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?!