7 1/2 Dozen

Trent the Peace Corps Surfer’s cell phone was shot for a while, so in order to discuss the coconut bread we are having made for the kids’ activities of the Festival de la Tortuga I had to actually go hunt him down in the next village over. 

I got out onto the hard sand where the tide had just left it, took off my flip-flops, and sprinted off down the beach, headed slightly to the right of where the sun had set a couple of hours before.  The moon wasn’t up yet; the stars were bright, but I couldn’t see much.  I held my single-LED keychain light in my hand as I ran, ready to turn it on if I came across anything other than flat sand and sea.

I’m actually rather afraid of the dark… functionally afraid, so I’ll still do things like run a kilometer down the beach at night.  It’s mostly just the zombies and sea monsters that scare me. 

That morning when I had gone out to count turtle tracks there was what I perceived to be a massive ray washed up dead on the beach right in front of the village.  Like eight feet across.  Actually more like three feet.  But it was big!  And dead.  But still scary.  I wouldn’t get close to it, on principle. 

Later, someone in the village skinned it.

Anyway, that morning and the morning before I hadn’t counted any nesting turtle tracks.  Apparently they found mala onda in the full moon.

So there I was, running down the beach in the dark, paranoid about sea zombies, fingers gripping my LED light, when I saw that I was coming up on a shadow.  Some newly arrived driftwood, I thought.  Prepared to jump it.  I pressed on my light to judge the distance but instead of a log I lit up a smooth-shelled creature with bright white skin holding together its head and fins as it crawled awkwardly up the beach.  Just for that split second, it scared the crap out of me.

Then I switched into turtle mode, put my light out, and crouched.  Mama turtle had stopped crawling.  I was sure she was going to turn around and head right back into the sea, as frightened by me as I was by her.  But she started swishing her fins again, leaving that unicycle-with-a-tractor-tire line of tracks and when she had gone another several feet I drew a circle in the sand behind her to claim her as mine.

It took her a while to find a good spot up at the top of the beach to put her eggs.  I sat on a log a few feet away to wait.  She kicked sand around while I twisted my neck back and forth keeping an eye out for zombie parlameros. 

She finished digging her nest and settled in to lay.  The last time I’d found a turtle on the beach at night I’d been with a local friend, who had dug a hole down behind the turtle, a tunnel into the bottom of the nest, to begin taking out the eggs as they were layed.  I wasn’t sure if that’s how I was supposed to do it, but I was eager to get out of the dark and the tunnel seemed like a faster way to go.  As it turns out, that’s how it’s done generally anyway, by parlameros and turtle volunteers alike.

While I sat and waited, some 4-wheelers blazed by, stopped at my turtle’s tracks, saw the circle, and continued on.  I felt like a real parlamera.  Hell yes!! 

I wish I weren’t afraid of the dark.  I can force myself to relax for a few moments and just feel the starlight and the sea air and the sand, but then the paranoia seeps back into my mind.  I can’t help it.  Perhaps I just need more practice.

What I experienced despite the fear, however, was awesome.  The turtle, Olive Ridley, parlama, large and heavy,  breathing deep every time she dropped two eggs at a time into the nest.  I kept my arm down in the tunnel behind the nest and could both hear her breathing and feel the soft ping-pong ball eggs thud against the floor of the nest.  I got covered in sand.  I got oozed on. 

I have learned that Guatemala sand and mama turtle ooze are glorious things, even when felt through a fear of the dark. 

The moon finally came up orange and big, and the parlama mama put her last couple of eggs, sighed, and started filling in the nest again.

I felt bad that the nest was empty.  Her ping-pong eggs were all already up on top of the sand next to me in a pile.  While she laid she had sort of been turning around and she could have seen the pile of her eggs, not where she had put them.  I felt bad about that until I realized she probably had no idea what a turtle egg looked like. 

