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.
No comments:
Post a Comment