Hannah and I have been up in Coban all week, and we just got back into Guate City yesterday morning after spending the night in Antigua with our group of Michiganders (or Michiganians, no one is sure).
We left last Saturday with an experienced field coordinator, Collin, and while he left on Wednesday morning (and normally, we would have as well) we stayed on with the group right up until yesterday morning when we gave approximately 25 goodbye hugs outside the airport.
The week (well, about ten days) was definitely an adventure, filled with fun and laughs as well as some more stressful moments. I should have taken notes (Hannah did, I think, so you should check out her blog), because I know I've forgotten some events, but here's a not-necessarily-chronologically correct record of what we were up to in Coban, Guatemala:
Saturday morning (The 11th, I believe) Hannah and I met Collin at the airport and we waited a couple of hours for our incoming build team to arrive from Michigan. 26 in total, Hannah and I admit to getting pretty attached to them over the next week or so.
The group arrived right as the three of us were scarfing down a Pollo Campero lunch (It's a good thing the one item on the menu I can eat happens to be delicious) and then we all left for Antigua, which is a little more than an hour away from the city depending on traffic.
We reached our hotel for the night, Hermano Pedro, which is a very lovely hotel. I dig the open air halls and stuff. Lots of plant matter, makes me happy.
We wandered around a little bit then, and Hannah and I ended up at Fernando's, a very nice little cafe. I got an all-fruit smoothie of pineapple and, uh... strawberry, I think, and Hannah accidentally ordered an espresso, which surprised her a little when they brought it to her. Now she knows what an espresso is.We also hunted down the Cashew Man, who seems to be always wandering around Antigua peddling various nuts, and if you mosey around town long enough you're bound to come across him. It's 20 Quetzales for a small baggie of yummy cashews, which comes out to about $2.60. Worth it! We LOVE cashews. omg.
For dinner that night all 29 of us walked down the street to Tacotento, a nice chain restaurant with good but sort of small food. The menu is all in what I'm sure would be a cute themed dialect (reminds me of Panamanian Spanish) if we were totally fluent but as is just made ordering sort of confusing. But we got through it, had some good tacos, the group had a lot of fun despite the frustration of trying to figure out who ordered what as it came out of the kitchen.
Sunday morning we had a buffet breakfast at Hermano Pedro's and then climbed into one coaster and one micro bus for the long drive to Coban. Something like 7 hours, I'm not sure. It went pretty well, though, the scenery was interesting and I had my iPod whenever I needed some change of noise. Gypsy orchestras and Gnarls Barkley make everything more epic.
Sunday was the day of the World Cup, and while I am not really into it, Hannah is and so were several other people in the group. We stopped for lunch around the beginning of the game. I should have ordered Kak Ik, but instead I just ordered rice and beans. A lot of the group had trouble getting what they wanted for lunch, which turned out to be a common theme for the week. We had to leave before the game ended and so we listened to the unintelligible radio broadcast instead. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL...
As we approached Coban, I started seeing tree ferns! I love tree ferns! No one else here seems to share my enthusiasm for them. Oh well.
By the way, I'm still looking for a good guide book to Guatemalan plants. How can I be plant girl if all the plants I know are thousands of miles away?
We reached Coban that afternoon and booked into our hotel, Alcazar de Doña Victoria, which was historically a convent and is now a hotel filled with mildly creepy wooden statues of saints. Hannah and I couldn't figure out how to work the lock on our upstairs room, so we climbed through the knee-height window a few times.
That night Hannah and I gave a joint general work site safety speech to the group at dinner and only missed a few minor points. I don't remember if the welcome ceremony was that day or not... it must have been. Anyway, at some point two of the three Guatemalan families receiving our help on their Habitat houses as well as two of the masons came and joined us and everyone was introduced and it was only a little awkward. One of the families was missing due to illness in the family and we would not be building for them, another family had been found and we would be helping them instead.
Sorry, my writing skills are going downhill. This is a lot to write. Anyway...
The first work day, Monday, I took one of the three buses to a site with a third of the Michigan team. Collin and Hannah each went to the other two sites. I didn't take any pictures that day.
Did I mention that Sunday night I woke up in the middle of the night very sick? Sickest I've ever been that I can remember. Ack.
I wasn't feeling very well on Monday, and the next day I felt terrible again and stayed at the hotel. Hannah went with my group since the group she had been with on Monday had one fluent Spanish speaker and a few others with good skills, and we figured they could take care of themselves.
I snoozed and felt sorry for myself and called my mom and then when I was feeling a bit better around eleven I walked down the road to a local little medical clinic. I waited for a while as there were other patients in front of me and then saw the doctor for a consultation (costing as much as a small bag of cashews - 20 Quetzales) and he asked me lots of questions and listened to my stomach with a stethoscope and stuff and then wrote me two prescriptions: one for Perenterol, which is like yogurt in a pill, and another for an antibiotic starting with T or X or something that I never filled out. I did fill out the Perenterol that evening at Farmacia Batres off the main square and got 6 pills to take every 12 hours and that seems to have done the trick.All of the Lutherans were very concerned about me that evening, when most of us (I think some other peeps were feeling a little green around the gills at that point, too) trooped down to a little indoor-ish soccer field. More than half the build team plus two Guatemalan masons played a great game. The rest of us, including myself, watched from above and took pictures until it got too dark (Hannah has the pics I took with her camera).
