back to xela

this week has been pretty amazing. i've been back in quetzaltenango, guatemala (xela), for the last week and a half and am kind of starting to settle in here. i switched families on sunday which was definitely the right thing to do. the first family lived so far away from everywhere that i was always faced with this sketchy 30 minute walk home. i'd bonded pretty hard with my little brother, but then after his 18th birthday party on wednesday night, the mom and her friend pulled all this strong evangelist stuff over everyone at the party and it felt pretty uncomfortable. now i'm with a family that loves to play scrabble in spanish. the food is amazing. the water is hot. i am happy. this week is the most hyped up week in guatemala, as it's the week of semana santa (easter). there are processions every day and some huge ones this weekend.

things feel awesome right now for the following reasons:

1. i love my spanish school and my teacher luis, he's so sarcastic and patient and so much is starting to click

2. received pretty amazing news from the grad schools i've applied to... am trying to make my final decision between pratt and columbia. leaning towards pratt. very psyched.

3. i live in the attic of this beautiful house that is covered with the grandmother's paintings. the room smells like dried eucalyptus and old books. last night it rained for an hour, really hard, and i just laid on my bed and listened to it crash on the roof. perfect.

4. there is a bidet in the bathroom.

5. and hot water and water pressure in the shower. at the same time.

6. i went to a dinner party on sunday night in the apartment of this couple from my school. it was a send-off party for this girl who's been here for months. i brought a bottle of wine and they had a piñata on the roof. it felt like sf and normal. for the first time here, like some sense of my life at home.

7. i gave myself a haircut with the scissors on my swiss army knife and didn't do such a bad job.

8. i've found this amazing mennonite bakery in xela that sells fresh yogurt and homemade granola. it's open every tuesday and friday and so far i've gone three times to stock up on heaven. ALSO found the best macaroni salad at this fried chicken place down the street from school.

9. recieved a cell phone from a departing friend. i am so definitely connected now.

10. i hadn't heard ANYTHING in my life until the other night when, on my walk home from the dinner party, an evangelist church was singing eye of the tiger.


here's a view from the roof of my school. you can barely see the tip of the volcano sticking up over the clouds. it's so beautiful here..


so this might be complicated to explain.

last week was the annual event of university students here called the huelga de dolores (literally means strike of the pains). historically, i believe the event has been this awesome forum for students to talk politics, criticize the faults of the government and generally assert their opinion on things. because of the pretty brutal police brutality and corruption in guatemala, the students have always covered their faces with these masks, which don't look unlike the kkk. pretty alarming on first sight, but it really doesn't have anything to do with that.

so there is this big parade of the students the week before semana santa, and this year was no exception. there were tons of floats and events and people dressed up like a million different things. also one of the traditions of this group is that they ask for donations to support the event from local businesses, the remainders of which they give to social projects in guatemala. however, businesses that don't donate are attacked with paint the night before the huelga. as evidenced below:


here are some mayan women in front of me at the event



a comparison between bush and rios montt.


saturday night, went to a soccer game! it was the xelaju team vs. the team from zacapa i believe. from what i understand, the team is owned by the city somewhat collectively, and almost everyone pays dues to the team so they can pay their players. xelaju won and it was a pretty fun game.

they don't allow bottles of any kind, don't even sell beer or water, so i was so thirsty and had to settle for pepsi in a bag. it seemed like there should have been a goldfish in it.




my new lovely house and attic room...



here are some pics from the piñata portion of the dinner party i went to this weekend:

the last few weeks

finishing up my last week in xela and starving for some substantial food, my roommate and a couple new friends and i decided to splurge at this awesome french restaurant. we were so psyched to eat some amazing food, finally!


then.. i hopped on the bus back to antigua, to meet up with this guy. yup, kevin came to visit me for two weeks! we met up in antigua and stayed there for a couple of days.


then we headed to rio dulce in the eastern part of guatemala. we stayed at this place called casa perico, which had free canoes to paddle around the river in. it was owned by some swiss guys and the food was probably the best i'd had in a long time.


on our way through rio dulce, we passed this old fortress

and then arrived at the much-hyped finca tatin, which we weren't blown away by. they did, however, have a killer rope swing out front.


