at the flat instead.

I woke up early the next morning and walked home. I like being out in the mornings, even though I'm a lazy sod and will never get up to see them. But places are different in the morning. I stopped by Xela Pan, the local bread mafia, and picked up some pastries, unsure if I should expect much for breakfast when I got home. The first meal of Sunday is usually kind of weak food-wise, since the family goes to church in the morning, but I still get three (well, two and a half) meals on Sunday, whereas most students are left to fend for themselves on the Lord's Day. Xela Pan is decent, I'd say all the stuff I've gotten there is solid, not spectacular, but good. Today I bought a sort of cross between a bear claw and a turnover, filled with pineapple, which Xela Pan calls a flauta (flute, it does kind of look like a flute I guess), and something else with flaky filo dough and caramel or something in the middle that I haven't tried before. Like I said, the pastries are good, although they tend to rely a little too much on custard and not enough on chocolate.

On the walk home, the streets were quiet, and most shops closed. I saw middle-aged women out running, taking advantage of the relatively low traffic (it's not really all that bad usually, but drivers are loathe to give way for pedestrians, take corners at high speeds, and poor engine maintenance means that choking on a blue-grey cloud of exhaust fumes is all-too common here. I sure wouldn't want to run in it. Watching a chicken bus try and struggle up a small hill is like watching your own personal lung cancer machine, working just for you). There were traditionally-dressed women, sitting on the curb with several kids and bundles of firewood, presumably waiting for customers. I think the cities run mostly on gas, but I've seen enough firewood cutting and selling going on to think otherwise about the countryside, and maybe poor folks in the cities still use wood. I also saw what I would have pegged as a homeless man if I were back stateside, a white guy with a large plastic bag full of junk in one hand, and a clear plastic zip-top container, like what might hold a comforter or something, also full of junk, in the other. He was wearing a white dress shirt, a small, red, nylon cap, and black shorts that left little to the imagination. He was laboring up a slight incline, the cottage cheese of his ham-hocks trembling, and upon reaching the top of the hill, he exclaimed "Jesus!" and sat to rest. He didn't seem lost or anything, just tired. I let him be. Then I walked down a road I hadn't taken before, and found the Mormon church. True to form, it was ginormous, taking up half a city block, with 15 foot walls topped with razor wire. Inside was a glittering white building, surrounded by a manicured lawn. The only places you will see manicured lawn in Latin America is gas stations and Mormon temples. I felt like the poor Palestinian to the rich Isaelis-cum-Mormons, with that wall the way it was. Most of churches in Bolivia had slotted metal fences, so you could more easily see how nice the building and lawn was. It's a recruitment tool.

Learning another language is an amazing roller-coaster. There are days when I feel like all cylinders are firing, the words roll smoothly off my tongue, the phrases and adverbs come easily, and my conjugation is (mostly) correct, whether it's presente, preterito, imperfecto, futuro, o condicional (there are a lot of verb tenses in Spanish). That's a peak day. After a peak day comes a day of downward sliding, followed by a trough day, when I can't get a thought to fall out of my mouth if my life depended on it. On one of these trough days, after spending an afternoon realizing I had forgotten virtually everything I knew about Spanish, my maestro (instructor) told me, "no homework today. Just go home and review." After a trough day, it's a day-long upwards climb to another peak day. And repeat.

I have a new teacher tomorrow, which the head maestra called just to tell me. Or mostly to tell me that I had a pretty young girl for a new teacher. I need to learn how to say "hard time" in Spanish, because I get one a lot. I guess as a result of my incessant flirting, and love of salsa dancing (despite my left-brained ability to keep a beat), I have been branded a pica flor, flower picker, or as my host brother Jason prefers, hombre de mil chicas (do I need to translate that one? well, mil is Spanish for one thousand, not one million, which is millon). What can I say? I never had many actual Spanish classes, and my grammar is a bit crap. And since I haven't spoken the language in two years, my vocabulary is a bit crap. Also, since I spent the end of my South American trip in Brazil, I throw some Portuguese into my Spanish for good measure (e.g. I still say nove instead of nueve, and if you ask me how I am, I'll probably say tudo bom!) But the one thing I have is confidence in speaking, no matter how horrible I am at it. My teacher for the first two weeks, Carlos, is 25 and a partier, with a stud in his tongue, a diamond in his ear, and a head of hair perpetually covered with a baseball cap. I had him teach me the important slang, and that goes a long ways with your street cred, even if I can't tell the difference between preterito and pluscuamperfecto. So that's my strength, and I use it, I talk to a lot of people, and try and use the thirty minute pausa to get to know people and practice my Spanish. And yes, OK, I'm a flirt too. Slag off. Flirting is fun.

Carlos was a good teacher, I liked him, we got on well and he didn't cut me any slack. I asked to switch teachers (and I just asked to switch, without reference to age or gender, just to set the record straight) so I could practice with different methods of teaching and a different voice. At some schools, they require you to change teachers each week, because they don't want you to get used to understanding your teacher's Spanish, without being able to understand anyone else's Spanish.

I think next week will be my last week of Spanish lessons here in Xela. Maybe for the trip. I was thinking that after this week I would head to Nebaj and the Ixil Triangle, giving myself a break to let my lessons sink in, and then head to San Pedro on Lake Atitlan for another week of classes. But then I heard that San Pedro is kind of a party town, and it's much harder to immerse yourself in Spanish speaking, because after class everyone just wants to speak English, party, and do coke. I'm still going to head to the lake, because it definitely looks like a place I could spend a week, but maybe I'll head for a chiller town, or maybe I'll still feel like taking Spanish lessons anyways. Or maybe I'll just party for a week. Sin la cocaina. I don't really like cocaina. I thought it was a hippy pot town, but I guess I was wrong, from what people have been telling me. I'm not all that into dope anymore either, but I like the kind of people who smoke a lot more than the kind of people who snort. Cocaine is dirty.