Even if she could smell that something was not quite going as planned, she finished filling the hole while I collected the eggs into the front of my T-shirt.  I would like to thank Threadless.com.  My fear of the night did not fade with the dark even as the moon rose, and I regret not staying to watch her return to the ocean.  I was too scared.  I put on my sandals, said thank you, held the eggs close to me and continued 200 meters down the beach to the trail that leads off to where Trent lives, with the promise of electric lights.

We put the eggs into a worn clear plastic bag, about seven and a half dozen.  High fives.  Snickers bars.  We walked back to El Rosario, where I went and grabbed the hatchery key from my house and Trent checked out the beach towards La Barra to see if other turtles were coming up. 

We buried the eggs in two nests of 39 and 50 eggs, the obscure numbers due to a minor miscount and poor math skills between the two of us.

Upon finishing up reburying a nest:

“Did you say the magic word?”

“There’s a magic word?”

“Yes:  Nascan tortuguitas!”

“…That’s two words.”

The last four nests in the hatchery were found by us; Trent found one right in front of his house a few nights before.  That’s pretty cool.  And we released some babies that had just hatched while we were there burying the nest I’d found. 

At some point I remarked that I had not woken up that morning thinking I was on a collision course with a sea turtle. 

It certainly doesn't feel like November.

I’m getting a little anxious for my family to show up, already!  I take the early bus to Antigua to meet up with my dad in fourteen days.  Two more weeks.  I haven’t seen anyone from my tribe for five months.

I don’t really get homesick, not here at the beach anyway, where I have turtle eggs to bury, English lesson plans to put together, and a puppy to keep an eye on.  That isn’t to say home is never on my mind.  Memories of the stretches of road that I know well, especially the places where I learned to drive, the smells and sounds of my sister’s Portland apartment when it is full of good food and happy people and grouchy cats every Third Sunday Brunch, and the doors in my house, starting with the front door.  How cool, Oregon chipi chipi, light rain, feels; different from even the Antigua chipi chipi.  These images and accompanying sensations flicker through my mind occasionally and my heart strains to remain in the present.

El Murcielago, The Bat

This morning I was walking on the beach with my chucho puppy.  We do this every morning.  Some mornings we head out too late and the sand is already too hot to walk on without sandals, caites, and I have to dump burning sand out of my flip-flops every few steps and carry the puppy on my shoulder.  Where the waves have been most recently the sand is cool, but my job is to count the places where nesting sea turtles have come up and write down the location information with a GPS and the tracks don't show anymore where the tide has washed it away.  So we walk on the hot sand, at least in one direction.

This morning, like most mornings, we came across a few interesting washed-up dead things.  Heading West, the long leg of the crawl count, the guts of some large animal were cooking on the sand.  The puppy chased away the big beautiful black-headed vultures who were expressing interest in the guts, but was not herself impressed.

Heading back from the eastern leg of the count Luna, that is the puppy's name, stopped ahead of me to sniff at a curled-up fuzzy dead creature - a bat.

I don't remember really seeing a bat up so close before, even a dead one.  In fact I think the only bats I've really gotten adequate looks at are the smaller-than-mice cave bats in the Oregon Caves and the gigantic flying foxes I saw in the botanical gardens in Sydney, Australia when I was nine.

I peeled the dead bat's wings away from its furry body and took a look at its fingers and single claw and the membrane stretched between.  Its hind paws were curled up, looking like flexible rat's paws.  On its nose was a little pink rhino horn.  I wanted to identify the species, but apparently bats make up a huge percentage of the mammal population in Guatemala and I don't know where to start.

Jaime told me a few weeks ago that there are vampire bats here.  I didn't believe him until some other people told me the same thing.  I don't know where I thought vampire bats lived, but I didn't think it was Central America, I don't know why not.  Jaime says that sometimes you sleep with your foot pressed against your mosquito net and in the night you wake up and it feels like there's sugar between your toes, and in the morning you see you've been bitten.

