Lake Chichabal

Last Sunday, we went on a cool hike to Lake Chichabal which is a site sacred to the Mayans. They believe it is a place of balance between heaven and hell and still frequently practice ceremonies there. We hiked up a crater and then down a long set of steps to the lake. It is a beautiful lush place, but is also kind of dark with a thick cloud mist hovering around. I can totally understand why the lake holds the significance it does. We hung near the water and ate our lunches then hiked around the lake and back up. On the way back up the weather switched from drizzly to a downpour so it was really slippery, but fun! The ride back to Xela in the rain in the back of a pick uptruck was really wet and cold, but it certainly made my luke warm shower back at the house feel great!

St. Simone

I went to a small town about thirty minutes by chicken bus called San Andres Xecul. There's a really cool mix of Catholicism and traditional Mayan beliefs practiced here, which I understand is pretty common in Guatemala. We visited the local church which is painted bright yellow with colorful carvings gracing the facade. Inside is a beautiful candlelit church with lots of intricate carvings and metal work, but it also has several window displays along the side with mannequin saints in various holy poses. Above the altar is a dramatically posed Jesus with pink and green neon lights surrounding him.
In addition to the church, this town is know for its adoration and celebration on Saint Simone. He is a sort of Robin Hood figure/saint. There is an effigy of him that travels to a different home every ten years. It is an honor for a local elder to house him and the saint gets his own room and a bed that he is placed into every night. People come from all over to pray to him and make offerings of candles, rum, and cigarettes.
When we arrived at the home a man was there praying and lighting candles. He welcomed us in and was generous to let us stay and observe. His prayers were really sincere and he didn't hold back at all. Most of the students left to wait outside, but the three of who stayed for the forty minutes or so got a real treat. His prayers included lots of songs and was a cool mixture of Spanish and K'iche. Afterwards, he sat down and talked to us about his prayers and his life. He welcomed us to visit Simone if we wished. Unfortunately I was fresh out of rum and cigarrettes, but I still went up and said a quick prayer to the mannequin wearing a suit and Elvis glasses and with a big cigar in his mouth.
In our conversation with the man afterwards he asked if the three of us were traveling with spouses or alone and when Kristin told him I was getting married, he replied, "So, in the U.S. that's about a four or five year contract right?" I was sure I misunderstood, but nope that's what he said! We had a fun chat, then headed back towards Xela. I have to go now. I have a lot of thinking to do about whether I want to go with the four or the five year contract :-)

Ms. Magoo

On Friday, I was walking along minding my own business when I spotted an unusually gross slimy spot on the sidewalk. I took extra care to step around it, but managed instead to fall off the curb and land my butt cheek in the middle of the puddle. I jumped up quickly and walked off only to realize about ten minutes later that I´d knocked my glasses off in the fall. I went back for them, but they were gone! I´ve been getting along fine without them except for all the school stuff. Fortunately my teacher is really sweet and told me about a shoe store she saw with a sign stating that they sell reading glasses. I went by there yesterday, and when I inquired about glasses the store clerk got out a shoe box full of gently used glasses of varying perscriptions. I dug through and found a pair that kind of sort of seems close to what I need, so I am now the proud owner of small rectangle black wire frames with a deep smokey tint. I´m positive that I could find an eye doctor here and order appropriate glasses (assuming I could read the chart in Spanish), but I figure my groovy pair will work until I get back home. The happy ending to this story is that my old glasses probably ended up in a shoe box somewhere and will find a good home!

The more you learn, the less you know...

I went to yoga last night. It was a good class and I got the added bonus of a solid review of vocabulary for the parts of the body. It was about halfway through the class when I finally realized he was telling me to square my hips.
I´ve been working really hard to improve my Spanish, but it´s hard to say if it´s working. I have days where I feel like I can communicate really well and more days where all I do is give and receive blank looks.
On Tuesday, I declared Wednesdays as my days without English. It was harder than I thought it would be - especially while hanging out with other English speakers, but it was a fun experiement that I will continue. If I get the guts, I may expand the program to two days per week.
I took some time after school to upload pictures to flickr. I didn´t have time to really organize them yet and put some in several times. However, if you´re up to weeding through them feel free to check them out:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13525016@N03/

