patej (tortillas)

This is the stove that pretty much everyone (including restaurants) cooks on. It’s made of cement, with a metal grill that I’m told was the latest innovation when it came out. (I think this stove is the replacement for a campfire on the kitchen floor, actually.) The metal circles are removable in case you want to boil your water quicker, and the whole surface is used for tortilla-making. The front part is “high,” the back part is “low.” The fire-starting process involved the 8-year-old son splitting a special firestarting wood into tiny pieces with a machete and lighting it up.

Lwin’s mom taught me how to make tortillas. The process involves washing corn with lime, carrying it to the mill where a line of women waits to put their corn through the belt-driven grinder for 12 cents, scooping up your masa from the bottom of the grinder, carrying it back home, and shaping it by hand like so:

Notice how large and white I look in the photo, and also that Lwin’s mom is wearing a Hello Kitty T-shirt. After a while, she said I didn’t suck at tortilla-making anymore.

Peace Corps Outing

Unspoiled “tierra caliente” mountains:

The adorable house where the new volunteers get to live:

Coffee trees:

Talking to a local nurse:

The village was set on one of these ridges:

Santa Eulalia

Here’s where I am:

Actually, it usually looks more like this:

Here’s Lwin’s team working on morphology in the bedroom/laboratory of his house. It has a white board and two or three computers. Lwin’s the one standing (he’s the grad student at the University of Kansas).

His house has adorable chicks running around it.

This is the relief map of the province of Huehuetenango. You start at that flag next to the rusty one, and then go straight up the mountains to the third flag, which is Santa Eulalia.

The pink thing is my first (crappy) hotel.

But it did have a nice view from the bathroom window:

Though a bit blurry, this is a pila, which is where they wash both clothes and dishes. The water chamber can be filled with rainwater or tap water, and you just scoop water up into the washing basins.

This bizarre orange plant is seen frequently, and though it sure looks like a parasite (or a collection of plastic string) to me, people here don’t seem to think it’s a problem.

Peace Corps

Today I ran into the aforementioned Peace Corps people... the first Americans since I´ve been up here! It´s strange how different it is in a place with NO tourists/foreigners/Americans compared to a place with even a couple of them... it gets lonely.

The people in question were Jaime, a volunteer in the Guatemalan Peace Corps public health program in a village right near Santa Eulalia, and his boss. They were driving an awesome and brand-new looking Jeep with a "Cuerpo de Paz" logo on the side, and they spotted me as I was trying to change hotels (with two backpacks and a 5-gallon jug of water.) They offered to take me to the other hotel, which quickly turned into an invitation to go to a village way down the mountain in "tierra caliente" to set things up for incoming volunteers.

The road we took was two hours of up and down with lots of erosion on the slopes, and quite frankly, I can´t believe we made it with no problems. It ran along ridges with dropoffs on both sides a lot of the time, which made for spectacular views since it was an unusually non-rainy day. (Have I mentioned that it´s the rainy season up here?) The village was completely tropical, with coffee trees and banana trees everywhere, and people even had their shirts off. Compare to Santa Eulalia in the same township, where people go around in hats and jackets with gigantic umbrellas all the time...

It was really great to talk to other Americans, and I´m jealous of the volunteers that are going to live in this rather pristine tropical village in adorable painted houses and teach the people about good health practices.

In other news, my new hotel is NICE for $10 a night... brand new, huge, and the restaurant has filet mignon on the menu ($9). Compare that to the other restaurants in the town, which don´t have menus at all. Someone is doing Santa a big development favor, and I hope they get rich in the process. It sure beats my $6 hotel where the shower shocked me, the water didn´t always come out of the sink, and the mattresses smelled like either mildew or *other things*...

finally a functional computer

Hello! I´m sure you´ve been thinking that I´m dead, because I never go this long without internet. Well, it hasn´t really been SO long without internet, but a) there´s only one internet cafe here, b) the internet is satellite so it frequently goes out for hours or days in bad weather, and c) the computer that kept being free (I wonder why?) is ancient and virus laden (it opens a lot of popups and the popup blocker is ON), so it actually won´t load the ¨logon¨ button for the Blogger homepage. Hence no blogging.

So, how are things going? Well, I´ve started actually interviewing people, which is good, but otherwise, Santa Eulalia in the rainy season is not exactly a happening vacation spot. I basically go to sleep from 9 pm to 6 am, take a walk in one direction or the other if it´s not raining, meet for a couple of hours with Lwin´s team that´s learning how to identify morphemes, look for people to interview and/or meet with them, study the Q´anjob´al grammar, watch bad American movies on TV, and/or read. Which is to say, life is getting a bit boring up here. I have literally not seen another tourist the entire time I´ve been here (nearly a week.) I hope to go meet some Peace Corps volunteers or some of the people associated with one or another language school, because really, you can only go so far talking about the weather and why I´m here! Two more weeks of research to go...

mom and dad are gone!

To an American, Latin America (and even Europe) seem like places where the parents aren't home.