and a cute little cat

after a few days in the jungle on the river, we took a few boats and a few buses to tela, this caribbean beach town in honduras. i apparently took no pictures there, perhaps because it rained for the three days we stayed there. there was this moment at an internet cafe where we saw the water rise up past the sidewalks -- we decided not to wait around for the rain to stop and instead headed south in honduras to lake yojoa. we stayed at a brewery! more precisely, it was called the d&d brewery, run by this nutty guy from oregon who was obsessed with digging around honduras looking for 'treasure' and brewing beer. he played us some neil young and cooked up some good food. then he told us that the tap water was fine to drink so we filled up our water bottles and a few days later, this ended up being a pretty big mistake.


while we were there, we got some teenagers to row us around the lake for a few hours, as these guys are tough to row with the wind.








just as we started getting sick, we got to la esperanza, this surprisingly cute little honduran town. who knew?


fun fact about honduras if you ever go: there are no ATMs. there was one in la esperanza, but it took visa and i have a mastercard. so i was sick of borrowing money from kevin and we found the one restaurant in town where we could use my credit card. it was this local fast food chain called mike's, and when we walked in, we met mike! he was pretty stoked to have travelers in his restaurant and kept shaking our hands.


we headed out to this other town called gracias, which was so gorgeous. it was apparently the capital of central america in the 1500s and is called gracias because when the spanish conquistadors got here, they were pretty glad to find some flat land in the mountains and called it gracias a dios, thanks to god. on the way there on the chicken bus on a bumpy, unpaved mountain road, we got stuck in this bummer of a town called san juan, where we waited for two hours in a dusty gas station trying to get to gracias. played a game of soccer with a pepsi bottle after awhile and then finally caught a ride with a guy in a pickup and his two pistols in the front seat.



here's gracias at sunset:

after days of popping anti-diarrheals like they were candy, we were both pretty psyched to be eating something again and celebrated with saltines waiting for the bus. the water from the brewery was the likely culprit and i had all the symptoms of typhoid. who gets typhoid? the smarty who didn't get her shot.. kevin fared much better as he was vaccinated, but we were both out for a couple days. gracias has these amazing hot springs and all these beautiful mountains that desperately want to be climbed, but all i could do was lie in bed with a fever.


after being in gracias for three days, we headed to santa rosa de copan, which was also surprisingly gorgeous and then got buses back to guatemala city. while waiting for the first bus on that leg, we met these two fifteen year old boys who were starting out their long trip to try and make it to the u.s. they were these babyfaced teenagers trying to get to new york. we ended up on a few buses with them and then at one stop, i bought them some cokes and we gave them an impromptu english lesson. it felt really heartbreaking. i mean, people cross the border all the time and everyone here seems to have family or friends in the u.s., but seeing these guys on their first day of what will be a very different kind of adventure than the one i am having was pretty mindblowing. i've obviously had lots of examples of the haves and the have nots but this one struck me pretty hard.

kevin's back in san francisco and i am back in xela, where i am on some antibiotics for the amoebas and staying with another family. my new little brother is adorable and is getting his tongue pierced tomorrow and made me promise not to tell his mom. it's his 18th birthday on wednesday and there's going to be a big party at the house. there are a bunch of guatemalan students staying there too and i'll probably get to meet them tonight...

photos from belize & xela

finally am able to upload some pictures. here's a funny shot at the guatemala-belize border. this guy was wearing a t-shirt that said renton, washington on it! renton!

here are the only two other photos i took during our week in belize.

and back to guatemala. here's the view from the roof of the house i'm staying at in xela.

my lovely roommates, magale from belgium and richard from the netherlands.

my beautiful ceiling.

pals in xela. we have excellent study habits.

xela at last

ahh, xela. up until now, this place has been so mythical. everyone i know who's been to guatemala has spent significant amounts of time here and i've heard so many stories that i can't believe i'm actually here. you were all right, it's pretty awesome. i am absolutely freezing, but really enjoying myself. i have a great maestro at the spanish school, he's this great lefty and i keep learning more and more about his days as a trade union president. he's also a writer and today took me to the office of the magazine he writes for. we talked with the editor for about a half an hour and i walked out with an impossible stack of political revistas. we've been reading some of his articles together during class time and while it takes me awhile to decode everything, it's coming a bit faster each day. i had this great conversation with kate (hi kate!) the other day and realized how hard i'm being on myself about how much spanish i don't know yet. i know i can't expect to become bilingual in a matter of weeks, but i've been so impatient lately with my seeming lack of progess. realized i need to chill out a bit. it's coming along fine.