I also get peed on by bats on a pretty regular basis.  Right through my net onto my face, usually right when I was about to fall asleep.  Spritz.  Otherwise I like to watch them flit around under the thatch and wish them luck taking out all those damn zancudos. Mosquitoes I dislike and DEET I hate.

I came home from the crawl count and was offered papaya. 
There's a new bus on the route that goes all the way to La Barra that is orange and they call it La Papaya. 

Small fishing community seeks English teacher, comes up with inexperienced 18-year-old

(Who just had to look up whether it's spelled and pronounced "inexperienced" or "unexperienced"...)

The demand for English lessons around here is high and the supply of English speakers with time on their hands is low.  So when I showed up, incompetent as I may be, I was immediately signed on as the new English teacher in the village.

I am terrified and uncertain of my teaching capabilities, but also excited and eager to see what we can accomplish or I wouldn't have said alright, sure.  I'll be teaching adults - fishermen, mostly, since this is a fishing village, but they would like to learn English and get jobs in nearby tourist-infested Monterrico.

I have a pretty clean slate to work with.  Around town I receive the occasional "hello!", "how are you?", and "good morning!" (regardless of the time of day), but no one seems to know much more past that.

Last night I helped Sara the schoolteacher finish the homework she was given by her university English course, for which she travels to another town (rather far away, not sure how far) on Saturdays.  Her homework is to fill out sections at a time of her workbook.

The workbook is awful.  For starters, it is completely irrelevant to her life: Every single section relies heavily on the assumption that the student has lived in an American-style city his or her entire life and therefore knows the names and locations of bus stations, convenience stores, and restaurants.  Sara has lived in small fishing communities all her life, where everything comes from one or two stores run out of someone's house,  and if you want to go somewhere else you sit down and wait for the chicken bus to come by.  She can make things up to fill in the spaces, but the lesson is wasted.  Also, the setup just sucks.  Even I couldn't figure out what the book was trying to ask her to do some of the time, which is not acceptable.  I'm not dumb, and the instructions were in English (Sort of complicated, confusing English at that).


The level of the lessons she was working on were much higher than her actual proficiency level, which gives me further evidence that that textbook sucks and hasn't taught her a thing.  Of course, I have always sort of hated textbooks and workbooks.  They are tedious and just make me grumpy, which is not a good mood to try and learn in.


Furthermore, the people here in El Rosario aren't looking to learn how to write in English, they want to speak English.  So I refuse to teach English as if I were working from the confines of a public school system somewhere in the US.  I'm living in a sand-floor thatched-roof hut on the southern coast of Guatemala, Man!  I can teach as I see fit.  I'm in charge. 


First-hand personal experience (redundant?) with learning Spanish reveals that I essentially did not learn Spanish in a classroom.  When I got off the plane in Panama in February of 2009, I knew some basic vocabulary, some grasp of present tense, and your basic "hola, me llamo Ana."  It took me more or less four months to pick the language up on my own, by listening and interacting, shy as I was, with real Spanish-speakers.  I have memories of the moment I learned specific words and phrases "in the field", as it were, and those are some pretty awesome moments.  I still experience them occasionally, as my current level of Spanish is enough to have a good conversation and a good time but still far from perfecto.


So, with what I have seen and experienced in mind, I first turn to the "Where Are Your Keys?" project.  I think I stumbled across it quite a while back, a year or two maybe, while stalking around the internet investigating my brother's life on the internet, which sounds creepy, but really, google my brother's name and he's practically famous.  Somewhere in the mix was this "language fluency game", and now it's come back to me as my best idea for a means, or at least a supplement, to teach English down here. 

Introduction to WAYK from Willem Larsen on Vimeo.

My first obstacle is the fact that I am barely able to post blogs from here, with my dinky little Tigo plug-in modem.  It only gets reception where my Tigo phone does, and I only have... 3 bars right now.  It took an hour to load the above video, and the necessary tutorial videos available on the website run long - the basic overview is an hour and twenty minutes.  I am incapable of loading that from here - I can't leave my laptop out on the beach for three days.  I need internetz. 

