Abbey's Road

I figured that I flew all the way down to Guatemala from the US so I didn’t want to just see Antigua. So I booked a tour to Tikal National Park, one of the most well-preserved sites of the Mayan ruins, for the middle weekend. To get there, I had to catch a shuttle to the airport at 4am, then a flight to Flores, and then another shuttle to the park. I booked the tour on my own, but found out before I left that 2 other students, Mary and Sean, were also going and we all ended up in the same hotel. The hotel was actually pretty nice, but the best part about it was the swimming pool. Tikal was very warm and extremely humid. By 9:30 in the morning, when our tour started, it was already getting uncomfortable. By the time the tour ended around 12:30 it was getting unbearable, but that pool felt great. If I remember right, the temples and other ruins in the park were built over a period of about 1600 years ending around 850AD. The amazing thing was that the jungle had reclaimed all of it. Everything that we saw had been unearthed by archaeologists, and much of the ruins in the park were still covered. It was interesting to hear about the Mayan culture and how they built all these structures to such exact precision, to line up with the solstices and the equinoxes, etc. But Mary had a different perspective. She said, “Just imagine the number of people who died building these temples.” As Sean said, in order for a civilization to become advanced it usually required the oppression or exploitation of a large group of people.

No matter how I looked at it, it was interesting and I was happy I went. Mary on the other hand was not. She was probably the oldest student in the group, and wasn’t real intent on learning Spanish. She also didn’t swim in the pool, which explained why she was so hot and uncomfortable in Tikal. Sean and I made use of the pool so we were just fine. Sean is a Canadian from Nunavut, if you’ve ever heard of that. I remember hearing about Nunavut being named a new territory in northeastern Canada near Greenland several years ago. He is the one and only Nunavutian that I know, though he is not from a native tribe. He’s a real nice guy, nonetheless, and if all Nunavutians are anything like Sean I’m sure it’s a real agreeable place to live, if you like frozen tundra. The next morning Sean and I went back in the park to check out more of the ruins and we hoped to see some wildlife. Not only did we see some wildlife, Sean had a close encounter. While climbing up one of the temples we saw some parrots. All of a sudden 2 more parrots showed up and a territorial battle broke out. Sean's head got caught in the middle of everything, but luckily he didn't jump out of the way. It would've been a long fall down. We also saw some howler and spider monkeys, but they weren't as "wild" as the parrots.

Miss Mayan Ruin Contest?

When I arrived back in Antigua Sunday evening it felt strangely familiar and comfortable, like it was home, even though I had only been there a week. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say I felt like I belonged there. Walking through the central park back to my house, I felt like I was an old timer, one of the experienced. Luckily, no one tried to start a conversation with me in Spanish. That surely would have killed the moment. Week 2 was more Spanish. I graduated on to using the past tense. I no longer had to say everything in the present tense and hope that by the context of the sentence the person to whom I was talking could figure out my meaning. Of course, with more verb conjugations to remember, I suddenly forgot how to conjugate verbs in the present tense. It’s been way too long since I had to study! Week 2 also came with more partying, which also hindered the studying part. Since I had gotten to know more of the students, I started going out more. Most of them were younger so I was usually not in the crowd that stayed out the latest, but I did manage to experience “reggatone” for the first time. Some would call it music, some would not, but nonetheless I managed to dance, or some semblance thereof, to it. Jackie, a girl from DC, was in love with reggatone so we had no choice. The students came from a variety of countries including Holland, Switzerland, Canada, Denmark, Australia and the US. After the US and Canada, the most were from Holland. Surprisingly, at our school there were no Germans. Most places I’ve traveled recently the majority of the foreign tourists have been Germans.

The meals we had with the family were pretty good, though not overly big. There was always bread and tortillas and many meals came with rice and beans. I definitely had my quota of beans for several months in those 2 weeks. The lunches were the biggest and the best, where dinners were quite small. We’d often get something else to eat before or after dinner. And at the 10AM break at school I learned in a hurry that a lady came in everyday to serve different kinds of sandwiches for all of .50 to .70. You couldn’t beat them for the price especially considering that they came with guacamole – one of my favorite foods. There were a few different brands of local beers none of them anything special but they were fine just the same. We were a bit surprised at the price of the beer though. It was cheap by American standards, but in relation to everything else it wasn’t any bargain. We had cheaper beer in Costa Rica. I think it is because Antigua caters to tourists.

On my last night, I decided to try and stay out with the youngsters all night. My shuttle was picking me up at 4:00 the next morning so I figured it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to go to sleep for just a few hours. We started out with a nice dinner and then headed to one of the dance clubs until that closed at 1:00. In Antigua, they have this strange concept they call an “after party”. After the clubs all shut down at 1, guys stand outside and hand out maps to their “after party” – supposedly illegal parties at some out-of-the-way unmarked place where they serve limited booze and play pretty bad music in a darkly lit room. I pretty much think they bribe the cops to look the other way, because it is way too obvious for them not to get caught. (One of the major complaints of the locals I talked to was that of corrupt police and politicians.) Well, the music was pretty bad so I lasted ONLY ‘til 3:00 before heading back to the house. I somehow managed to stay awake until 4 when the shuttle picked me up to start my journey “home”, which at that time happened to be Colorado. Whenever someone asked me where I was from I would just say “the States”. And they would say, “Of course, but where in the States?” So I’d have to go into this explanation of how I live now. Just before leaving for Guatemala I decided to rent an apartment in Boulder, CO for the summer starting just after Memorial Day until the end of August. So sometimes for simplicity sake, especially if I was explaining it in Spanish, I would say that I now live in Colorado.

Posted by Ed at 6:52 PM | Permalink

After spending the Christmas holidays in Costa Rica I decided I wanted to try to learn Spanish. I figured it would come in handy if I do more traveling in Central or South America, or if I ever get to do some relief/volunteer work in that part of the world. After a bit of a roundabout investigation I found out that Guatemala is one of the cheapest, and most popular, places to take Spanish Immersion classes. And I figured, why learn Spanish in the United States when I can learn Spanish and have an adventure at the same time. Besides, in theory, taking an immersion class in a Spanish-speaking country is a much better and faster way to learn the language. So I signed up for two weeks, left Abbey with the Gibbons’ in Loveland, CO and off I went. I say an immersion class is better in theory because it all depends on where you go. I picked Antigua because it sounded like an interesting colonial city with lots of other things to do.

I didn’t realize it beforehand, but Antigua is quite touristy, by Guatemalan standards. It also is home to a dozen or more Spanish language schools and more travel agents than Manhattan even though there are probably less than 50,000 people living there. As you can imagine it is popular with the backpacking crowd. Even though I saw a lot of western tourists and expats there, the population was still overwhelmingly Guatemalan. However, it was too easy to fall back into English, especially when talking to other students. Towards the end of the first week though, after 4-5 hours of Spanish lessons a day, I was happy to not have to try and think in Spanish all the time. My brain was fried and oversaturated. The school I went to had about 20-30 students at any one time, each with their own individual teacher. I stayed in the home of a local family near the school. The first week there was one other student who stayed in the same home, a Polish guy named Jarek, who now lives in the US. The second week a young Dutch girl joined us. The family was an extended family with the grandparents, four or so of their adult children and a few grandchildren. It took me most of the two weeks to figure out who was who. At most meals we only ate with a few of them, because they had several kitchens in the house. One of the sisters, Maria, cooked all our meals. She and her brother, Freddy, both had hearing and speech problems, but they had big hearts to make up for it. They were always smiling and laughing and, of all the family members, they spent the most time with us. We found out that in Guatemala, people with disabilities are shunned and discriminated against. They told us that the students that stayed at their house were much more friendly with them than any Guatemalans. Jarek found out they like wine so he started a habit of picking up a bottle of wine now and then to have with dinner. They really appreciated that.

I arrived on Saturday night, and on Sundays we didn’t eat with the family so I spent most of the next day just exploring the city. Antigua is from the Spanish colonial era so the architecture was interesting and there were a number of old ruins still around. It was quite common to see local women dressed up in traditional clothing. They also had an area next to a park filled with concrete basins where the local women would come to wash their clothes by hand. I figured they were mostly from the rural outlying areas. One thing that lost its charm after a few days, though, were the cobblestone streets and the crazy sidewalks. The sidewalks were fairly narrow, very uneven, and every building seemed to have windows with concrete sills and iron grates that protruded out over the sidewalk. If you weren’t paying attention you could smash your head or your shoulder on one of them. There were also many large churches in the city and one of them was celebrating the feast of its patron saint, Francisco. That morning I had been awakened at 5:30 to loud music playing. There were people dancing and they had this crazy procession through the streets carrying a statue of San Francisco. On the route they traveled people had laid out pine needles and flowers and had made some pretty elaborate designs using colored sand. And then there were the firecrackers and fireworks. Actually, they went on all day. And night. And the next day. They seemed to die down for a day or two and then on Wednesday they started up again. We were all thinking that they really go crazy for their saints’ feast days in Guatemala until we found out that they were celebrating a different saint’s feast day. All day long you would hear firecrackers and explosions. Finally after several days of this it stopped, but even then you would hear an occasional outburst. It turns out that anytime you celebrate someone’s birthday, even Mother’s Day, the thing to do is to light off firecrackers. Guatemala is anything but quiet. Between the early morning music, traffic noise, fireworks, dogs running on the roofs (they’re flat – the roofs, not the dogs) and the ubiquitous roosters, I didn’t get a lot of good sleep there. It may have also had something to do with having a few beers at night, but I’m not inclined to believe that.

One of the downsides to staying in Antigua was that I didn’t really get the feeling that I experienced what life is really like for most Guatemalans. I did have some talks with my teacher about how life is in Guatemala. And one of my host family’s sons, Jose, who didn’t live in the house, came over for dinner a few nights and talked to us about the politics and other issues. He spoke pretty slowly and clearly for us, which helped a lot! So at least we got a little flavor of what it’s like to be Guatemalan. We were told that our host family was considered middle class and were by no means poor, but by US standards they were at most lower middle class. I think if I go back, I’ll take some time to see some other places as well.

On Thursday of the first week, the school had an outing to a swimming pool. Actually, there were several levels of pools with a slide going from the top to the bottom. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t too good in the morning, but we had lessons in the morning around the pool anyways. It finally cleared up in time for lunch and a few of us managed to get in the pool. The school’s director went in only because he was pushed in. The guy who pushed him in felt bad when he found out he couldn’t swim. There aren’t many swimming pools in Guatemala so most natives don’t know how to swim. If nothing else, I was happy I went because I got to know a lot more of the students and I had my first experience on a “chicken bus.” The “chicken bus” is the major means of transportation in Guatemala. They are actually school buses that have been painted in bright colors other than yellow. I never saw chickens on the buses, just tons of people. We were told not to ride them after dark as they can be dangerous and are often held up by banditos on the road. To get back to town after the pool party, we found another mode of transportation – the back of a pickup truck. It had a metal frame sticking up that you could hold onto so you could stand up. That definitely was one of our “local” experiences.

Another thing I really enjoyed doing was going down to the central park in the afternoon and reading or doing my homework. The central park was a place where everyone congregated – locals and tourists alike – especially on weekends. It was a great place for people watching and you could always see public displays of affection especially among the kids. It was like they thought they were the only ones there. Of course, if most Guatemalan homes were like the house we stayed in with several extended family members living in one house, it’s no wonder the kids go out on the street or down to the park. I don’t think they have much of a concept of personal privacy.

Posted by Ed at 8:05 PM | Permalink