How the days slip by

Let's see, last Friday I went to San Franciso el Alto to see the largest non-tourist market in the country (that's right, the tourist markets are bigger than the real markets), which was pretty rad, unless you don't like markets for some reason. I love markets. I didn't realize at the time quite how great it was, but Arequipa, Peru, has a fucking rad market, with fruit stacked 15 feet high, and vendors with 12 kinds of garlic, or 15 kinds of potatoes, or 20 kinds of olives. I tried a dozen different olive types before I bought some. I didn't really want olives anymore, but I felt obligated I guess. I also bought a sick Panama hat there, but it got lost somewhere in Bolivia. It's the one in my blog profile pic.

But I digress, as usual. The market in San Francisco had beans and belts and cows and dogs and garlic and traditional Mayan clothes of all colors and types, plus just the fabric if you're the DIY type, and bananas and mangoes and tomatoes and carrots, and some fruit called zapate that doesn't have a name in English, I had figured this out before I went, so knew I had to try it; it was supposed to be a cross between a papaya and a sweet potato, but the one I bought was kind of rotten, because I bought it at the end of the day so the good ones had been picked over, and the woman said they were one quetzal each, and then put five in a bag and said "five quetzales," but I only wanted one which was good because she was trying to pawn off her rotten fruit on me, but even though mine was kind of rotten it was still kind of good anyways. And spices and weird little amber-like hunks that were actually incense, and cinnamon sticks, and pots and pans, pottery, weights, and mattresses, and bootleg brand-name merchandise. And a picture of the Pope. I actually bought that last one, it was on the back of a mirror about the size of the palm of my hand. Who can't use a mirror? I can signal for help, and it'll probably be divine. And then when the angel comes and finds out I'm not Catholic, he'll probably want to send me to Hell, but will settle for purgatory because I'm such a good kid. I can settle for purgatory. I mean, it's all right. Not great, but, you know, could be a lot worse.

I had to be subtle about taking pictures at the market, because Mayans are sensitive about pictures. In fact, a Japanese tourist and his guide were killed in a remote area of Guatemala in 2000, because the extranjero (foreigner) had taken a picture of a young boy. Apparently there had been a rumor going around that an outsider was in the area to steel the souls of children. So says my Lonely Planet, at least. Anyways, I left my camera on and held it down by my side, pointed upwards, and tried to snap interesting faces as they went by. Only one really turned out, but it was cool because her head was down and she had a folded-up piece of cloth set on top of her head (keeps the sun off, plus you can set baskets of laundry and stuff up there. No, really, I'm actually being serious this time). The market affords you a certain amount of anonymity as well; it's so packed with people that everyone can think, "he's not taking MY picture, he's taking THAT GUY'S picture." There's an animal market, where you can buy half-dead bulldogs and see a month-old puppy share a water bowl with a full-grown goose. I tried to pet a stray dog who came up and sniffed my leg, but he ran away. A Guatemalteco saw me and chuckled, saying "that's food." I avoid mince-meat in the markets now. Actually, that's probably a decent rule everyplace.

You get to San Francisco on a chicken bus; on this ride they skipped the usual US hip-hop and played some Madonna/Michael Jackson mash-ups. On the way, I saw a private airstrip with several small planes, and wondered who can afford those, and then I remembered that a lot of cocaine moves through Guatemala. At the end of the day, I struck up a conversation with a tela (cloth) vendor, who had lived in Austin for a while. We talked about that, and he talked some about how much money you can make in the US. "See these homes?" he asked, pointing out some of the nicer places around us. "All these families have people in the United States sending them money. That's how they can have such nice houses." Remittances make up a significant portion of the Guatemalan economy - equal to two-thirds of all exports - and are disproportionately distributed to vulnerable sectors of the economy, such as the rural poor (this is according to a USAID paper I breezed through so I could sound intelligent on this topic, although I guess now it just sounds like I'm lifting passages from a USAID report. Which is not at all true). In Latin America as a whole, remittances are larger than both foreign direct investment and foreign aid combined. In other words, they're a big deal, and 75% of the total comes from the United States.

I went to some sweet hot springs the other day - Guatemala is pretty active with volcanic activity. I went with my two room mates, and some students from my school, who weren't all traveling together, but were all from Israel. When I told the guy, Itay, that my name was Devin, he said, "Oh, like the porn star." Then he explained that it was a girl porn star, so I explained that Devin with an I is usually a guys name, and Devon with an O is usually a girls name. So I'm not really like the porn star. When we got off the bus in the town near the springs, we had to hire a picop to take us up the hill. We negotiated a price of 40 (about $5) Quetzales each way, and since there were seven of us, my room mate Alleen said "so it'll be about 6 Q apiece, that would be 42 total." Itay said, "I'll die before I give that guy two extra Quetzales." (Two Q is about 25 cents. You might be able to guess that Itay could have made a better first impression on me. Why some people insist on living the stereotype, I have no idea, but I see it more traveling than my sensitive liberal side would like to admit. If you ask sometime I'll tell you about the snooty, self-important French chef I spent 4 days in a Jeep with).

The springs themselves were pretty well maintained, with one pool on the vent - scorching hot - and two other pools fed by the first pool, so they got progressively cooler. It was super relaxing, nestled in a temperate jungle above small tracts of farmland covering the whole hillside, seeded with mostly lettuce and I think mint or basil or something (I'm not really sure, it looked like an herb but I haven't really seen many herbs in Guatemala). The whole trip was worth it just for the picop ride; we went up into the mountains, with awesome views of deep ravines, farmers out watering their crops, and the protective shadow of the Santa Maria volcano.