The Fair, Cuban Music, and a Good Hike

This weekend was the Indepence Day celebration for Guatemala. We had a much appreciated day off from school on Friday, and there were activities around town all weekend. Friday, I went to the fair just outside of town. It´s nice to know that there are some constants all over the world, and apparently fairs are one of them. We rode rickety rides, ate greasy food, played silly games, and walked by tons of vendors pushing their wares. On the way home from the fair, we stopped to watch one of the zillion parades they had this weekend. I enjoyed watching some concerts, speeches, and Mayan dance routines in the central park as well. It was a very festive Independence Day.
Last night several students met up to celebrate a student´s birthday. We had good food and conversation and were treated to some world class music. As we were chilling out listening to the Cuban band, one of the students commented that the keyboard player looked like one of the guys from Buena Vista Social Club. Everyone that had seen the movie totally agreed, and later another patron confirmed for us that it was in fact him! I guess he plays in Xela a couple times a year. What a treat.
Today, we hiked up La Muela which is a rocky point near the Volcano Santa Maria outside of town. It was a great hike with beautiful scenery and a little culture too. The way up wound through some agricultural areas. There was corn that stood at least twice as tall as me and lots of flowers. One kind of flower is common in the US as a garnish for salads (according to an avid gardner student), so I tried it - pretty yummy. We also saw tons of little lizards, some of which were bright green and had blue necks and bellies. Once we got closer to the rocky area, there were lots of locals hiking along headed to a church service partway up to the rocks. There were women in traditional skirts and tiny little shoes with heels walking along gracefully while I stumbled along in my hiking boots huffing and puffing. Once we passed the church service site (outside near the trees around a soccer field), we came upon a Mayan sauna and ceremony site. It wasn´t being used at the time, so we got to check it out. The sauna part was still quite hot. After the spa stop, the terrain got really rocky and fun. We had to do some scrambling to get to the top, but it was totally worth it. Great views and relaxing on the volcanic rocks in the sun was so warm and cozy. The way down was a bit tricky with all the loose rocks, but it was a fantastic hike to end a really great weekend.
P.S. The trip leader for the hike told me that the Big White House of Mystery is supposedly haunted. The story goes that at one point the house was used as student housing, and in the 80s two Guatemalan and one foreign student were killed there and now haunt the place. I guess we could count old abandoned house ghost stories as another universal constant. I´ll let you know if I see anything scary!

The Mystery of the Big White House

There is a house behind my host family´s house that is totally out of place here in Xela. In a neighborhood of single story cement buildings attached to one another is an ornate white wood mansion that takes up about half the block and is surrounded by a large fence. It has a huge For Sale sign on the front and appears to be abandoned. I wondered about it, but never remembered to ask anyone.
Last night as we were walking home from going out to dinner, my host mom headed towards the gates of that house. I asked her what she was doing, and she said we were going to go to Socrates and Pelusa´s house (those are the names of her two dogs). I laughed thinking it was a cute joke because there were two similar sized dogs barking from behind the gates, but she pulled her keys out of her pocket and opened the gate! We walked in and were greeted by her dogs. She explained that her husband´s family owns the house, but is trying to sell it. I was really shocked, but to her it was no big deal and she didn´t say much else and we just cut through the mansion grounds back to our house.
I told my teacher about it at school today, and she said it´s pretty well known that the family has been trying to sell the place for a long time. She also said the inside is totally furnished with colonial antiques. She suggested I ask my mom for a tour. Hopefully, I´ll get the guts to ask and will see the inside!

The Rigoberta Menchu Follow-up

Here is a link to an article about Rigoberta Menchu and how she fared in the recent elections - the quick version, if you´d prefer, is that she didn´t do well at all :-(
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/world/americas/11guatxx.html?ex=1190088000&en=19f3ce998dce18cf&ei=5070&emc=eta1

La Pedrera

I headed up to the volunteer project for the first time on Monday. It´s a pretty gook hike up to the one room school, but totally worth it for the view and the kids. The kids range from the ages of 7 to 15 with a few much younger siblings hanging around. The project provides daily tutoring and also provides sponsorship to pay for the kids´ education. From what I understand from my whole two days of experience, many of the kids would be working if they didn´t get the help to pay for school. Even though the kids are on a week break from school for Independence Day, the place was packed with kids anxious to practice math and English. The math practice has been awesome for reinforcing my numbers in Spanish. Talking with the kids has also been great for practicing my speaking skills in general, and they are super patient with me. They got a recent donation from a group in Santa Fe which is paying for a bathroom to be built near the school. It should be completed soon which means I´ll be able to drink water during the hike up without fear!

