I love you, I hate you

Just as I suspected, there would be follow-up with the 7 Habits. Rodolfo, who gave me the books, came by last night apparently just to see if I was already more effective. I hadn't even started with habit 1 yet, but I said I was just about to get started now that I was done with some other stuff. But his presence unleashed a whole love triangle scenario later when her boyfriend came over. When I don't use the tools for self improvement, I'm not the only one who suffers.

I've never gotten sick there.

Talking to Guatemalans about restaurant recommendations, it becomes apparent that foreigners are not the only ones who suffer problems from the food and water here. Foreigners are definitely more likely to get ill from those things, and I think part of that is habituation to the microbes and part of that is poor choices in where we eat. We're not as practiced in scoping out a place before choosing it if it's unknown, and it seems a lot of folks that I've spoken to here only eat street food that's been recommended to them by someone else. I have a date to go with Lucky to a get chuchitos from a lady in the Parque Benito Juarez sometime this week. But every time a Guatemalan recommends a restaurant to me, they're like 'The food is delicious and I've never gotten sick eating there. Not once!' Although I can think of occasions when friends of mine got sick from a restaurant (Hannah, Zona Rosa, Telegraph Ave), it's not a must-mention when suggesting a restaurant. So yesterday Lucky and I went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant here in Xela called Woon Kooc. I had invited her, my treat, since she'd gone to such pains the week before when making me lunch (getting a pie and cookies, for example, just so I could try the muy ricas polvorosas, meaning 'crumblies', as in that's the way the cookie... ), and then she'd taken such good care of me during my dental crisis. The day before, Saturday, in the latest search for cash, I ended up at the shopping center that has País, the supermarket now owned by Wal-Mart. I was picking up a thing or two while there (aside: if you were here, you'd shop there too), when the man in line behind me started laying huge bags full of broccolli on the conveyor belt. More than a household would eat, even if a recent super-foods convert. So I looked at the gentleman, who has an asian appearance, and then when the cashier entered the broccoli buyer's NIT (numero de indentificación tributaria, it's like a tax number for a business and they enter it when you check out if you have one) the name Woon Kooc came up! These are the kinds of things I linger around to find out about, though I didn't realize that the name would come up. I told Lucky about that when we sat down at the table on Sunday, and she nodded her head sagely and said 'So we know we will be eating healtfully today,' as she has great faith in País and Hiper-País. As an aside, when she and I had gone to Hiper-País the weekend before, we talked about the Wal-Mart take over, which was like 4 months ago, and she said that it was a great thing because before the workers had been paid terribly and they had to work long hours without compensation and now things were better. She was surprised when I told her that that was the reputation Wal-Mart has in the US. I felt like kind of a party-pooper telling her that. So even though foreign food except for maybe Italian doesn't enjoy much popularity here, the Chinese restaurant was bumping and it was pretty much all Guatemalan family groups. The food was good, not notably different from what you'd get at a Chinese restaurant in the US, and just to bring it home I'll mention we had broccoli beef in oyster sauce. The only thing that at first seemed odd to me was that many tables had large pitchers of white beverage on their table. I asked Lucky if they were pitchers of milk, but she said they were pitchers of horchata. A lot of tables had these pitchers, so I'm not sure if horchata is thought to go particularly well with Chinese food, maybe they make a particularly good horchata there (it did look good), maybe I'd just never seen a restaurant so stuffed with Guatemalan families on a Sunday... At any rate, it's been over 24 hours since my lunch there, and I can say Woon Kooc has done it again, it was delicious and I didn't get sick.

Roof Dogs

It's Saturday and I went up to the roof to eat my breakfast, where it's nice and sunny. The neighbors have dogs that pretty much never leave their roof, keeping watch I guess. Doesn't look like a life with a lot of affection, but they do have each other. There's a female weimaraner and a male dauchund, and sometimes they both peer over the side of the building with the dauchund standing underneath her, since she clears him by about a foot. They're always excited to see me.















Although sometimes the excitement wears off.

She looks like she had puppies at some time in the past. With the little guy? Perhaps he surprised her at a moment like this?