I wanted to send some boxes home, or actually I wanted to send some stuff home but figured I would need a box. So I went to find one, which I eventually did at a papeleria (paper store, they also sell notebooks and pens and stuff). They used an old box they had, wrapped it all up, and charged me a few cents. But it was Saturday, and the post office closes at 1pm - and I got there at 2pm. So I went back on Monday (I'm yet to find a country where the post office is open on Sunday), but apparently the girls from the papeleria don't send packages much, because apparently I didn't have the Special Brown Paper to wrap the box in. So I had to leave, and then the NEXT day get the special brown paper from a different papeleria, although they must not send boxes much either, because they wrapped my package for me, which you're not supposed to do. You're supposed to let the post office look inside and write a customs receipt, and then they wrap the box for you. So on my third visit they gave me some grief about that, but they did let me mail my box. The moral of the story is that a lot of things are just a little harder to do in Guatemala. Like when I titled this post "how the days slip by," what I really meant is running around between the post office and paper shops. So expect and plan for that.

p.s. on my second visit to the paper shop (and I should explain that these shops are about the size of a large closet), I saw an irate teen with his mom, and she was riding him about how many photocopies of school papers he was getting, and he was sulking and sighing melodramatically. I love how universal that stuff is.

Things I notice on the way to school

Christ is coming. It says so (Christo Viene) in large block letters on the church, perched high above us on a cliff, where I see it as I walk down my street.

Everyone is in a hurry here in the morning. I live accross from a school, and there's all these kids and parents getting themselves in and out of micros and cars, trying to make the bell. And then there's always kids running for the school after the bell finally goes off. Everyone driving is speeding like a madman, presumably expected to be on time for work even though nobody is. 'Country Time' is a concept that seems to exist everywhere - in Thailand, for example, 'Thai Time' means showing up between 15 minutes early and 30 minutes late, and that is expected and normal. 'Guatemalan Time' means showing up between 30 and 90 minutes late. It's just expected.

Kids are cute.

City roads are almost all paved with small stones, shaped like a fat cross, and about the size of a soccer ball. The stones are usually finished and set by hand as the road is paved. This is perfectly logical in a place where machines and capital is relatively expensive, and labor is relatively cheap. It's also probably a good make-work program for the government to run.

In some places in the street, metal half-spheres a little bigger than a softball have been bolted down, to stop people from speeding. But it looks like someone came out and smashed a bunch down with a sledge hammer one night, so people can speed unimpeded.

There are a lot of gun shops here, which seems strange in a country which has a real problem with violent crime. Maybe they did something fucking retarded, like include a right to bear arms in their constitution, and then made the constitution real hard to change. Do tourists in the US have that impression, that we're a violent tribe with lots of guns n ammo? Probably. Thanks a lot, Michael Moore (my blog will now increase its hits exponentially, thanks to my mention of Michael Moore. I hope. I'm a shameful self-publicist).

The sidewalks here are as strangely irregular, just as they are in South America. They vary in width from 6 to 36 inches, and in heidth from 4 to 24 inches. Sometimes they dissapear altogether, either into a sandy path or into a wall. And things like electric poles are placed in the sidewalks, so even a wide one will become narrow every few feet. Negotiating the sidewalks can become an intricate dance when the get even a few people trying to pass at the same time.

There aren't a lot of taxis in Xela, but there are a lot of bikes, which is rad of course. This is in sharp contrast to Arequipa, Peru, where I once sat at an intersection cafe in the center of town and counted something like 85 taxis in 20 minutes. You've probably gathered that I don't care much for taxis, but I do love my bike, and I love living in Portland, America's bike capitol. The bikes are about as prevalent here; buses, cars, and micros are more common, but there's probably someone on a bike for every 4 or 5 vehicles that pass.

One of my neighbors is a Pats fan. He has the bumper sticker on his truck.

Reflections on life in Xela

Man, I am so tired here! I attribute it to my white diet: lots of white rice, white bread, and grease. Somewhat ironically, most places in the world regard 'whole wheat' as 'disgusting.' In Thailand, brown rice is fit only for prisoners (lucky for them, they would no doubt be a lot healthier on brown rice than white). And when I say white bread, it's the whitest bread possible. Like sugar and titanium dioxide held together with air. I eat three meals a day with my host family, and it's pretty hit or miss. Last night we had delicious (though still fried) chicken empanadas (bigger here than in South America, where they're just a snack. Folded pockets of corn or wheat tortillas filled with meat and/or veggies), with fresh tomatoes and goat cheese on top; this morning for breakfast we had white bread and raman noodles, complete with those little freeze dried carrots and peas. It could be worse, I know some folks who had beans and rice three times a day over their whole homestay. I actually like beans and rice, and in fact asked Ezmeralda if we could have them sometime (I haven't had beans once since I've been here. Maybe she thinks that's not international enough or something. But she's really nice about suggestions. She's pretty much just really nice period).

I could also be tired because there's a flock of little birds that taps around on the corrugated metal roof above my room as soon as the sun comes up, and an attendant cat that occasionally chases them. My room is really nice actually, but man it's been cold here at night. My floor is concrete with tile over it, and in the morning it's like an iceberg on your feet, in a room that's already 45 degrees to start with. I don't shower much, first because there's so many people (9) sharing one bathroom, and also because it's no fun showering in near-freezing weather. The hot water is a pretty standard on-demand electric unit, which has a hot-cold-warm setting, which I find laughable - not only because it's so cold in the bathroom to start with that you would never want anything BUT hot water, but because the 'hot' water isn't all that hot anyways.