Chicken Buses and Giant Hairy Spiders

After class on Friday, I left for Lake Atitlan for the weekend with two other students from my school. We took a chicken bus, old school buses painted in bright colors which are the overcrowded public buses of Guatemala, from Xela to San Pedro de Laguna. The ride was super crowded and I had the misfortune of sitting in the hump seat on the bus. With my backpack in my lap and two other adults sharing my seat there wasn´t much room, but you get what you pay for - about three dollars for a three hour trip - and the view going down to the lake was gorgeous. Lake Atitlan is a crater lake surrounded by lush volcanoes with clouds hovering around the peaks. It´s one of the most beautiful places I´ve seen!

We arrived in the lakeside town of San Pedro in the evening and went to a nearby hotel. The other two students were together, so they got a room, and I took a bed in the dormitory. It wasn´t really a dorm, though, because I ended up being the only one there. Well, except for my fellow dormer Harry the Digusting Spider. He was huge with striped legs and had little spidery antenna things sticking out of his mouth - oh and in case it wasn´t clear, he was really hairy. I was convinced he was some type of tarantula, but really I have no idea if they even have those here. He also only had seven legs, so he must have been a hardened survivor. I decided I might not fare well trying to kill him, so I went outside to read and left the door open so he could escape. He must have been plotting how he was going to kill me, so he didn´t want to leave. Sarah and Neil and I decided to go explore the city and get dinner, so I left Harry there hoping he would lose interest in me and leave. We returned a few hours later and there he was waiting for me, but this time he had moved within a few feet of my bed. I debated for a long time what to do, and finally decided that he would be a stupid spider to waste his venom on me. I moved my bed as far away from him as I could and went to sleep. In the morning he was gone, and I was still alive and spider bite free! I got some good pics of him to prove his overwhelming scariness, but finding an internet connection here that won´t take two days to upload a picture is proving tough. I´m sure I´ll figure something out, but in the mean time you´ll have to trust me that he makes the spider from The Two Towers seem adorable!

After saying goodbye to our groovy hostel, we took a boat to another town on the lake called San Marcos. It is this quiet place that´s a Guatemalan haven for alternative medicine and the like. This hotel had a little dorm with a thatched roof and bamboo walls. The place was surrounded by lush jungle and also had a communal kitchen with vegetarian cooks, a Mayan sauna, and morning yoga classes. My whole stay including super yummy meals, sauna, and yoga was $28. I wasn´t looking forward to hanging out with a bunch of strangers, but a huge rain storm forced the issue and I ended up having a blast with 5 really cool people from England and Austria.

Luckily, before the big storm hit we were able to hike a trail along the lake that we had heard about that leads to some cliffs you can jump off of into the lake. We weren´t sure if we found the right cliffs, but there was no way we were leaving without trying. It was so scary standing there getting ready to jump, but it was so worth it! We each ended up jumping three times and each time was equally exciting. I went back the next day with two of the other travellers I met and they confirmed that we had indeed chosen the right cliffs - I guess we already knew that from the lack of broken legs, but it´s nice to get validation.

We headed out to go back to Xela around noon on Sunday. We knew it could be a bit tough travelling on election day, but we couldn´t skip school! Unfortunately, a bit tough turned out to be an understatement. We waited about an hour to catch a crowded boat back to San Pedro which wasn´t a huge deal, but when we got to San Pedro we found out the buses weren´t running because of election day (people in San Marcos had assured us they would be). We thought about staying in San Pedro for the night, but realized we could take a truck to the next bigger town. We negotiated a pickup truck ride half the way then took a tuk-tuk for as far as we could. Then, we had to pay another truck to take us up to the main highway. All of this was quite an exercise in communication and patience, but it was also pretty fun (at least until we got rained on and a bit cold for the last part of the ride). When the truck dropped us off at the main highway (a term used quitel loosely here) we were lucky to quickly catch a chicken bus headed back to Xela. And, to make for a super happy ending I didn´t have to sit in the hump seat!

Politics

Guatemala's presidential elections are this weekend. Today was the last day for candidates to campaign, and it's now quiet time for Guatemalans to think things over until Sunday's election. I really don't understand what's going on, but I did see a huge billboard for Rigoberta Menchu, a former Nobel Peace Prize winner, who I made a poor unsuspecting student do a report on a couple years ago when he swore he had absolutely nothing to write about. I figured it was just a coincidence, but nope, it's her! From what I've heard and from what I actually understood of that her chances don't look good, but things are pretty wide open right now. I guess she just returned from exile to Guatemala this year, but many indiginous people don´t like her because they feel that she hasn´t helped them directly. I'll ask my teacher for more info which I will most likely totally misunderstand and incorrectly report back to you.