So I hope to go into Monterrico this afternoon, or tomorrow, or Monday, or whenever to seek out fast wi-fi.  If I have to spend a night there, I will.  I am determined.  I need to learn the game, test it out and teach it to Trent, practice it, and then get on the whole teaching classes thing.  I imagine more than a few people are going to be a little dubious of my methods, so hopefully I can make sense of the game and present it well and make some progress!

There's my plan. 

If anyone reading this has any tips, ideas, stories, etc., to help me out, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you!  This feels like a very big endeavor, and I intend to do my best despite lack of any training whatsoever.

Wah.

First Day Luck

New & Improved - with pictures!

 I am finally in El Rosario, a very small fishing villages located in a string of very small fishing villages along the southern Pacific coast of Guatemala. The closest Google Earth-able town is Monterrico or perhaps Hawaii. Monterrico is a small, fairly touristy beach town and Hawaii is where most of the sea turtle people go to volunteer.

My shuttle to Monterrico picked me up at my doorstep in Antigua at 8:30 and I chatted a little with some other travelers (from Houston, Michigan, and the UK) who were also headed to the coast, though only for a few days. The heat increased substantially along the way. The coast is hot.

The shuttle driver dropped me off with my embarrassing amount of stuff on a street at the edge of town where the micro bus to the pueblos comes by. I waited for about two hours, sitting under a ficus tree at the edge of a field teeming with dragonflies across from Tienda La Esperanza and a smaller hardware store.

And now I’m here! I made it! I meant to be here a month ago or more, but now I am here and the adventure has already begun. I only hope that my internet is strong enough to post this stuff; if you want to see pictures, please submit your prayers to the Tigo modem gods.

This morning I got up at 6:00 and waited for Trent, the Peace Corps volunteer from Iowa (if I remember correctly) who has been living here for the past 7 months and has about a year and a half still to go. He is thinking of purchasing a horse.

He and Benjamin and I headed out to check on the turtle hatchery (tortugario). Benjamin is a local kid who has been helping out and now working in the turtle hatchery since he was quite young. I live with his family here. He is also a fisherman.

When we arrived at the tortugario we found two nests had hatched and some of the nestlings had escaped the wire nets, so we couldn’t count exactly how many had hatched from each nest. Trent was surprised, he had never seen so many baby turtles at a time. We scooped them up several at a time and plopped them into a bucket, carried them to about 10 feet from the farthest-reaching wave and set them down, facing the sea. We stood and watched until they had all disappeared into the surf. Fifty-four olive ridley sea turtlings.

Benjamin left Trent and I, and we continued on down the beach to perform crawl counts: counting the visible turtle tracks from the night before. Trent told me that the turtles had been coming up at low tide, which made it hard to find tracks the next morning after high tide had washed most of the evidence away.

We did find one set of tracks. Trent pointed them out to me: they look like a unicycle with a tractor tire came up out of the ocean. We were following the tracks with our eyes as they crossed the beach, and when we reached the end we realized the owner of the tracks was still around.

Trent’s immediate assumption was that the turtle was sick - they rarely come up to lay eggs during the day, and it was at least 8:00 by that time. She also wasn’t moving at first. We sat behind her so as not to scare her and watched her for a while, then she started swishing her fins around and tilting her whole body side to side, resembling some sort of dancing mushroom.

Trent wasn’t sure if she had laid eggs, would lay eggs, or was simply confused. After about 20 minutes she packed up and left, with some difficulty.

Trent and I started digging up the area she had been sitting on. He couldn’t identify a definite hole by poking the sand with a stick to feel where it’s been loosened, so we dug all over. When nothing turned up, we assumed she hadn’t laid any eggs after all, filled everything back in, and continued on the end of the beach.

We went up to the hot, sandy road and headed back, stopping for a few minutes at a home where a man named Chepe happened to be (He is actually my neighbor). Chepe is an expert ‘parlamero’ - turtle egg finder. He listened to our story and accompanied us back to where we had encountered the parlama.

He started out by poking around with a stick, but we had dug up and disturbed most of the sand anyway. He inspected the area and poked a few times more at an area slightly above where we had been digging and he put his stick down and started digging himself. And lo, a nest of turtle eggs!

The nest was apparently on the larger side. We carried the eggs back in a t-shirt. It was settled that Chepe would receive 50% of what the eggs would be worth on the market, and we took all of the eggs to the hatchery to be reburied.

When we arrived at the hatchery, 6 more baby turtles had hatched and were trying desperately to escape their wire net. Two other nests look like they will hatch soon: the sand on top is caving in. We buried the nest in four different holes - about 130 eggs in all!

So today was an excellent first day. Trent and Benjamin told me I must be ‘pura suerte’, because that sort of thing doesn’t happen most of the time. Hopefully I can keep it happening…

Remember that you can donate about $20 and purchase another whole nest to pack into the hatchery! Talk to my parents about it, or send me an email, or whatever.

A sunny day in Antigua

This morning our host dad let us sleep in until 9:00, which really just made me wake up every half an hour after about 6:00, thinking I was missing something. The day is beautiful, though, so about 10:30 my two Dutch housemates and I wandered up to Cerro de la Cruz, a hill with a great view looking south over Antigua, towards the volcano.Whenever Cerro de la Cruz is mentioned in conversation, people tend to warn you that they've heard that it is extremely dangerous and you are sure to be robbed if you go without a police escort. This used to be true, perhaps, but now there are cops sitting around up there all day and the hill is a popular place for joggers, people with dogs, and youths who want to make out in the shade. It seems equally popular for foreigners, Antigueños (Guatemalans & expats), and folks visiting Antigua from the capital.And here is some proof that I was there:Go take a look at more pictures from today in my 3rd Guatemala album on Facebook. :)

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.

Last week in Antigua... as far as I know.

I definitely enjoy the Antigua life. It's not "real Guatemala", but it has its own special charms. For one thing, it's gorgeous.

Okay. I would write more but my laptop is dying and my housemate Jeen is not shutting up. And we have nachos, which are very distracting...

Simplifying

I am going to go live on the Pacific coast, in two fishing villages that have sea turtle hatcheries. I have about a week and a half left here in Antigua.
This is an email I sent to my brother yesterday:

I'm going to live in a tiny fishing village near the El Salvadorian border! YOU WOULD LOVE IT HERE. I want you to come here. This morning I buried sea turtle eggs in the little hatchery. It's beautiful, lots of birds and lizards and other critters (mice in the kitchen... might get myself a cat) and they cook over a fire and we wash our hands in a pila, which is like a sink without running water, and it's just awesome and for you it would be like a big laboratory of fun!
Yesterday to get from El Rosario, another little village on the beach, down here to La Barrona, I went with Leon who is an English guy living and volunteering in La Barrona, and we had to hike along the beach and through muddy crab-filled forests and I saw a crested lizard that got up and ran on two legs and we had to wait and wave at the fisherman from across rivers for an hour just to get a lancha (little boat) to take us across and then we would stumble, mud-covered, into a little village and then we took a bus for a while and then we had to avoid getting ripped off and take another lancha to another village, and we got into the mangroves and that's where we are now, coastal jungle with lots of mangrove networks. It's very very hot, i got sunburned yesterday (six hour trek) for the first time in years and now I am craving salt like crazy. You would love the markets here, walking along the street. Here actually right now being La Colonia, a larger more inland town practically right on the El Salvadorian border (We probably crossed and uncrossed the border on the way here) and we had to take a chicken bus, a lancha, and another tiny bus to get here. Here I am using the internet and this is where the market is, it's a pretty nice little town, and I really think you would like it.