Another thing I noticed in my bathroom is that the toilet water seems to leave streams of dirt behind. My family has a big water filter hooked to the sink that they use even before they boil water for cooking. The water cuts in and out here; apparently there's plenty of water in Xela but not very sound infrastructure. I wonder if that's salt in the wound for students at the engineering school here. 'This is how it WOULD be done - i.e. no dirt in the water - and then this is what happens here in Guatemala.'

I'm probably going to modify my plan to stay in Xela for 4 weeks. I don't think I want to hang out here that long; I'm not in love with the city enough to stay and just live (even though I prefer long stays to short stays), and I think I'll be able to check out the things I want to check out in a couple more weeks, as day trips around Spanish lessons. Also, my original plan to volunteer isn't really working out. I have classes from 8-1, and I don't get done with lunch until nearly 3. And then the city shuts down around 6. Not everything, but it's amazing to me how much stuff closes once it gets dark. So I don't really feel like I have time in the day, plus most places expect (and deserve) at least a one month commitment, which I don't think I can make. So I feel like it's a case for moving on sooner rather than later (I do have time to be someplace for a month, so if something works out volunteer-wise, I'm definitely open to that - but I don't think it will be in Xela). I might head to a mountainous area called the Ixil Triangle next, where the lifestyle is very traditional and Mayan; it's also one of the areas where some of the worst massacres occurred during the 30-year civil war (maybe I'll get around to telling you all about that someday, but there's also Wikipedia and the rest of The Internets if you're interested, and it really is interesting. Not to mention shameful for those of us from the United States; once again we installed a real bastard series of military dictators who killed a bunch of people, and we did it because the military was anti-communist). The Ixil Triangle is also supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in the country, with good trekking. From there I think I'll go to Lago de Atitlan, and maybe take another week of Spanish lessons there (everyone, tourists and Guatemalans alike, love Lake Atitlan). And probably a stop in Antigua, the old colonial capital cum gringo capital, if for no other reason than to take money out. For the first time in all of my travels, I'm having a lot of trouble finding Mastercard ATMs. So I'll probably have to take out a shit-ton of Quetzales in Xela and in Antigua, budget carefully, and hope I don't get robbed.

OK, I'm going to do one of the things that I complained about in my last post, but I hope my sticker-shock is understandable. But let me weave a backstory first: Burgundy, 1944. No, wait. That's my Great American Novel I'm writing while I travel abroad to Find Myself. Portland international airport, 2009. I'm passing through security. They think something is in my bag. I think nothing of it. They don't see anything, but the scanner saw something, so they run the bag through again. Ah, there it is: a big bottle of explosive sunscreen. I thought I had been so careful. I bought bulk Dr. Bronner's to bring, and had a 4 oz. bottle, so was careful to fill it only 3/4 of the way, so I wouldn't break the 3 oz. or less liquid rule (if you haven't flown in the past 8 years, you can't bring liquids on an airplane in more than 3 oz. containers. Strangely, I could have broken my sunscreen into several small bottles and been OK. I'm pretty much convinced airport security is a bunch of bullshit to make white people feel safe and show how easy it is for The Man to intrude in our lives). I even left toothpaste at home, so it wouldn't get taken (yes, you can buy toothpaste, even in the savage wilds of Guatemala. And bulk tofu). Somehow I didn't think about the sunscreen. So the jerks took my sunscreen. I'm going to need sunscreen - this is, after all, "Surf and Spanish in Central America." I'm going to be on the beach, a lot. I knew I could probably get sunscreen in Central America, but I was nervous because in Brazil, the locals don't use sunscreen, only rich tourists do. So sunscreen in Brazil costs $15 for a 2 oz. bottle, and gets MORE EXPENSIVE as the SPF goes up (and if you haven't seen me lately, I'm pretty much as translucent as I've always been). Anyways, I bought a bottle on my layover in Miami (wow, for once I think to myself, "Florida rocks"), but since I'm not sure how long it will last (Alaskans aren't good at gauging those things, I don't think), I decided to see if I could buy some in Xela (do I overuse comments in parentheses?). It is the second biggest city in the country, after all. So I looked around. Anyone want to guess on a price before I tell you? Ok, ready? $23 for a 3.5 oz. bottle. Ouch. If things look tight for sunscreen in Sipacate, I'm wiring money home and having some sent, I'll have enough left over to rent a surf board for a week.