Anyway, here's the view in two directions from the roof. Of course that's the tip of a volcano in
the skyline of this photo, and at the end of this street you can kind of see the market near the house.






View over the neighbor's roof. Check out the black lace panties!

Tooth Hurty

It's kind of funny that I'm now scheduled for the first root canal of my life, and that it's going to take place in Guatemala. What started out as mild discomfort in the right side of my upper and lower jaw, brought on, I thought, by my history of brushing my teeth with too much gusto, became an intense pain that didn't allow me to sleep for more than an hour at a time last night. Since it was at its worst when I was laying down, some of us around here reached the conclusion that there's probably an infection in my gum, so I ran out and bought an anti-inflamatory and antibiotics, which don't require a prescription, and my old maestra and friend Lucky called her dentist and arranged an appointment for me, and offered to drive me. I had to abort my lesson early today, as it was excruciating sitting there and I'd had some luck in alleviating the pain by moving. I'm sure when people saw me bailing early on my lesson they thought I had explosive diahrreah, as that's the usual reason. So I took a walk just to do whatever is the good thing to my blood pressure that makes my problem hurt less. It hurt so much! The whole right side of my face was aching, with locales of intense pain in my upper and lower jaw. The good part of the story is that I used the time to walk to Pais, a supermarket recently bought by Wal-Mart, and there I found some cereal I'd been missing. I can't handle much more white bread! The walking didn't really help, but then the drugs started to do their thing, and I felt so much better by the time Lucky swung by to pick me up that I thought it surely was an infection and that the antibiotics would fix it and that'd be that. To make a long story short, the dentist sent me across town to get an x-ray, there is an infection, but the problem is I have a large filling in one of my teeth that's too close to the nerve and it'd be best if it came out. This is the same thing a UCSB dentist told me over a year ago, but I guess I was waiting to be really motivated to remove the filling. Lucky said she'd heard of getting a second opinion before, but most people didn't go to another country to do it. Today the dentist drilled it and wiggled some wires around in there, getting gook out, and I have some cotton balls which I need to replace thrice daily in there until my next appointment in 10 days, at 5pm on a Friday. That seems like kind of a funny time to have a root canal, but anyway. Luckily it happened here and not in the wilds of Petén. And it's funny that I actually had my dentist appointment today at 2:30, because that's the punch line to an oldie but goodie. What time is your dentist appointment? Tooth hurty.

Kind of a bad day, but I'm grateful Lucky ferried me around and waited for me, and that now that my anesthesia is wearing off it's not hurting anywhere near as badly as it was. And if this root canal ends up being a good one that lasts a long time, I'll be happy to have spent around $105 on the whole thing, which I understand is considerably less than I'd pay in the US. Yay bargain dental work!

7 or 8 habits

So it seems that I am now obligated to listen to an audio file of 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People' and then read the follow up 'The 8th Habit'. It all started harmlessly enough. The Señora of my casa is the critical point in a love triangle, composed of her, her business associate Rodolfo and her boyfriend Jorge. They are part of the parade of people who come through the house and the café she owns, although because they were on 'una pausa' when I first showed up, I didn't meet Jorge for about a week. When Jorge re-entered the scene, Rodolfo said he never wanted to see la señora again, but he was at lunch the next day. Anyway, as far as I can tell, Rodolfo makes very little effort to be understandable to me in spanish, maybe because his real desire is to practice his english with me. At first I didn't mind too much because I was eager for the opportunity to show that I am not a complete dumbass. But then he quickly steered conversation to 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People' and offered to make me a copy of the audio files if I furnished a blank disk. So then each time I saw him after that, it was 'do you have the disk?'. So I got the disk, then it took several queries before I handed it over, and so now that I have the files I think the next line of questioning is going to be whether or not I've listened to it yet. So to keep things smooth I'd have to listen to the disk, I reckon. The practicing english kind of irks me, because I would be unintelligable to him in english if I spoke at my normal rate. But I speak in a way to be understandable to him, while he doesn't do that for me in Spanish. Possible self-absorption. In him, not in me. My own is already well known. Anyway, maybe these 7 or 8 habits will prove to be useful, as I've already been using a trick I learned from the Simpson's episode where Bart gets a copy of 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Pre-Teens'. When someone (a time suck or something like that) comes in your work space and starts talking, talking, talking and you want to get back to work, you stand up and thank them for dropping by and accompany them to the door. And I think I've been dismissed in the same manner as well. Maybe there are some other gems awaiting me?