No one's saying, "put on your seatbelt," or even, "standing up in the back of that pickup truck is dangerous." No one admonishes you not to set off those firecrackers before 7 am because people are sleeping. No one tells you to go home when it gets dark, or while you're out in the dark, not to play with that ball right in front of the street and then not to run after it when it rolls into the street again. Or to wear a bike helmet. Or not carry young children on your bike. Or not to get so close to the edge of a cliff. Or that that's dirty, don't touch it.

It must be a lot of fun.

Food surprises

1) Pancakes (complete with "jarabe de maple syrup") and banana bread are quite popular here. And the pancakes are exactly like at home.

2) They advertise vegetarian food. It's not weird that there is vegetarian food, since "for most Guatemalans, meat is a bit of a luxury" (LP), but the fact that they know the term vegetarian and know that it'll bring in business (solely from Americans?) is surprising to me compared to the situation in Spain ("what? it's just a little bit of ham to flavor the green beans!")

3) Almost anything comes with one or two slices of Roma tomato.

4) The portions are American-sized. I{ve only been eating breakfast and dinner, which is backwards since lunch is the biggest meal of the day (with corresponding cheap set menus.)

eight thumbs down for Huehue

I{m in Huehuetenango, which I would charitably describe as a complete shithole. Unless you{re fond of huge piles of garbage rotting in the street. (To be fair, I haven{t gotten around to asking anyone if the garbagemen are on strike or something, but we{re talking piles of multiple garbage bags that have been ripped apart by dogs.) The city is also infested with giant loudspeakers. Right across from the church is a loudspeaker store, so while you{re talking to God you can be listening to five second stretches of music interspersed with announcements. My motel also used their ginormous loudspeaker to broadcast religion followed by music at 7:15 am.

The only cool thing in the entire town is the maps- since most people are just passing through, there are lots of maps of the entire province of Huehuetenango. The awesomest one is a sculpted relief map in the central park, which shows how high the places are that I{m going, and where they are in relation to each other and the mountains. It also tells the climate (frio, for me), population and language of each town. I{ll upload it at some point, but right now I have to get the hell out of here!

Xela market

I went back to the market at the entrance to Xela to snap a few photos. In the middle one, the woman on the right is texting and listening to music. By the time you read this, I'll be doing linguistics in Santa Eulalia...

Miscellany

Here is a helpful drawing of a cow placed above the beef display in the supermarket. Pieces of interest: viuda (widower), caña (cane/small beer in Spain), manita de Rochoy (small hand of Rochoy), and lagarto (alligator.)


Antigua sunset:


Flowers in hotel courtyard:


Sawdust decoration in the street:


The old church was crumbling, so they just propped up the facade, demolished the rest of it, and built a new one behind it:

Guatemalan language schools

I've never seen as many language schools as there are here. They all have a one-on-one teaching system, too, which I've certainly never seen anywhere. Five hours of one-on-one instruction every day, five days a week. Sounds tiring. Pairs of one Guatemalan and one American decorate little tables at the schools, cafes, and plazas, and every young American is thought to be a Spanish student.

It only costs a little more than $100 a week, so that means the teachers get paid $4 an hour (or less depending on how big of a cut the school takes). Personally, I'd much rather teach a whole class for one hour a day. But hey, it does provide more jobs, so if $4/hour is a decent wage here, then Guatemala has developed a fantastic new industry.

Two thumbs up for Xela

(That's Quetzaltenango to you)

On the way to Xela, I sat next to two very interesting people: first, an old man who lived in Santiago de Atitlán (across the lake from Pana, where I was originally) and hires women to make jewelry and keychains for export to the US. He was very pro-US: "mejor en Estados Unidos, mejor desarollo para Guatemala." Second, a young guy who works for the Ministry of Education monitoring schools. He drives around to all the schools in the small towns and makes sure that they're actually having classes ("The teachers sometimes decide on Wednesday that that's enough classes, and they don't give any on Thursday and Friday.") He was returning to his village for 15 days of vacation since they've closed the schools due to the swine flu scare. He invited me to go up and go hiking with him, which I probably would have done if I had more time as he was interesting and non-creepy, but the thought of a few extra hours on a bus with all the rest of the bussing I have to do wasn't terribly appealing.

As I stepped out of the bus in Xela, a single raindrop fell. It was soon an enormous storm, and I ducked into the huge, mazelike market along with several hundred other people who had the same idea of avoiding the rainstorm. It was pretty incredible- in short order, I was completely lost, but my two backpacks and I remained dry.


The first night I stayed in a quirky Spanish school, and unfortunately got the one bed in the place that was almost literally a board with one or two blankets for padding. But it had wifi! After a night spent on the board listening to drunken Guatemalans blunder in and out of the adjoining bathroom, I moved to a much nicer B&B that Ryan had recommended.


I then attended a nonprofit breakfast held by an American man and his Guatemalan wife in this beautiful garden:



Afterwards, a girl from the breakfast and I hiked above town to the "Cristo Viene" church.