So there's this thing here called Xela Who, it's a zine run by expats or temporary foreign residents or whatever, and it has stuff in it about Xela and what's going on here, where to eat, how to be the best gringo you can be. And I was flipping through it, and in the back there's some brief staff bio stuff (and boy are they a wacky, fun luvin bunch). Anyways, I was hit with a strange feeling, something approaching revulsion. Not because I think moving to a poor foreign country and starting a low-rent magazine that's mostly adds and is about where the best Indian food is or where to get drunk on a Tuesday is an asinine thing to do, but because of the lifestyle choice I saw, and the path I might even see myself on: being an expat seems like the most miserable, awful thing ever. I have spent a large chunk of my adult life traveling, and I think it's a great way to gain perspective on yourself and on the world. But fuck man, moving someplace permanently? That sounds like a desperate plea for help to me. I was thinking earlier today how insanely hard it is to master a language. I'm really happy with my Spanish, I'm understanding more (although having more trouble spitting words out than before, in South America), and have beat my expectations (even though, and let me be clear, my Spanish is pretty sucky. I regularly confuse verb conjugations, words, I even confused left and right earlier today). I doubt I will ever be fluent. I think to really be fluent, you have to study a language from a young age, continue to study it in university, including lots of reading and writing, and spend a whole shit-ton of time living in a place where they speak that language. And language is only one part of a culture, albeit an important one. So even if someone can master Spanish, a white kid from suburban Seattle who is hell-bent on educating poor kids on the CA isthmus (or hell-bent on living in Xela and hanging out with other gringos who have made the same decision) will never really be Guatemalan. I mean, if there's one thing I take away from traveling in other cultures, it's that I_am_a_guest_here. That's not to say that cultural boundaries can't be overcome, and it's not to say that people shouldn't travel. And I know that national boundaries are sociological creations, and someone could make this same argument about traveling to the next town, instead of the next country. And that's also not to say that for some people, expatriating might be a great option. But for me, I would always feel foreign, even in a place like Xela, on an island surrounded by The Other. There's nothing wrong with The Other, but it does sound lonely to me, and unfulfilling. It's basically what I felt living in Bolivia. The racial, cultural, and economic differences just seem too great to overcome in a single lifetime, and that's all the time I have (as far as I know. C'mon, theory of rebirth!). I still remember my year in South America, and how strangely weird it was when at the end of my trip, in Brazil, I hung out with a group of Americans for the first time (and West coasters, at that). I dunno, it was just so strangely comfortable, the ease of communication, the understanding of innuendo and boundaries. It was like comfort culture, instead of comfort food. I have too many close friends, and family, and places I love that are Home, in the United States (traveling makes me strangely patriotic). Maybe severe cultural barriers are just one reason change comes so slowly. And maybe this is part of my whiteness, and what I'm expressing is how, for example, black people feel all the time in the United States. But even if that is the case, and I have some special privilege, it's not something I want to give up. Would you?

By the way, trying to brush your teeth with Dr. Bronner's is about the stupidest thing you could do. Just sayin.

Chiquen Bus!

That's my phonetic spelling for 'Chicken Bus,' a 1950's-era US school bus that has 'Jehovah es amor' or something like that emblazened on the front, is painted in bright reds and yellows, and functions as inter (or intra) city transport. The name comes from the livestock that rides along with the people, and for some reason is in English pronounced with a thick Spanish accent (Chee-can boos. Don't drag the s). Alongside chicken buses are the same micros that run inside town, and picops (pick-ups, pronounced peek-ops), which are just that - maybe they have people in the bed, maybe sacks of frijoles (beans), maybe both. We got a seat on our bus, because we got on at its departure point (the Xela bus terminal), but damn it filled fast. After 20 minutes or so, each seat had 3 or 4 people on it, and the aisle was packed to capacity, including 2 people in the stairwell and the money-taker hanging out the side door (which is for looking at, not closing). Keep in mind, these buses were designed for kids 12 and under. Actually, I'm apparently pretty used to rides like this, and didn't really mind. I mean, I had a window. I was sitting PRETTY with that spring in my ass!

The worst thing about bus rides like this is that you're expected to know where to get off, and it may really surprise you that I can't really tell one pueblo from the next. But the scenery was nice, I really liked the cemetaries, all filled with mini crypts in a rainbow of pastel colors. Roberto and I took a chicken bus to San Martin Sacatepequez, where you start the hike to Laguna Chicabal. Chicabal is a volcanic lake, sacred to the K'iche and Mam Mayan people (basically all I can say at this point about the different Mayan groups is that they fought each other lost of the time, and all ate a lot of corn. Hopefully I'll have something more intelligent to add before I leave). The hike is about 1.5 hours/3 miles each way, up a steep hill through town, where women in traditional Mayan clothing washed clothes in the communal wash bins and kids fought with the firewood they were supposed to be stacking. Then we went up an even steeper dirt road, where fathers and sons were coming down with firewood or crops, and lone pre-teens wielded machetes with an overtone of boredom. The road had an inch or two of fine red dust on it, and some of the pick-ups coming down were going fast enough to bring a tsunami of dirt down on us. As we climbed, town became fields, and as we approached the reserva natural (na-tour-al), forest.

The climb wasn't over, but eventually we reached the lake. It was socked in by clouds by the time we approached, so the miradors (lookouts) weren't much fun, but the lake itself was beautiful and serene. Armies of clouds would bear down on us from the surrounding hills, covering the lake in a matter of seconds, until the sun drove them off a few minutes later. We saw flocks of bright blue birds with a cucoo's call, and yellow songbirds picking at the pink flowers on the trees. There are 24 Mayan altars around the lake, each dedicated to a different Mayan god. The altars are still in use by the Mam Mayan people, and the lake is closed to visitors at the beginning of May so the area can be used for Mayan rituals. Behind many of the altars are clearings in the trees used as toilets, with bits of used TP hanging about.

It was getting late by the time we circumnavigated the lake, so we trekked back to San Martin, hoping to catch a bus (it was Sunday, after all, and there's less of everything going on when it's Sunday. Except church). While we waited for a bus that wasn't packed to the gills, a young Mayan woman in traditional clothes get out her cell phone (cell technology has spread faster in the poorest countries on earth than land-line technology spread in the richest countries 100 years ago). I also noticed a sign explaining a road development project in the village. At the bottom, it declared "A Time of Solidarity," and had a graphic with several different colored hands gettting along just fine. I imagine this had something to do with the government spending the majority of the last 3 generations slaughtering people in villages like San Martin (more on this at some point). Hey, it's never too late to turn a new leaf, I guess.

Bienvenidos a Xelaju!