i'm staying with a sweet family here, but the house feels much more like a guesthouse than a homestay. i eat my meals with my belgian roommate who is awesome -- finally! a cool girl i've met on this trip! -- but there is hardly any interaction with the family. i'm leaving xela this weekend for a special two week trip to el salvador and honduras with an awesome guy from north carolina, but afterwards i'm planning on coming back here until mid-may and hopefully getting involved with a volunteer project and finding a j-o-b. i had dinner with my friend seth last night who i met in leon, nicaragua. he's lived here in xela for the past year or so and showed me around to some of the spots around town. it was great to reminisce about how amazing nicaragua was. i really miss that place, especially leon.

a few days ago i went to the most beautiful hot springs in the world. all you xelaphiles out there know the place, fuentes georginas. seriously. i stupidly did not bring my camera. uhhh. the pickup truck ride up to the springs was amazing, we drove up this windy road passing some cute farms the air started to get really really fresh with clouds covering everything. made it up to the pools which were steaming and wonderful and so perfectly hot. there was a mayan family at one end of the pool and some of the women in the family were massaging the sick grandmother and although i felt like a voyeur, it was pretty amazing to watch.

oh, and i got into grad school! i've heard back good news from the new school and nyu, still waiting on a couple others, we shall see....

big bad guatemala city

i´m updating this from an internet cafe in a MALL in guatemala city. there is a marching band playing somewhere close by. it´s 10ish in the morning and i´ll be hopping on a bus to xela in an hour or so. i couldn´t skip over this place though. the way people describe guatemala city you´d think they were talking about baghdad, but after successfully finding a mildly satisfying dinner last night, i am still alive, with my wallet and all my limbs, able to update the blog.

i got in yesterday after a 6 hour busride and 1 hour ferry ride from belize. rana flew home out of belize city a couple days ago (yesterday maybe? i have no concept of time right now) and i got a bus to punta gorda, which is where you catch the ferry the next morning to get to guatemala. i wandered around punta gorda for a bit with my enormous backpack in the most humid place i´ve perhaps ever been. the entire town is like a wet t-shirt contest in the sense that you just sweat through your clothes throughout the day. it was definitely a really chill place to spend the day but i´m happy to be wearing jeans again. i found this awesome little reggae bar that also doubled as a vegetarian restaurant and drank beers with these hilarious rasta dudes for a bit, one of whom was the customs guy.

looks like i haven´t updated this in awhile.. rana and i went so many places in guatemala and belize i feel like i can´t even remember them all. during our awesome trip to the highlands through nebaj, we rode buses through the mountains on barely existing dirt roads that hugged extremely close to the side of the cliffs. we went through coban and caught a minibus to semuc-champey, which was the most amazing thing i´ve seen here. there are pictures of it in the earlier post, but it is this series of natural, turquoise pools made of limestone that we swam in for a few hours. we hiked up to the mirador, the lookout, and took some photos before hopping in. we played cards a few nights in a row with these awesome chilean guys and had some crucial hammock time by the river. after semuc-champey, we went up to tikal and climbed around on the ruins and watched the sun set and got up to watch the sunrise and hear the monkeys and birds waking up too. tikal was stunning since the temples are so high and it´s in the middle of the jungle. after tikal we took a super hot minibus ride to the belizean border with our new italian friends and got to san ignacio, belize. san ignacio would have been amazing if we had money to do 60 dollar cave-tubing trips, but it was just really hot and i am broke, so we decided to leave the next day for the beach. we were offered a ride by these seemingly nice people from ohio who were staying at our hostel and what a trip that was.. the drive was a total nightmare. these two middle aged couples criticized and cut each other down at every opportunity and then decided to stop and do a sight-seeing tour of belize instead of going right to the beach as they´d told us. rana and i have cast them perfectly in a screenplay which is like the daytrippers meets who´s afraid of virginia woolf -- the first couple will be played by jeff bridges and a really unsexy goldie hawn or the late gilda radner, and the second couple is kevin kline or steven colbert with sally field, if she´s still doing movies. these people were seriously toxic. once we finally got to the beach in placencia it was late afternoon and we should have been there hours ago. the beach was amazing and toally worth it though. we lounged around for days, finished many books and went on a killer snorkeling trip and saw sharks, enormous sea stars, barracudas, schools of bright blue fish and this adorable dolphin on the way back to placencia. belize was awesome but everything was so expensive that i am psyched to be back in guatemala.