El Cementario

Yesterday afternoon we took a little field trip to the cemetery in town. When you first walk in there is a brightly colored grave with writing all over it. It is the grave of a gypsy who died in the early 1900s. She died at 17 of a broken heart because she and her love were prohibited by their families of different classes to see each other. Legend has it that you write on her grave what you need and when it comes true you bring her flowers. There were things like, "Please help me get a girlfriend fast" and more serious things like, "Help my dying son not suffer" all over it. She had a decent amount of flowers, so there might be something to it.

We also saw some graves missing the marlbe covers because of looting, and in one you could see some human bones on the bottom. I feel bad for those families. Like it´s not bad enough that your family´s grave was vandalized, they also have to see Grandpa´s bones sticking out. Most of the statues were missing parts because there apparently is some benefit to stealing marble pieces. I´m not really sure where the market is for assorted marble heads and feet, but it must be lucrative. The only statues that weren´t vandalized were the ones of the angel of death - he´s bad mojo to mess with. I have some pictures to post, but the computers at school are too slow and I forgot to bring the USB cable with me to the internet cafe. So stay tuned for tacky pictures of human bones.

The City

Xela is a really cool city. I´m so glad I´m here. The first day it really reminded me of Florence with its narrow stone streets and the big classical buildings in the city center. I made immediate comparisons to Mexico when I got here, but other than the stray dogs and crazy traffic it´s really quite different - well, there is the Spanish thing too. Now that I´ve been here almost three whole days, I think I´m getting a feel for the city it is without all the comparisons. It´s pretty tranquil for a large city, and the vibe is chill. I can walk everywhere - so far - which I love. It´s colder than you´d think for Central America, but I´ve been fine with a fleece and I´ve been lucky enough to only get rained on once so far. The city is at about 7,000 feet and is surrounded by really lush jungle and volcanoes. I´m having trouble posting pictures :-( , but my school´s website has some good pics of Xela and the school: www.casaxelaju.com

First Day

I arrived in Guatemala City early Sunday morning without incident. I was met outside of customs by a representative of the school holding a sign with my name. He didn´t say anything when I introduced myself and just started walking, so I followed. We went to the parking lot and he said, ¨carro,¨ so I put my suitcase in the trunk and got in. Once we were driving he started talking and explained that he was going to drop me off at the bus station, but when we got there we had to sit outside and wait for it to open. He talked about the upcoming election and the general state of things in Guatemala City. It was really interesting and he was super tolerant of my terrible broken Spanish. I commented to him that the city seemed incredibly traquil to me and he laughed and reminded me that it was 6 am on a Sunday morning. So I guess I didn´t get to see the real Guatemala City, which is just fine with me.

I caught the bus at 8 and proptly fell asleep for the first 3 hours of the 5 hour ride. I was jolted awake when we went over a bump and my head hit the window frame. I was annoyed for about a half a second until I took a look around me. We were winding around the side of a mountain covered in jungle driving through the clouds. It was absolutely beautiful and I saw wild calla lillies, lots of cute goats, cows, and chickens. We stopped periodically in the small towns to pick up other passengers, most of whom were indigenous. One woman at a bus stop was holding the hand of a toddler, had a baby in a blanket on her back, and a huge bundle wrapped in cloth balanced on her head and she and her kids were totally chill and almost still the whole rest of the ride. I also enjoyed watching the driver´s assistant whose job it was to take tickets and hold the broken door shut. He also got to pick the CDs and by his choice in music I´m pretty sure he had been recently dumped.

When I arrived in Quetzaltenango there wasn´t anyone with my name on a sign, but I figured my family would find me pretty easily being the only foreigner on the bus. I waited until everyone had left the bus stop and started looking questioningly toward anyone walking my way, but no luck. I asked one of the police where a bathroom was, then came back outside and decided I would wait fifteen more minutes then catch a cab to my host family´s house and if they weren´t home then to the school. Luckily a woman came rushing towards me saying my name after about ten minutes. She hailed a cab and took me to her house. She seemed very serious and other than asking me where I was from didn´t say anything. I figured she must be a liason from the school escorting me to my house. But, I was wrong. She was Judith my host mom. She took me inside pointed to my room and left. I started unpacking and thinking about heading out to explore and get some food, but she called my name again and I followed her to the kitchen where she pointed to the food on the stove and showed me where the dishes are and told me to eat. I had decided I wouldn´t be practicing much Spanish at home, but I was wrong. Once I got my food and sat down she became warm and animated and we chatted for quite a while. She is really nice. I think we were both pretty shy initially. I met her husband later and he is also shy, but pretty funny.

After eating, we went for a walk and she showed me how to get to the school and the central park. I can walk to pretty much everything which I love. The bell is ringing for class, gotta go...