Technically, the town is called Quetzaltenango, the place of quetzals (it's a bird, the national bird of Guatemala), but everyone calls it Xelaju, or just Xela, the old Mayan name. It's just easier. Just how everyone calls Huehuetenango just, 'Huehue,' and Chichicastenango 'Chichi.' It's the second largest city in the country, but has only about 125,000 people (Guatemala City has about 3.5 million, up from 2 million just 5 years ago; the country alltogether has 13.5 million people). Like all large towns here, Xela is divided into zones - I think there are 11here, compared to 20-some in Guatemala City. I'm in zone 1, the center, aka 'gringo zone.' It's, well, like lots of other touristy Latin American cities I've been to, with micros (little Japanese vans which function as city buses) constantly combing the streets for passangers (at least they seem to use their lights at night, unlike in La Paz, Bolivia), chaotic traffic, gringos walking about clutching their Lonely Planets. There's a McDonalds on the main plaza, complete with McInternet (no, seriously. Buy a burger and get a half hour free). There seems to be a lot of money here; Bentleys, no, but Beemers, definitely (is Beemer a proper noun?). It's actually not that touristy on the scale of things, and most of the stuff I just mentioned has a lot more Guatemalans buying than foreigners. Day-tripping wealthy Guatemaltecos come on the weekends to do cocaine and party with tourists. Of course, leave the center and most of this changes. But where I live, you can take yoga or tai chi lessons, buy tofu by the pound, and eat European food 3 meals a day, if you were so inclined. Xela is actually kind of a cool place, because the extranjeros (outsiders) here often come to volunteer, or at least have that spirit. Many of the businesses that cater to tourists operate from volunteer labor, and donate most or all of their proceeds to various causes. Quetzal Trekkers, for example, funds a free school for poor children.




It's my fourth day in Xela, and despite what you might take away from what I just wrote, I think it's pretty nice. The city is at about 7,000 feet, and it's actually been brutally cold at night - it's the coldest part of the year I guess, and it was about 25 degrees the past couple nights (this is brutally cold when you packed for the beach and haven't seen a heater since you got here). It's supposed to start getting warmer, but it's tough right now because 2 of my 3 months are planned to be in the tropics and on the beach. This means I packed light (I didn't even check a bag), and now my rash guard is functioning as a base layer. For once I'm really grateful that my hoody actually has a hood. It's fine during the day, and in fact is probably 70 or 75 degrees in the sun, but it's rough getting up in the morning (I should mention that the only countries I have ever been in where heating or cooling is common are the US and Canada. There are probably a couple more, but the vast majority of places are at the whim of the weather. My house has no form of heat other than the oven, making the kitchen the place to be in the mornings. Pus, there's that aweful instant coffee to keep you warm. You in the US, thanks for buying all the good beans). But hey, the way I look at it is if I get by during the coldest parts of my trip having to wear all my clothes, then I packed just the right amount.



I started Spanish lessons last Friday, and moved in with my host family that afternoon. I had a whole list of schools researched, but visited two schools, and just settled on the second one. I figure the teacher is more important than the school anyways, and it's hard to know who that will be until you start. That, and I decided I didn't want to burn two whole days just trekking about visiting schools. That's acutally usually how I do things, very deliberately (Jesse, are you going to tell me this is the Libra in me? :-D), but not this time. I've had two days of classes, and with two different teachers. That was lame, because half of today was rehashing my first day (where did you learn Spanish? What do you want to cover? Let's chat so I can learn how much you know and we can get to know each other). I thought both seemed like good teachers, although my teacher today (Carlos) was younger, and while he seemed more thourough than my first teacher (Rosa), he seemed really distracted for the last half-hour or so. But like I said, he was really thorough with his explanations, was a bit of a hard-ass with me, and gave me a bunch of tarea (homework). So we'll see how it goes by Thursday (when it's time to fork over cash for a new week).



I think I got a really great host family. They are super nice, and we interact a lot, which was my main complaint with the two families I had in Cusco - I'll actually get to practice my Spanish a lot. One of my host brothers is also a teacher at my school, which means he'll correct my Spanish. I like that, because normally it doesn't happen, and it can get easy to ingrain bad habits. Anyways, I have a host mom, Esperanza, who is super nice and seems to want to make sure we're eating the types of food we want to eat, but she's pretty subtle about it ("which salsa is your favorite?"). We eat pretty tipico comida; tortillas (smaller and thicker than in Mexico or at home) or chichitos (small bits of corn dough, sometimes with meat inside) accompany every meal. Frijoles (beans) are another staple, and the salsas are hot, fresh, and varied (tomatillo or tomate con cilantro are common ones). Along with Esperanza is her mother, whose name I forget because we just call her abuelita ("little grandma," it's a term of endearment), who sits at the end of the table in silence, until she sees an opening to crack a sarcastic, yet friendly, joke at one of our expenses. Geraldo, my host dad, is also really nice, although he works 12 hour days 5 days a week, and 6 hours on Saturday, as an electronics repairman (at "Electronics Repair Isreal." Because we all know Jews are whizzes with electronics? Seriously, throw a rock in Latin America and you'll hit a business with a funny name). I already mentioned Jason, 22, my host brother who works at my school and also studies civil engineering, and then there's Roni, 18, my other host brother, who just got into the public university (more competative than Jason's private one, apparently) to be a doctor. There are two other extranjero (foreigner) students in the house; Roberto (not his real name, he's from Korea but studied abroad in Mexico, and Roberto is his Spanish name) is a little better than me at the language, which makes sense since he studies 8 hours a day 6 days a week! He's a pretty quiet guy, and only speaks Spanish unless we need to explain something in English about the Spanish, so that's good practice. There's also Eileen, who is getting ready to go run a Christian missionary thing in Peru in two months and is learning Spanish. 