The next day I went back to work on a different site than the one I had gone to; Collin left Wednesday morning, which is normal for the field coordinators, but Hannah and I opted to remain for the full experience.
I went to a site in Carcha, about 15 minutes away from Coban. The father of the family there has relatives in Chicago and visits them and took English in school and so spoke English about as well as I speak Spanish. The masons at that site all spoke a Mayan dialect with some Spanish words thrown in.
That night the team had reservations at a nice restaurant in Coban called La Casa D'Acuna. It was lots of fun and really good food; I had a sort of a cooked salad with chicken and macadamia nuts and olives and onions on it. A lot of the group ordered pizza.
The next day we left the work sites an hour early to take a tour of a coffee plantation a block down from where we'd had dinner the night before. It was pouring rain and we were all still in our dirty work clothes. The plantation is gorgeous, hard to believe that the town is right on the other side of the wall because suddenly you can see for miles and it's very green, especially with the rain. I tasted some ripe coffee beans off the bush - sweet, fibrous. Friday was the last work day. By then I had very tan arms and very sore muscles. We ate dinner again that night at La Casa D'Acuna because the group had enjoyed it so much and the hotel meals were getting a little boring.
It was pouring rain again on the way there and I, lacking any sort of protection from the rain, arrived soaked through.
I had another salad. Twas delicious, and several people commented on my bravery. I figured the restaurant was nice enough to get away with eating the uncooked salad, and it was.
On the way back it wasn't raining so hard and a group member had lent me a poncho, but the road was flooded in one place and we had to go around the block and then walk along the narrow, unreliable sidewalk for a while and hop across a wooden plank to get back onto the road when we could.
When we got back to the hotel, I enjoyed the tortilla I had sequestered in my sweater. I have taken to hoarding food, particularly tortillas, in case there's nothing I can eat at my next meal. So far I have had food every time I didn't really need it and had nothing when the hotel forgot to make me lunch on Saturday. Luckily I was with a group of generous people.
Saturday we went to Semuc Champey. The road there was an hour and a half of tight turns and half an hour of very rough unpaved road, also with tight turns.
Our tour started, unexpectedly, at some caves. The caves were beautiful and epic but also frighteningly dangerous and very hot. The group contained 100% good sports, though, and we made it back alive.
We had lunch at Semuc at the trailhead, and Hannah and I ended up purchasing some ill-fitting swimsuits because we decided we really wanted to go swimming.
This is a spider devouring a fly:
Part of the group took the hike up to the lookout, where they saw a fantastic view and a monkey. Hannah and I and the rest of the group walked down to the river, which consists in that area of a huge rapids going into an underground tunnel (Like the Rogue River in Oregon, but way bigger) and a series of something like 30 pools going overland downhill, terraced and perfect for swimming and jumping. It was a lot of fun, and definitely worth it after all.
We drove back, even more exhausted, that evening, had dinner, and slept hard, though our laundry was still missing. Did I mention that? The hotel lost our laundry. Mine turned up the morning we were leaving, and Hannah's was found a day later and will be returned to her via another Habitat group staying in the same place in Coban.
Sunday morning we left Coban, drove hours and hours, got a flat tire on the way there, got back to Antigua, wandered around town a little, shopped, and then went to Santo Domingo for dinner.Santo Domingo is the nicest restaurant I have ever been to in my life. Holy cow. This is an appetizer:
I had the Guatemalan Dish, which was three pieces of delicious beef, some rice and beans and platanos. I ate all of it before I realized I should have taken a picture.
Yesterday morning Hannah and I rode in one of the two buses taking the group back to the airport in Guatemala City. We said goodbye to all of them there at the drop-off point. We made sure to get everyone's facebook info and such. We miss them already! :( It's impossible to spend ten days with a group of such great individuals without growing a little attached.
We then went back to our hostel and gathered up all of our dirty laundry, which fit into a duffel bag and two backpacks. Our landlord's wife picked us up and took us to their nice apartment, where we laid around and watched TV and used the internet for several hours while waiting for our clothes to be done. They took us back to the hostel afterwards, and we walked to Paiz (grocery store) to buy food. We tried to get a taxi to pick us up when we were done shopping, but the line was busy and even a woman selling candy at a little kiosk who happened to be related to a taxi driver couldn't get us a taxi, so we walked all the way back with our heavy groceries. I guess it's really only about ten blocks or so, but it's stressful to walk in this city.
Last night we cooked up my speech & debate coach's recipe, Rice and Beans for Lazies, which turned out delicious and we're having it again for dinner tonight. Yay for leftovers!
Our landlord is letting us borrow his little DVD player and some DVDs, so if we can get that hooked up we should have enough evening entertainment to last us the rest of the week.
Now Hannah and I are in the Habitat office, and I have been working on this blog post for hours. I think I'm going to have lunch now (we're going down the street to get Pupusas) and then I'll come back and add the photos. Phew.
Here you go! <3
1 comment:
It looks so beautifully green there! Thanks for posting pics and stories!
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