Guatemala: Week 2

(See below for the first installment about Week 1 of the Guatemala trip.)

Chichicastenango: We had all of our stuff with us, and though we packed lightly for two weeks, it was a lot to walk around with. When we arrived, we stopped in a fancy hotel for coffee and the restroom. There were parrots and macaws in the courtyard. Then we walked around the market, overwhelmed by the amount of stuff on sale, people trying to get us to buy their stuff. I got tired of saying, "No, gracias." The one cool thing about Chichi was its church in the central plaza; the Catholic church has allowed pre-Colombian religious rites inside the church, so there are seven little platforms up the center aisle to the altar, where people place candles and flowers or petals and say prayers. We sat there talking about religion for a while, enjoying the sanctuary from peddlers and beggars. We tried to eat lunch at a restaurant on the plaza, but it was crowded and we weren't served, so we left and found a small comedor (dining room) where we sat next to two cute girls with their dad. When we were ready to catch our bus, I realized that I had lost the tickets. It only cost us $5 each, which is expensive in Guatemala, but not much for American tourists. Nevertheless, I became angry and upset. I just hate it when I lose things. We paid again and left for Panajachel, the main town on Lake Atitlan.

Lago de Atitlan: From Panajachel, we took a boat across the lake to San Pedro La Laguna, where we would spend a week at another homestay and another Spanish school. The boat ride was actually kind of fun, getting splashed every so often on the 30- or 40-minute trip. Once in San Pedro, we navigated a strange route through alleys towards the school. There we were picked up by our homestay parent Miguel. Our room had a narrow balcony, but we also overlooked the street and heard absolutely everything pass only a few feet away from the window. The meals were not quite as bountiful as the ones in Antigua; there we were given many courses and stuffed every time. The house was less finished than the one where we stayed in Antigua. For example, there was no running water for the toilet on the roof, so we had to dump buckets of water to flush, and use little basins to wash our hands.

In fact, everything about San Pedro felt less developed than in Antigua. It was about half as expensive but you could see that people lived less luxuriously around the lake. There were many more indigenous people, who wore the traditional costume and spoke the Mayan language Tzutu'jil more than their second language of Spanish. There were three girls in the family, Ana Maria in fifth grade, Norma in fourth grade, and Angela only two years old. The two older girls conversed with us a lot at mealtimes. They mainly spoke Tzutu'jil with their mother, Maria, who spent most of the day and night cooking, which made us feel a bit uncomfortable. Miguel we only saw one other day that week, because he worked in another town on the lake. To school the girls often wore the traditional costume of an embroidered, short-sleeved blouse and a long, colorful, cylindrical woven skirt called a corte , tied with a woven belt. At play, they usually wore t-shirts and shorts. They reminded me a lot of myself and my little sister, Sandy, when we were kids; they spent a lot of the afternoon and evening playing and screaming and running around the house. Perhaps because I am the middle child of three girls, I felt an affinity with Norma, who was a brash, outgoing, and animated little girl.

Our school had a lovely garden, with tables and chairs under little palapas (straw-thatched verandas) scattered amidst trees and flowers. There was a large mango tree, coffee trees, bright red hibiscus, and many more plants we could not name, with beautiful flowers of colors I had never seen before. The school was a cooperative of teachers, much better than our first in Antigua. Shane and I were very tired of four hours of class every day, so we switched to three hours. At the break, we had tasty hot coffee and refaccion, which is a little snack much like a second breakfast. The female teachers all wore the blouses and the cortes, while the male teachers wore t-shirts and shorts. Only the old men of the town still wore the traditional costume of what seemed like white capri pants embroidered with colorful characters and designs.

Along with the locals thrives a community of hippie expats in San Pedro. There were vegetarian restaurants, lots of beaded hippie jewelry, and an everpresent aroma of marijuana smoke. We avoided that scene.