One thing that's really weird about my home stay, and exactly the same as my other two home stays: I have no idea what most of the house is like. I wasn't given a tour or anything, and like many Latin American houses, mine is set around a courtyard. What's behind all those doors? Maybe a two-headed rabbit or something, only a mutant one that only has one head. Who knows? Anyways, even though I don't feel like a stranger at all, I have little sense of what the house is really like or how my family lives. I've never eaten with Esperanza or Abuelita. I mean, they own two cars and have a big house with two kids in university, so they're definitely middle class (although it's still not safe to be on their street after midnight), but that's about all I can say.




I probably gave the impression that I wasn't very excited when I got to Guatemala, and that's the truth. I guess I was bummed about leaving a place I like and people I love - again. I also wasn't sure what this trip was going to be like, because I haven't done a trip like this since my 4 months in Asia when I was 18 (that is, a trip not for school). Only nowI have a totally different perspective on traveling, not all of it positive. During my brief periods as a tourist around South America (i.e. inbetween research projects), I always found it really hard to connect with backpackers. I felt like it was the same stupid conversation over and over and over - where are you from? How long are you here? What have you seen? What are you going to see? What's the cheapest way to do it? Let me tell you about the time I got ripped off. Let me tell you about how not to get ripped off. Let me complain about the prices for X, then regale in how cheap Y is. Let me use a ticket to a poor country as a cheap way to party, and use the services only the local elite can afford, and get no perspective on what a place is really like. And of course, I see myself at least partially in at least some of these things, and that just makes it that much more bitter of a pill to swallow. I mean, living in Bolivia doing research for school, I would go out and party - and it was cheap, and that was rad, and it was fun. I HATE fussing around with taxi drivers because they always try and pull one over on you, even if it's for two or three dollars. If I'm taking a 20 hour bus ride, I go primera clase. But at the same time, I have learned a lot about myself traveling, and how to be a responsible traveler (I like to think). Bargaining is always a game, and should be fun, not life-or-death. I'm actually not big on souveneirs, and buy most stuff at places with prices on them - just because very commonly street vendors will triple a price because they can tell you have money based on your skin color, and I don't like having to bargain when I just want to buy some soap or something. And the whole thing about all of this shit with money is that "we" have it and "they" don't, and that's just not a super comfortable situation. Should I be really rich compared to 4/5 of the world? Am I somehow at fault that a lot of people are poor? It's the same as how people in the US can get really irate when the homeless ask for money - no one wants to think that they are in any way responsible for someone elses misfortune, but in the back of their minds exists that nagging doubt. So we all have to weave some sort of story to make ourselves comfortable; maybe it's close to the truth, maybe not. I don't think there is ANY clear-cut answer to these issues; like most important stuff, it's something intelligent people can disagree on, but it's definitely a friction that can be felt when traveling to most places in the world. I actually think the Xela crowd is a pretty interesting one, it's mostly young people here to live, work, and volunteer. A lot of them seem to like to travel the way I do, in a way that connects you to the place and the people around you, and is about more than just snapping pictures. So far, the people I've met have been pretty interesting.



Anyways, I've gotten off track a bit. I wanted to write that after getting settled in, I'm having a great time. I really like learning Spanish, and I'm a lot better than I thought I was going to be, even though I still suck. It's hard for me to follow long conversations, although I at least get the jist in the shorter ones - usually. Guatemala has a pretty slow, neutral way of speaking, from what I've seen so far. I'm actually just fine being in the gringo zone, because the loneliness of not interacting with those of the same culture really became a drag in Bolivia, and it's not something I want to revisit. I'm still eating typical food, speaking primarily in Spanish, and I plan on being in some fairly remote places later on. I'm definitely in a middle-class Guatemalan house, but you know, I've seen a shit-ton of poverty in the world. I know it's there, I know it's unjust, and unless I plan on seriously living on $2 a day over here, like most of the world does, I don't think I have a lot more to gain from gawking at poor people.


This post reminded me of this quote:
"Even the milk from our own animals does not belong to us. We must give to those who need it, for a poor man shames us all" -- An elder of the Gabra, a pastoral tribe of nomads in Kenya

Bus rides: simply the raddest thing about traveling, period.

Add to the list of chains I've seen here, this time on my bus ride out of Guatemala City (towards Xela): Taco Bell, Ace hardware, Little Caesars, and Hooters. That's right, Hooters. God BLESS America!

Also, let me tell you how a 4 hour bus ride becomes 5 hours: the driver spends an hour tooling around town, trying to fill up the bus before he leaves. While we did that, people came on board to sell us stuff (par for the course in all of Latin America apparently), although the vendors were probably dissapointed to see just 5 of us on board. But we did have the lovely opportunity to purchase newspapers, sodas, notebooks, gum, coconut wafers, hard candy, or tip the guy who got on and blessed our voyage with his Bible.

The bus was an old Greyhound, and in fact the company seemed affiliated with the US version, judging by the office. I chose it based on proximity to my hotel. It was a first class service, but I wans't about to spend two hours looking for a cheaper service, arguing with taxi drivers, and getting a ride that takes twice as long (second class buses stop for anything: random people in the street, the driver is bored, clouds), and then save $2. It was only a $7 ticket, and I got a bathroom and a dubbed Jean Claude Van Damme action movie to watch. Before I fell asleep, I saw billboards advertising shwank suburban housing (the type 94% of the population will never see, let alone afford), and one for a local cola brand that is, apparantly, 'the official drink of everything.' There was also one with a bunch of white girls in bikinis, who may or may not have had Halls cough drops in their mouths (colds are sexy when you have Halls!!)