No more girl talk

I have a new spanish teacher this week, and it's no more girl talk around here. It's grammer drills and the revealing of huge gaps in my spanish knowledge. She'll ask me, for example, 'when do we use the conditional?' and I'll give a weak sauce answer, and her eyes will roll back slightly and then she'll break it down. So discouraging because it's turning out that I know less spanish than I thought, but ultimately for the best. She says we're doing this because I already speak 'bastante español'. Better than ninguno.

Hot, hot, cold

Today I went to this place called Fuentes Georginas with some ladies from the language school here. It's so nice, the hot water comes out of a lushly green mountain-side and then three pools have been set up to capture it. I ended up having the most pruned up hands of my life. They're still not normal, almost 6 hours later. To get up there, we had to take the bus to this nearby town called Zunil, then find a pickup to take us in its bed up a twisty mountain road for 20 minutes. It's funny all the risks that I'll take in a foreign environment that I wouldn't do at home. At home, I feel antsy if I'm in a car without a seat-belt. Here, hopping into the back of a truck is just a normal way to get around. When we were done, there was a group getting into the back of a pickup to go down the hill, but we didn't realize it was a family group and not a for-hire situation so we asked if we could ride too. One lady was like, "Sorry, it's full" but then the father of the family was like, "Sure!" and it ended up being a pretty crammed ride in the back of the truck down the hill. The ladies were all wearing traditional Mayan clothing, but it's much rarer to see men dressed that way. The whole thing was very generous of them, because they gave us the ride for free and gave each of us a piece of fruit. Now I'm back in town and freezing again. It can be pretty warm on a sunny day but the nights are always cold here. I bought a big puffy down jacket at a used clothing store here. I thought I had found a resale store specializing in clothes ditched out on by travelers, but my maestra said that corrupt officials began a business of importing large amounts of donated clothing from the US and then reselling them. Apparently it started back in the 1970s, when there was a huge earthquake and the US sent large packages of clothing as a donation. Somewhere along the way, the clothes became available for sale instead of just being handed out, as was supposedly the intention of the donors. The tradition continues. Well, it was much warmer than any of the other coats I encountered here, and when the saleslady asked 20Q for it (like $2.50), I said I'll take it, even if it looks pretty 80s.

Pelirroja, nunca mas.

Today my maestra Lucky told me that I'm not really a redhead. Now that Miranda from Sex in the City, now she's a redhead. I'm more of a blonde. I've never been challanged on this before, I just kind of sputtered.

You can learn a lot about a person in 36 hours of one-on-one conversation. She's not going to be my maestra next week because it's recommended to switch it up and try differnt accents, different teaching styles, so I'm going to have another lady named Yadira next week. But I'm going to go to her house on Sunday for lunch since we like each other so much. If all goes well, she's going to adopt a baby girl that a 16 year old at her cousin's church is giving birth to next month, and she's very excited. I found a used copy of Dr. Spock's "Como Cuidar a los Ninos" at a bookstore here, so I gave that to her as a gift. It's updated for the 90's, I'm not sure if his advise is old-fashioned but I told her that my parents referred to it in my babyhood and she said that in that case she's guaranteed to have a wonderful daughter. So that's a shout out to Mom and Dad!

ka-CHING!

Got cash today, out at the mall attached to Hiper Paiz, the market recently purchased by Wal-Mart. The whole adventure took about an hour, and you wouldn't believe how many people will cram into a mini-van. Even more than usual since we weren't wearing clown costumes. En route home I saw two boarded up banks, the BancoCafe and Banco del Comercio. Which bank will fall next?

