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.