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.
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