Tuesday afternoon, we went horseback riding to a beach. It was my first time riding a horse, so I was lucky to be on a gentle one used to ambling with a tourist on her back. At the beach we went swimming in the lake before turning back. Afterwards, our knees and legs felt funny from all the riding. Other afternoons we spent reading or doing homework in cafes or restaurants on the lake, which was beautiful and surrounded by mountains and volcanoes.

We grew tired of the classes and the noise, however; for most of the vacation we weren't getting much sleep. So on Thursday we decided to give notice to our teachers that we would miss class because we were going back to Antigua on Friday, and we left on a boat to stay in the village of San Marcos, north on the lake. San Marcos is known for its tourist haven for yoga and meditation, with much less noise. We stayed in an amazing hotel decorated with recycled glass and wood, in a room with a view of the lake. It was good to treat ourselves and actually enjoy the vacation. We had hot water and a clean shower, a toilet that flushed, and quiet for a good night's sleep. We walked a little along the lake shore, feeding a stray dog some of the banana bread I was constantly buying from local women. That evening, we dined at a restaurant nearby, through groves of banana trees. We were the only ones at the restaurant, which did not bode well, but in the end it was the tastiest meal we'd had in a long time. This is not to say that the food we got at home was bad; it's just that it was a while before we had anything really gourmet. I had some nice fish with butter sauce and Shane had a wonderful Hawaiian pizza. We walked back to the hotel in the pitch black of the night, looked at the stars from our many windows, and noticed the many bugs, especially large spiders, inside and outside of our room. By this time, I was getting mosquito bites much less than during my first few days in Guatemala, when I was covered in red welts. Perhaps the local diet made me less succulent to them.

In the morning, we took a boat back to San Pedro to retrieve our things from the homestay and caught another boat to Panajachel. The days were windy so the lake was rough; we kept hitting large waves and flying up and down on the water. Luckily, I had brought my trusty Dramamine, which I had purchased in Mexico for the long bus trips. In Panajachel we negotiated for a bus trip to Antigua. I knew there were minibus trips that only cost $5, so we scoffed at the $12 prices of going "first class." Then we got on the bus and learned why someone might pay $12; we had to go with a full bus, so they crammed in people from a neighboring town. The other tourists on the bus made a huge stink, threatening the driver to report him to the tourist police, because we had been told that it was a direct trip from Panajachel. Shane and I were sedated from the Dramamine, so even if we had wanted to complain, we definitely were not inclined to do so. We just wanted to get to Antigua. Understandably, the driver was peeved by the whiners, and I believe he chose the long route through construction just to spite them. The trip should have only take about two hours and 15 minutes, but we were on the bus for practically five hours because we had to pick up other passengers and because we were stopped about an hour waiting to be let through the road under construction, which was only allowing one-way traffic. It was hellish, but Shane and I tried to make the best of it. The effort, however, exhausted us, so that by the time we got back to Antigua, we were both feeling pissy, and I ended up arguing with the guy at the hostel where we were staying because I had made a mistake in the hotel's register. We cleaned ourselves up and did some more shopping before getting a nice dinner in a Cuban restaurant near the center of town.

The next morning, we left Antigua for the airport, which commenced a very long day of travel. We spent several hours at the airports in Guatemala City and in Miami, where we were shocked by the prices of food. No, we were no longer in Guatemala! There were reasons to be thankful for that, because we had grown a bit tired of everything towards the end of the trip, but there were things we missed -- for instance, the inexpensive food. We did not get back to our neighborhood for a long time; we waited for the bus but it took too long, so we decided to splurge on a taxi. En route, we encountered a huge traffic jam. We didn't arrive home till about 1 a.m.

I will be developing photos soon, so I hope to post some later on this week. Shane wants to make a video of the trip, so we'll be working on that over the next couple of days. If I can make that available here, I'll try, but my lack of tech know-how may prevent any such thing.

I'm writing this from the office, where work is, as usual, pretty dead. I have a pilates class in 15 minutes, which I desperately need after two weeks of no exercise, but I'm feeling a bit lazy and somewhat light-headed, not sure why. I'd better get going, however much I don't want to.