Minutia

Two and a half weeks into my time in Guatemala, and I am finally starting my blog. The reason why I finally decided to get it together and share with y'all the latest is because of two items of minutia that happened lately. Number one was an unfortunate incident at a restaurant yesterday. Number two was today was walking around looking for somewhere to eat lunch. But I'll get to that in a bit. This entry is long, but in the future they'll be more bite-size.

I got to Guatemala City on December 27 at 5:30am and got a shuttle to Antigua, a beautiful city nearby. I called my friend and classmate Kathryn as soon as I arrived, but did not manage to contact her. So I found a hotel and hunkered down there for a little while. Also the first couple of ATMs I tried for money yielded nothing. Little did I know this was a spectre which would haunt my time in Guatemala up till now, and possibly well into the future.

Day two, though, just as I was pondering my next move in the friendless country of Guatemala, I finally heard from Kat who'd kindly respected my perceived need for privacy and solitude upon entering Guatemala when she didn't immediately hear from me. But then she saw my email saying where I was staying and her and the family came to greet me. She'd been in Antigua for the past 4 months working on a paper concerning fertility and family planning in Guatemala and her husband Jude and their 5 year old daughter Maeve (under the spanishized pseudonym of Mimi) had joined her. Mimi claimed to have the best Spanish of the bunch. I stayed at their apartment with them for the remainder of their time in Guatemala, till they left on Dec. 31 back for SB. Well, we had a lovely 4 days together and my only regret is that I didn't any photos. Actually, I've taken about 4 photos since I got here, and another motive for finally starting this blog is to inspire me to take some. But we had a good time cruising around Antigua, it's a lovely city with lots of comfortable amenities, many foreigners have come to make their home there so we spent our days paying visits to the handmade chocolate counter run by an Algerian man, little gourmet stores offering hummus and imported Trader Joe's goods and enjoying licuados from Licuados Gloria. Actually, regret number two is that I let the long lines at the ATMs scare me away during these times. I now know that while a long line at an ATM would normally be perceived as a hassle, it at least signifies an ATM with cash in it. The chilling thing is now an ATM without a line.

New Year's Eve morning, Kat and family took off, already pining for Guatemala, and I went looking for cash. Um, there was none. None. No ATMs had cash, and I had about 20Q, the equivalent of about 2.50$. I called the swanky hotel on the outskirts thinking that would be the most likely place to come by some, and while the person on the phone cheerfully verified that they had an ATM on the premises, when I asked him if it had cash therein he replied that it did not. Well, a forey into Guatemala City yielded nothing and I only had about enough cash to get back to Antigua, so I went back and bought a liter of Gallo beer and some snacks at a supermarket that takes credit cards to celebrate the New Year. Walking back to Jude and Kat's apartment, which I had for another night, out of nowhere I ran into my old SB roommate Heath and his girlfriend Celina. He and Sarah Battersby were my first roommates in SB, and he and I had been loosely in touch since he left 2 years ago to be a math prof at CSU Monterey Bay, but I had no idea he'd be in Guatemala. Well, he saved my bacon because instead of toasting the New Year alone with a liter of beer and wondering how I was going to pay for my night at the apartment and for transportation to meet my friend Dayna in Xela, he bankrolled a fun New Year's Eve night out and gave me US$80 to get me on my next leg. Thanks Heath! All the healthily functioning ATMs in Vietnam, Thailand, Egypt, Belize, Brazil, Mexico, Czech Republic, Hungary, etc, had lead me to take it for granted as the best way to get cash and I had no backup. Never again! (shaking fist at sky).

So after a long ride on camionetas (also called chicken buses, but I'll wait till I see a chicken to call them that myself, though I'm assured it happens) to get to the high altitude town of Xela, I met up with Dayna who I know from my undergrad at Berkeley when she worked at Center for Environmental Health with my old roomie Cliff, and who also went to highschool with Marion, and who is now doing her Masters in Environmental Management at the Bren School at UCSB. A few years back she lived in Xela for a year and ran a non-profit Nuevas Allianzas that, roughly, does micro-loans for community development and reforestation programs. She was back in Guatemala to check in and distribute some donor funds, and it was great to hang out with her here. It was a much larger city than I'd imagined, and cold! because of the high altitude. And it's a popular destination for studying Spanish. She made a hard sell for doing my studying here, since a major goal of my 3 months in Guatemala is to get my spanish good enough for the field interviews I'll be doing in Peten in the next school year. I met some great people here and they all sang the praises of Xela, but I still was torn between here and Antigua.