We ran into a local woman with her five children, who were picking cherries. The kids were very interested in us (especially after I got them some cherries that were out of their reach.) This little girl is named Nancy Paolo. In the second photo, the oldest boy is up in the tree. The mother was only 24.





It was really nice above the city- cornfields, grass, and a shrine with some sort of praying figure.

Not a fan of Antigua

On the way out of Pana:

Lonely Planet describes Antigua Guatemala as “fantasyland—what the country would look like if the Scandanavians came in and took over for a couple of years. It’s a place where power lines run underground, building codes are adhered to, rubbish is collected, traffic diverted, and stray dogs ‘disappear’ mysteriously in the middle of the night.

Well, I did come into the bus station, which is the worst part—but I’ve seen plenty of power lines, my laptop charger semi-exploded from touching a faulty outlet in my room, and there was a whole pack of stray dogs last night.


(It still works, amazingly enough. Anyone want to mail me an $8 replacement plug? I don’t think there are a lot of Mac stores here.)

Moreover, the ostensible reason I came here, the OKMA, which publishes really cool books (including basic readers!) on Mayan languages, doesn’t exist. The gardener of their former location said they left but he doesn’t know where they are now. None of the tourist agencies has ever heard of it, nor has the Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín.

The town itself with its “spectacular” setting (ok, it does have a very volcano-looking volcano, which is cool), pretty much reminds me of Oaxaca, Mexico. Short brightly colored buildings surrounded by mountains. Of course, you shouldn’t actually go to the mountains, because you’ll be mugged unless you’re in an expensive tour group.

Did I also mention that it’s too hot here for my wardrobe and that I had to walk around to 4 hotels with my luggage before finding one with rooms available? Antigua is definitely one of those places where people come up and bother you a lot (including, memorably, a grown man sucking on a green ringpop whose entire mouth was green). I’m having some trouble with the Spanish here. I was getting pretty much 100% intelligibility in Pana, but here there are a lot of misunderstandings. My (opposing) theories are: 1) they’re used to dealing with American students and they don’t expect me to know as much as I do; or 2) they’re native speakers and the people who were easy to talk to were second language learners like myself.

A couple of shots of stupid Antigua:




Streetscape with power lines:

Morning laundry & Volcán del Agua on my hotel balcony:

Across the lake

It’s been very easy to make friends here. The first day, I was accosted by a Dutch girl volunteering and concerned about whether she would really be making a difference, and at night I ran into a Mayan scholar from here who wrote a book about the Guatemalan civil war, who I ended up spending several hours with, talking about linguistics and seeing his powerpoints.

This morning, I headed down to the docks for the 8:30 boat to the towns across the lake, but got there at about 8:35.



Fortunately, I then ran into a group from Decatur (right next door to Champaign!) They were here to spend their free day on a one-week mission trip sightseeing and shopping, but hardly spoke a word of Spanish- so I translated for them in exchange for a free boat ride and lunch. When they said grace, they thanked the lord for me. They were magnets for weaving/keychain/souvenir vendors, but very nice people.





This boy, Miguel, followed us for over two hours and was really quite endearing. He didn’t speak a lot of English, but had quite a skill for mimicking the midwesterners: “Hey Tony, come on, let’s go!” He told me how to say some things in his native language, Tz’utujil, and changed a dollar for quetzales with me. He claimed he was going to school in the afternoon, which I hope was the case. Though he tried to sell us keychains, he mostly seemed to hang out just for the attention, cookies, and coins.



I got an email from Lwin Pedro Mateo today (my contact in Santa Eulalia) saying he’ll be in Guatemala City till next Wednesday, and that I should wait until then to go up to the mountains. So much for an early start on my linguistics project! It looks like I’ll be going to Antigua (another major tourist destination and the home of OKMA, a linguistics organization) and Xela (a medium-sized city and home of ALMG, another linguistics organization) to mix some tourism and research first.

Lago de Atitlán

Lago de Atitlán is a huge volcanic crater filled with water, and it’s quite dramatic. Apparently you can go diving and see crazy underwater rock formations where the hot water still gushes out of the bottom.




Panajachel is also known as “Gringotenango” because there are so many tourists (Guatemalan as well as foreign), which to be honest is rather nice, as no one has commented yet on how tall I am, or held their children up to see my freakish blue eyes. In fact, the people seem to be just the right level of friendliness- willing to say a few words to you, but not with too many catcalls or that sort of thing. People seem to be making a good living in Pana itself- there are Guatemalans on vacation who seem to throw money around, ladinos (of Spanish descent) that run the businesses, and Cakchiquel and Tz’utujil Maya that sell handicrafts, but all three groups seem very laid back and get enough business without chasing you and trying to sell you things.

Moto-taxis are everywhere (I haven’t tried one):


This room costs $5.50. One of the rules is, “If you got DRUNK, don´t do any kind of scandals or disturbs.”:


A bunch of people seem to be collecting sand and gravel for sale in the river:


It’s Corpus Christi, which is celebrated by masked figures chasing kids around, as well as church bell ringing and fireworks before 7 am: