Palomas

I think the problem with only living in a place for 4 ½ months is that you don’t really get that feeling of being home until about 3 months in. I realized that when I got back from Mexico and was like dang, I love Pana too much and I only have a month left…

I loved Mexico too. I haven’t written in a couple weeks though so I guess I could catch you all up on some other stuff first before I get into that.

The mother-daughter trip was a success, and I (gracefully) avoided talking with the daughters too much. I did have to make those little bracelet things with them, but I was mostly translating between them and the artisans the whole time, so I didn’t have to try to make conversation, which I believe was for the best. But everyone was happy that the trip went smoothly, and things have calmed down a bit at work.

I went to Quetzaltenango (more commonly known as Xela) a few weeks ago with a few friends who are also interns at Mercado, and their friends who they met while staying at Doña Angelica’s. We only stayed one night, and then went to some hot springs in the morning, which was incredible. I’d never been to hot springs before, and it was definitely worth the trip. We went in the morning, and drove about an hour up through the mountains to a place called Fuentes Georginas and it was really cool and cloudy and foggy and beautiful, and there was steam from the hot springs and there weren’t many people there, which was really nice. It was really relaxing. Like an outdoor spa. Except I was swimming in my clothes.

And then came a string of bad luck for a straight week when I returned. I broke a key, got locked out of my house in the pouring rain, got locked in my house when I had to be somewhere, completely ran out of money because my bank sucks and the internet wouldn’t work to allow me to wire myself money, and lost my phone. Again.

But since I try to stay on the bright side, all that bad luck made me realize what a nice little community I have here now. When I got locked out of my house because my key was broken, it was 2am and I was standing in the pouring rain and my downstairs neighbors weren’t home to let me in, so my next door neighbor Carlos let me in and made me tea and chatted with me until my neighbors came home and unlocked our gate. And my neighbor Sam felt bad that my key broke and the copy I made didn’t work, so he offered to give me his key and he took my non-functional copy so he could take it to the guy who made it and yell at him for doing a shitty job. I love my neighbors. (But I still hate their dog.) And when I ran out of money, my boss Vanessa lent me enough money to get through the weekend since it was a Friday when the internet was down all over town and I couldn’t wire money to myself, and the banks would be closed the next day.

I’m just happy to have people here who help me out when I get into unfortunate situations. It’s like Vanessa said when I thanked her for lending me the money—“it’s like talking about your poop. We’re all in the same boat here.” And on that note, it really is unbelievable how drastically the appropriate amount of time between meeting someone and being able to talk about poop with them shortens when you live in a developing country. But I digress. I always digress.

This entire blog is a digression.

Anyway—Mexico. Where do I start?

The bus ride there was nice, despite four of the people on the shuttle being some of the most inconsiderate, spoiled rich kids I have ever encountered. The four of them stretched out as much as possible and took up more space on the shuttle than the remaining six of us combined, and they demanded the driver drop them off at their hostel instead of in the center of town like the rest of us, because it apparently was impossible to carry their stuff 2 blocks. It wasn’t hard to tell that everyone was completely fed up with them by the time we arrived 10 hours later.

Anyway, luckily I got to spend the drive talking to a really nice German girl around my age, and an older lady from New York who was really nice as well. That made it much more pleasant. And the older lady helped me out a lot when I almost got detained at the border.

I’m exaggerating a bit—though I was probably far from getting detained, I did have some trouble getting into Mexico, thanks to some asshat at the Guatemala City airport back in May who stamped my passport saying I left the country, so it looked like I had been staying there illegally for over a month. The border officers weren’t buying my story that my passport had been stamped mistakenly, and they were trying to make me pay a fee for all the days I had spent in Guatemala illegally. So the lady from New York helped me out and made them check their electronic records, which were correct and proved that the stamp was a mistake. They let me through and told me I could stop crying now. And then laughed at me. I didn’t appreciate that, as I had only started getting teary-eyed out of intense frustration because they refused to listen to me. But it all worked out.

Mexico was beautiful. It’s a little less mountainous than Guatemala—or at least it’s not all mountains like Guatemala basically is. There were a lot more expanses of flat land, and a lot more space for agriculture, unlike in Guatemala where they have to plant crops on really steep mountains because there’s no where else to grow them.

We got to San Cristobal around 5pm, and I went looking for a place to change my money and to stay the night. I stayed in a really nice, new hostel that was surprisingly cheap. I dropped my stuff off there, and went to go look around.

It’s a beautiful city, though very touristy, which was pretty much what I expected. Lots of old colonial buildings that seem very European, and there’s a big central park with a large gazebo thing where there’s always someone playing a marimba, and a large square nearby in front of a beautiful church that’s yellow and red.

Here’s how I think they built the town of San Cristobal—someone held a contest and was like, “whoever builds the most beautiful church wins.” So like 25 people entered, built all these incredible churches, painted them beautiful colors, and then they put the town square near the winner, and now it’s where all the palomas go to eat palomitas. True story. (Not a true story. Except about the palomas.) The end.

Nothing much else happened on Friday night, except my iphone got stolen, but I don’t want to talk about that because it was stressful.

Saturday was a super fun day. Those of you who remember my friend Maggie from a previous post might remember that she currently lives in Mexico. She lives about an hour’s drive outside of San Cristobal, so she and her friend Oliver came into town to meet me for the day. When we met up, Maggie was like, yo, Oliver’s a breakdancer and he has a competition today, wanna go? And who doesn’t want to see that? It was like one of the coolest things I have ever seen. I swear to god. How does one learn how to breakdance? Some kid showed me what one of his elbows looked like after a couple years of breakdancing and he had a callous on it the size of like, I don’t know what…it doesn’t even matter because who gets callouses on their elbows anyway? That alone is proof that these guys were intense. I can put up videos as well. It was insane.

So after that Maggie, Oliver and I went out in San Cris for dinner and drinks and it was really pleasant. Oliver tried to teach me how to drink beer like a Mexican and I failed miserably. It has something to do with Dos Equis beer, limes, and salt, and not letting the lime & salt get in the beer bottle before you drink it because otherwise it foams everywhere. And I made a big mess. But it was a fun night.

We went back and stayed in their town that night, called Chiapa de Corzo. Maggie lives with a host family and they were very kind and let me stay the night. On Sunday we took a boat tour of the canyon near the town. It was incredibly gorgeous, but there was a sad tone to part of the tour. They show you this cliff, where legend says the indigenous people of Chiapas jumped to their deaths when the Spaniards conquered the area because they preferred to die than become slaves. About 500 years later, there’s still quite a bit of tension and racism between mestizo and indigenous people. So that canyon story provided a little bit of the painful history of Chiapas. There’s a lot of that history of racism and genocide in Guatemala as well that you still hear about in the news all the time due to Rios Montt being on trial for genocide, and then his conviction being overturned and the current government ignoring that a genocide even occurred. It’s really horrible and painful and unfortunately still fresh in people’s memories. I just hope it doesn’t take five hundred more years for this kind of thing to disappear.

After my visit with Maggie, I went back to San Cris on Sunday night so I could get picked up by the shuttle early on Monday morning to head back to Pana. I had an amazing trip—even with how short it was, one of the nicest things was just walking around and enjoying the view wherever I was, taking it all in, and relaxing.

And then last weekend, I went with five of my coworkers to Monterrico, which is on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala. It was surprisingly not touristy at all, and got crappy reviews by all of our guidebooks, which confused all of us because it was so beautiful there [it had black sand!] and we had an amazing time. It was great being able to bond with everyone at the office a little more. On Sunday, we also got up at 4:30am for a sunrise tour of the mangroves near the town. So gorgeous—it sucks to get up early, but when everyone’s just too tired to talk, sitting in a canoe in a peaceful, quiet lagoon and watching the sunrise, it puts you in a great mood for the rest of the day. I went back, had some pancakes, and napped in a hammock on the beach for the rest of the morning.

Other random pieces of news—

I finally connected a little bit with a couple of the women across the street from my house who make tortillas. Or at least just got a smile out of them, which is progress. I always thought they didn’t like me—during my time here, I've tried to say hi as much as possible, buy their tortillas every now and then and try to talk to them, but I never was able to get even a hint of a smile out of them until yesterday when I lost my flip-flop in the street in the rain and had to run and chase it as a little stream carried it about a block away. I was also yelling after it for no apparent reason, which made the whole thing seem a little more ridiculous. These ladies saw this whole occurrence, and were laughing at me as I walked back to my gate. All I did was laugh in embarrassment, nodded and just said “mi zapato…” And then when I came back out of my house the next morning, they laughed at me again as they said good morning. Even though all this laughter was at my expense, you have no idea how good it felt to make people smile that I’ve been trying to be friendly with since I moved in. All it took was me making a fool of myself. It reminded me of this joke I saw in a video of John Oliver’s stand up—all it takes is something stupid for people to connect with each other:

http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/yrd7p5/john-oliver-s-new-york-stand-up-show-pigeon-indoors

Like a pigeon in an airport--running and yelling after a shoe in a stream got me one step closer to making friends! I'm determined.