Dayna displaying freshly folded undies from a Xela lavanderia

I went back to Antigua with Dayna for the night before her flight home, and had a fun night out, and realized that even the Guatemalans in bars there were there to speak english with foreigners. The next day I went to Lake Atitlan, which is lovely, and I do actually have a photo!

I will return here with my parents when they come next month. After 3 days there, I finally had to decide where to do my studying, and after some real teeth gnashing, I finally decided on Xela and I haven't looked back. I'm at a school here called Celas Maya http://www.celasmaya.edu.gt/correo/ and after 3 days of 5 hours instruction per day with an awesome woman named Lucky, and chattering my my host family and other assorted folks, my spanish is already much improved. But the money problems continue. The empty ATMs were just symptoms of much larger problems the banks and economy are having here. There have been many stories about why there is no cash. Story number 1 is that they took the gnarly old bills out of circulation before the new bills printed in Germany had arrived, thus the lack of bills. Story number 2 is that 3 months ago one of the major banks, Banco Cafe, shut its doors in the middle of the night and that was that. Some people got some of their money back, but many lost everything. So people lost their faith in the bank and started hoarding their money at home so less money is in circulation. And now, 2 days ago, another bank, Banco de Comercio, has suddenly closed down. Lucky tells me that her economist pals say Guatemala has a 50/50 chance of total bank failure like in Argentina a few years back, so she's thinking of taking her savings and bailing the country entirely, whereas the day before the news of the latest bank failure she was waiting to sell her house so she could use credit from that to do a business in organic produce/coffee distribution here in Guatemala. Leaving with her money of course won't be doing the economy any favors, but it's pretty easy to understand that reaction.

Anyway, on to the minutia. Yeah, spending time abroad isn't without its risks. The other day I went to lunch at this restaurant called DeliCrepe which I don't think actually has crepes, but they do have great complete lunches for around $2 (15Q, if you really must know). I was trying to squirt some hot sauce on my plate but it wasn't exiting the squeeze top, so I squeezed harder and... well, the bottle made a dull thumping noise as the top blew off and covered 1/4 of my plate in hot sauce, while blasting a good portion of my rice to the ground. Then, yesterday, I had the misfortune of having my 3rd international flasher incident. My first was in Florence, Italy, 2002. Marion and I were walking up a path to visit a monastery on the far side of the Arno when we came upon a man standing next to a tree, and um, well, he waggled his penis at us. I tried to convince Marion that we'd merely surprised him while peeing, but about an hour later, after visiting the monastery and from a higher vantage point, we saw him pacing around the same tree and then he fell and tumbled partway down the hillside. That's when I realized that perhaps he was waiting around for an audience to walk by. The second time was in Chapada Diamantina National Park, Brazil, 2003. Miriam and I were relaxing on some rocks after having swam in the river in a semi-secluded spot, when we became aware that a young man was visible through the trees and was using us for inspiration for his solitary exercise. We got out of there. Later on I thought it would have been fun to have thrown rocks at him, but then I was glad we didn't since he'd have known who we were in the tiny town of Lençois but we'd have had no idea who he was. These two events primed me to believe I was having my first domestic incident in Santa Barbara, 2004, but it turned out that the guy in the car at the gas station was just cleaning a CD on the hem of his shirt. While looking at me. And then yesterday was the 3rd incident. I was walking around Xela, searching for a place to have lunch, when a portly (un)gentleman of around 50 got out of his car on the opposite side of the streed, walked around the front, and pulled his penis out of his fly, seemingly to urinate. Fellas, real caballeros face the wall and keep their back to the public when they're going to pee outdoors. When I realized what was happening, I put my hands up as blinders and kept walking forward, and as I walked by him he said '¿Quieres?' (Do you want?) and I kept the blinders up and shook my head no.

I'd guess his technique has a low success rate, but when it works, how sweet would that be?!