Barrio

Since I am springing for the spendy dentist, I figured I'd better get some cash, in which case I'd better start the search good and early to make sure I found it before my 5pm appointment. And since I am leaving soon, here is a photo-journal of the search to show a bit of daily life in Xela.


This is where I've been living for the past 4 weeks, in an apartment on the 2nd floor of this building. Martita, mi señora, is hamming it up in front. She is from Nicaragua but moved here 18 years ago. Below her place there is a restaurant that blasts music from about 11am till 10pm, pretty much the same 10 songs over and over.








Walking towards the town center...














Funerales Quetzaltenango, near the pink tower, below. Urban legend has it that when the buckets of water they sluice over the floor to clean it come flooding out the front door, it is tinged with blood.





The faro (lighthouse). The low orange building towards the back is Martita's other house. She is making it into quite an enterprise with Rodolfo, or at least they were before his latest storming off. There are rooms for rent, then coming in the future there will be a café, an internet café, a latin american cinema, and a botanical garden. She and Rodolfo have a whole concept attached to the place, where it's going to be a space to showcase local artists and film and show a Guatemala that is not hopeless poverty and violence. Rodolfo wanted to call it "pinktowerhouse" because of the nearby Faro, but then he subsequently rejected that as "too gay".

My language school, Celas Maya. The two gals out front are nursing students in Sweden, though the one on the left, Kristen, is Norweigian. Signe is on the right. Look at Kristen and tell me if she reminds you of Julie Karpenko. They decided to accompany me on the money search. When we got to the central park, the first thing we were struck by was the flood of people, mostly men in cowboy hats, waiting outside BancoRed. A crowd of this size in front of a bank is noteworthy, even in these times, especially when they have a common feature such as cowboy hats. I asked a spectator what everyone was waiting for, and he said that they were there to cash there checks paying them for their service as community patrollers during the armed conflict here, which ended about 10 years ago. According to this fellow, most of them are now finally being payed for their work 10 to 35 years ago.

At the central park, site of many banks, but the only semi-dependable ATM on the central square, Banco Industrial, was out of service. I ended up returning to the school to get my passport, then got cash inside of the Banco AgroMercantile. And thus I was flush with cash for my dentist visit. But I still had some time to kill, so while walking home with my laundry I noticed a classmate from the school drinking in a little hole in the wall near the pink tower. Sierran was leaving the next day, and his host dad and he and another friend were having some beers to bid him adieu. This guy recently finished his undergrad in geography at U. of Oregon, then did an internship at National Geographics in D.C., where he worked with UCSB's star geography undergrad Maral Tashjian.

Last stop before going to the dentist, the internet café near the school and my house, El Infinito. This is one of the two places in town you can purchase fresh tofu, which is made at a women's cooperative in Sololá. Pedro on the left is the owner and is friends with my friend Dayna from when she lived here some years back, and Bonifaz on the right is Pedro's roommate and employee. There is a table behind a partition with an internet connection where I come and hook up my laptop, and since I started to refer to it as mi oficina Bonifaz now refers to himself and Pedro as my coworkers.