The scenery was nothing special, although I did notice that farm plots tend to be at 50 degree angles here in the highlands - can they irrigate those? They're sure not getting a tractor up there. Even if there was something special to see, I wouldn't have been able to since I don't think the windows on the bus had been washed since the last rainy season. The buildup of grime was undoubtedly from the under-construction highway, which alternated between spanking-new blacktop and bone-rattling washboard dust the entire ride.

Oh, I should lay this out: my plan is to get to Xela and find a Spanish school where I can start Monday, and take a month of lessons, and do daytrips up the volcanos and to other places like hotsprings and markets in the meantime. Then I'm planning on going to Lake Atitlan for a few days, a huge lake with several small towns around it, and probably a night and two days in Antigua, the old colonial capital, and then head to a small town on the Pacific coast called Sipacate to surf for a month. That month might get divided between Sipacate and La Libertad, in El Salvador, depending. Then I have a month to check out Mayan ruins and the Caribbean coast of Honduras before I fly home. Bueno?

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time

OK, I'm here. Guatemala City. It's funny, I wasn't nervous for this trip, but I wasn't particularly excited either. Now that I'm here, I'm a little more nervous, but only a little more excited. I'm practically back in Bolivia, the look and feel of the city is a lot like La Paz: squat, ugly buildings stretching out into the distance, terrible traffic with apparently no rules, men pissing on the sides of buildings, old US school buses-cum-public transit, indigenous women dressed in colorful clothes, selling fruit on the sidewalk while their kids play nearby, unscrupulous taxi drivers. I started my trip with an annoying price change-up from the taxi driver (a standard trip), my least favorite group of people when in a place where they don't use meters. Not much to do really but accept it. Or get in a fight. Neither is that much fun. My plan was to get a bus straight to Xela (Shay-la), I'd heard Guatemala City was nothing special. But the last bus ran at 5:30, and when I asked at the tourist desk at the airport, they said I had 45 minutes, but somehow that became 10 by the time I found an ATM and got in a cab. So we spent most of the cab ride discussing where we were going, and him telling me that my back-up plan of a cheap hotel in Zona 1 (the city center and convenient to bus stations) was really, really dangerous. He even showed me an article in the newspaper, with some statements from the US Consulate, the take-away lesson being: if you're a young American woman, traveling alone, don't go out late at night and get pissed and wander around by yourself. I knew these things already. In fact, my having a penis precluded this scenario from the beginning. But I wasn't looking to get shitcanned, I was looking to sleep. I'm in Zona 1 now, and I'm pretty sure I'll be fine. My room is a narrow slot with no bathroom and a window looking out onto the interior courtyard (don't think anything special when I say 'courtyard'), but there's cable television so I can at least watch A Clockwork Orange and laugh at the subtitulos. Next door someone is either watching a tela novela or a porno - it's hard to tell the difference from listening alone, both have long sex scenes and intensely cheesy dialogue.

I only wandered a few blocks, but have already seen a McDonald's, Burger King, Domino's Pizza, and a Payless Shoes. Then I went into a supermarket, I like supermarkets because they give you a large cross-section of food to look at, and when I went to check out (with my lone purchase of a bottle of water), I saw a Wal-Mart name tag on the cashier. That's right, no sign outside, but once I looked around the check stand there was plenty of shwag from our favorite cut-throat retailer, including reusable bags for sale, which I actually found heartening - you don't have to travel much to see what a problem plastic bags are. Anyways, I noticed some things inside the Wal-Mart, which I'm going to share: unlike Bolivia, milk in Guatemala comes in plastic jugs, not plastic bags. Liquor is really cheap ($5 for a bottle of Bacardi), but beer is really expensive ($1.25 for a 500ml bottle, less than 12oz.). Unlike Chile, there isn't as much bread, it doesn't look as good, and most of it looks intended for a BBQ (then again, Chile consumes more bread per capita than anyplace in the world, so they're into bread). Did you know that Latinos really like soda? In Wal-Mart, you can buy it in 3.5 liter bottles. It's ridiculously large, and I appreciate it on that level. Also, they have the same disgusting looks-like-has-eyeballs-inside lunch meat here as they did in Bolivia. Hooray!

So like I said, it feels a lot like Bolivia. I didn't really like Bolivia. I wandered through the market, and I'm becoming convinced that if you've wandered one random city market, you've wandered them all - excepting food markets, but this wasn't a food market. I'm talking the outdoor sidewalk markets here, with individual stalls selling bootleg DVDs, toiletries, those jeans with really low hip pockets (they were into those in South America too, must be the style. In fact, as soon as I got to Miami I noticed pretty distinct South American clothes all around), cheap electronics, whatever. These are pretty good places to get cheap food though, which I found in the form of churrasco (grilled meat): basically a couple tortillas with some guacamole, grilled meat, onions, salsa picante, and cabbage in between. There are a million stalls, lots of taco ones, I just picked one that had lots of people eating at it (that means the food will be fresh and tasty). It was good, not great, about what you would expect from the ingredients I just described, except picture tougher meat. The cook/proprietor did have a rad power mullet though. And an assistant whose sole job it was to fan the coals of the grill once in a while, even if that meant over everyone's food. Hey, that's where the flavor comes from.

One big difference from Bolivia is that they don't eat tortillas in Bolivia - their loss. Here, they're all hand-made, and I saw a couple stalls of several women standing about and pounding out corn tortillas from a ball of corn dough the size of a small car, and hucking them onto a griddle. It was really cool. Restaurants will serve a side of tortillas with most every meal here, and you can have as many as you want. As I understand it, making tortillas is a full-time job. Any women reading this, you now know what your responsibility would be as a married Guatemalan woman.