--

I am now very sunburned on my shoulders, but... worth it!

Chronologically Inconsistent Account of my Weekend

I stayed on another night in Xela because I couldn't work out getting home and everyone wanted me to stay, so I caught a bus off the street this morning around 8:05. I expected to get into Antigua before 1:00, but as it turned out it took another three hours. The bus got sort of lost and sort of trapped up on some very rural mountain roads when a bus broke down on a narrow strip (well, the whole way was narrow) and we had to creep by after thinking about it for half an hour, leaning precariously over a cliff as we passed. Then of course we had to pass everyone who had gotten stuck going the other way, so I was essentially terror-filled for about an hour and a half. Then the traffic is always terrible in Chimaltenango.

Xela was really fun, I actually quite like that city. It's safer, friendlier, and just better than Guate City - also, it's a big city but it's the kind of big city that doesn't have any skyscrapers. The streets are all super narrow and stone tile, it's like old Europe or something. Xela is also better than Antigua - there are tourists and tourist cafes and such, but they're SO much less pretentious and/or dorky than the tourists in Antigua. Xela is a real, friendly, fun and 100% Guatemalan city. It is a bit cold.

We were going to go to a party on Friday evening shortly after I arrived, but I climbed approximately 3,000 feet in approximately 3.5 hours, and half an hour after I arrived in Xela, I got a headache and nausea and later collapsed half-dead on Hannah's bed. Needless to say I stayed back Friday night, and I still had a headache the next day when we and a Danish girl went to the mall/local pacas (like little home-owned Goodwills) and had lunch and stuff. I was fine that evening, though, and we went out salsa dancing with several other people, which was very fun. Before that we also went to go watch a movie at the Blue Angel, this little cafe where you can also pay Q10 to pick a movie and watch it in one of two living rooms with big TVs. Couldn't pull that off in the US, but it's awesome. We watched 3:10 to Yuma, which I loved!

Yesterday we climbed a hill for a view of the city, then hung out the rest of the day with a Russian girl, a Guatemalan guy, a hilarious Mexican guy, and a Spanish guy who resembles a pirate. It was fantastic! We all watched another movie and had dinner at the Blue Angel; Babel. Interesting, intense movie.

So this morning I got up and then followed Hannah to her school up a hill, then kept walking with my stuff and had to ask three different people where to find a bus to Guate (They pass through Chimaltenango on their way, and there I connect to Antigua). I waited a while on the sidewalk, watched stores opening up, then a someone pointed out an mislabeled bus to Guate (happens sometimes - they take a different route than it says on their front), luckily they also yell the name of wherever they're headed.
I was sort of surprised to see another obviously not-Guatemalan guy on the bus, but I had to sit far behind him the whole way and we never spoke until he decided to get off in Chimal, too. When the bus was stopped in the mountains, he stood up and got out of the bus with a bunch of other people, and I thought he was about seven feet tall. As it turns out he's only 6'6". He didn't know Antigua at all, so I showed him to the Black Cat hostel when we arrived and then we went to a very belated lunch at the Rainbow Cafe. He's from Holland, traveling around between his studies of medicine. Meeting people in other countries is awesome.

Sooo I'm probably just going to copy & paste this onto my blog. I didn't take my laptop or camera to Xela since I took chicken buses (well, apparently Camioneta or Canastera are more politically correct terms for the public buses...), in fact I took very little, just some stuff in my little army surplus rucksack. I also mostly emptied my wallet, stowing money in my socks and stuff, which was good because I got it stolen when I was getting off the bus in Chimal on my way up on Friday. It was entirely my fault, could have been prevented, I was being dumb (put it in the front flap of my purse, my purse was at my back, etc.) and I even felt it being stolen but at the time it did not occur to me what was happening. All they got was about $5 and a photocopy of my ID, plus my old recycled materials wallet, so... I just need a new wallet and better judgment.