Antigua is sticky

Contradictory to my last post (which was... over a month ago) I am still in Antigua. The closest I've come to moving out was this morning, but it is now 1:30 and I'm still sitting on my old balcony at César's. I did my best to pack up last night, but I'm not a great packer (I lack some organizational skillz, which may have had some impact on my inability to get out of this town) and I would have still had some problems to work out before my 5:30 bus this morning.

This is the conejito I doodled in my host father's album of people who have stayed in his house over the last decade.

I was going to take a directo chicken bus to Monterrico, then hope it was one of the buses that continue on to the little pueblos down the beach. I had not quite figured out how I was going to effectively haul my two duffel bags, rucksack, purse and hiking boots all the way across town in the dark (Thanks to my handy-dandy iCalendar sun application subscription, I know that there wasn't going to be any light until almost 6:00 this morning) and then hassle with the driver and ayudante about getting the big bags up onto the roof. I had not gotten that far, logistically.

Then I turned my alarm off in my sleep and didn't wake up until less than thirty minutes before my bus was going to take off, anyway. So I'm still here.

Actually oversleeping was not my only problem. This week, similar to last week and perhaps the week before that, have been strange and/or hectic.

Last Thursday when I was in Guatemala City with Hannah and her dad I made my first attempt at getting my 90-day basic visa renewed (they call it a "tourist" visa. Bah!) but was turned away because the offices close at 4:30 and although I arrived around 3:30, I stood around looking lost for at least 45 minutes and got cut in line by sneaky old people multiple times, and then when I finally climbed up to the 4th floor to pay my fine for overstaying my initial visa by about a week, they were sliding the windows shut and told me to come back in the morning.

So I caught a chicken bus into the city Friday afternoon, got off at Miraflores Mall (Huge. Insanely posh and shiny. Crappy food court) and from there took a Green Cab to the offices of El Departamento de Migracion out in Zona 4. The cab driver gave me his phone number to be able to call him and get picked up again if the visa process didn't take too long, but I was running up and down stairs, getting photocopies made, and standing in line for over an hour and when I stepped back out of the building I just hopped into one of the slightly sketchier white taxis that was idling hopefully in the street.

White taxis are sometimes cheaper because they don't have a meter running while you're sitting in traffic, but you have to settle on a price before you get in or they'll probably try to rip you off. This one was good, I paid only Q40, whereas the Green Cab was about Q50.

I'm not entirely clear on why the Guatemalan government had to hang on to my passport for the weekend after I'd paid my Q120 renewal fee and Q110 illegal residency fine, but I was told to come back the following Monday afternoon to pick it up. I ended up returning yesterday afternoon, Thursday.

Last Saturday I was going to go hang out with Hannah and her dad here in Antigua, only to wake up that morning with a debilitating stomach bug. I did not get out of bed for two and a half days... fun fun. Then I got a cold. I am getting over the cold but the reason I am not in El Rosario at the beach right now is because I woke up this morning and realized that my In the bathroom/Outside the bathroom ratio was still out of whack and that seven days has been too long to expect this to just blow over while I'm living in a coastal village where the houses have sand floors and the shower is a bucket... and the toilet flushes very, very slowly.

So this morning I woke up again at 7:00, had breakfast with my host father and my two Dutch housemates who were surprised to see me since I had already said goodbye to them last night, then made my way to a local little Aprofam Clinic and got myself checked out by a doctor there. He agreed that seven days was way too long, I should have gone to a clinic the third day I was still feeling sick. He prescribed an antibiotic for amoebas called Tinidazol along with some pills filled with "the spores of Bacillus Clausii" called Enterogermina, to reflorify my estomago. I'm to take a total of four pills of the antibiotic, one every 12 hours, and two doses of the bacterial spores every day in between the antibiotics and for a few days afterwards.

He also directed me to a diagnostics clinic located a few blocks down the street where I am to take a poop test and then report back on Monday. So I'm still stuck in Antigua until... who the heck knows. I hate to be very specific anymore. Someday, preferably early next week.

Anyway, about yesterday's trip into Guatemala City to pick up my passport: I had to go twice. I was so cotton-headed and disgruntled by my illnesses that I realized after 45 minutes on the bus into the city that I had left the receipts for my visa back in my room. When I got to Miraflores Mall I called a friend and asked if those receipts were necessary, which he told me they probably were, then went and found some disappointing Chinese food in the food court. Usually food court Chinese food is so good! What the heck.

I was so grumpy I bought Q1 of ambiguous fruit-shaped candy, disregarding my allergies. I was already sick anyway. I should have bought Skittles, ambiguous fruit-shaped candy sort of sucks. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be gum or not.

So I left the gigantic shiny mall, walked down the highway, crossed the road on one of the fun footbridges, and caught a bus going back to Antigua. The ayudante was advertising the bus from about 200 meters in front of it, which I thought was sort of weird, and when I indicated that I wanted to get on the bus but could not see it he told me it was "down there, because there are police here"... Mmkay. I'm wondering if there's actually some sort of law against packing the buses as tightly as they do?

I made it back to Antigua around 1:00, hustled over to my house, grabbed my receipts off my bedside table, donned a sweater despite the heat of the day and booked it on back to where I catch buses into Guate. Then I sat in a chicken bus for another hour, got into a Green Cab that happened to be driven by the same guy I'd had the last time, made it to the immigration office, signed some stuff, got my passport, hopped back into my trusty Green Cab which took me to the bus stop, and got on a bus back home. Holy cow. Long day.

Yesterday evening I went to a few used & new bookstores around town and picked up my reading stock for the next few months: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, Dinosaur in a Haystack by Stephen Jay Gould, The Living by Annie Dillard, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson even though I have it on Audiobook, I wanted a hard copy. I also dawdled over and finally gave in to buying a brand new (and therefore expensive) bird book, Birds of Mexico and Central America from Princeton (like the school) Illustrated Checklists, by Ber Van Perlo.

And now it is 2:30 and I am going to go pick up my laundry.