User:Vagrant/Guatemala

on the tail end (or more probably the middle) of my trip to mexico, i found myself in guatemala. well, i put some effort towards getting here.

Xela(food)

i´ve been in Xela (Chey-la, a.k.a. Quetzaltenango) for two and a half days now. overall, the food here seems to contain more vegetable content than mexico, which is good, but it´s actually harder to find vegetarian food. go figure.

i ate fried banana-mush stuffed with beans today, with a side of fried banana. it was maybe overkill on the banana part, but otherwise great.

yesterday, i got this excellent thing called ¨plato vegetariano¨, which amounted to a huge plate of... arroz(rice), papas(potatos), vetabel(beets), sandia(watermelon), zanahorias(carrots), and cebellitas verde(little green onions), and some other starchy thing that i´ve had before but can´t come up with a name for it. all very nicely cooked, with something that seemed kind of like horchata and of course, nice thick tortillas, with some salsas on the side. it was so good, even the beets. solo diez y ocho queztales!

i also had some roasted corn on the cob, and there was music in el parque central. it made me totally feel like i was in some summer in wisconsin in some rural fair or something. except everyone was speaking spanish and it was very urban. but the corn, the cheesy music... so reminiscent. i guess you have to have been there.

this is also nestled in beautiful, lush mountains, and it rains heavily for a couple hours a day.

this looks to be home for the next few weeks.

my clock

today, someone asked for the time, and i told them, and showed them, and they grabbed my alarm clock and stuck it in their pocket. eventually, he wanted 2 quetzales for it back. i stubbornly refused and even physically got in his face a little, pushing a bit and saying, in plain english ¨give it back¨, hoping my anger, and maybe even my overall mass was apparent to the little guy. useless. this was in some back alley somewhere. fortunately, a woman hovering in her doorway saw the whole thing, and got what i presume to be her husband, and he kindly, firmly demanded from the fellow that he give it back to me, which eventually worked.

looking back on it all, i feel a little stupid. at the same time, i knew the woman was watching and had a feeling somehow that would help out. who knows.

spanish school

so, i´ve been debating for a while weather to go to the awesome-sounding`political spanish school http://www.hermandad.com, or to the cheaper, not quite as cool sounding one http://spanishschool.com (nice domain). well, fate decided for me. after wandering by the one place numerous times the past few days, they actually came to the door and i signed myself up for the not so cool one for a week, with the thougt that i could maybe go to the other later in my stay here. well, the cool place is filled up till august. decision made.

my brain hurts

so, four days in spanish school. about 4 hours a day of active one-on-one spanish lessons. when i am done, i go back to my family (oh yeah, i{ve been inserted into a local guatemalan family{s life), eat lunch, marvel at how my brain hurts, and take an hour or two nap each day. on the second day, i nearly wanted to cry. one of the teaching tools involves making examples for all the various conjugations of verbs, or peculiar uses or phrases. i pretty quickly understand the grammatical structure and whatnot, but pressed for an example with no real connection to necessity, i draw a complete blank. i now have a relatively firm grasp of about 22 verbs. wow.

don{t ask me about apostraphes.

mas vegetales

so, i´ve at times felt some of my sleepiness is due to a lack of vegetables. friday night, though, i finally got to cook. there was a potluckish sort of dinner going on at the spanish school, and i picked up a bunch of vegetables at the market and made a dish that was.... entirely vegetables. zanahorias, cebollas, chiles jalepeno, limon, chiles dulse, and... um... green cabbage and green beans. it felt so good. hopefully we adequately cooked everything and i won´t be regretting it several days later. someone also brought vinto tinto de chile(cabernet savignone... or something like that, anyways), which was so tasty.

we also went out for drinks later, and i tried the local beer, gallo. pretty much the exact opposite of what i want in a beer. light and creamy. gah. rumour has it that it is, in fact, possible to find a good dark beer here. i´m skeptical, the darkest anyone has been able to demonstrate is maybe a nut brown. well, at least i´m a little closer to chile than portland or albuquerque. uh, not really.

p.s. i´m finally at a keyboard that´s properly configured. i can figure out how to make an ¨@¨, ¨´¨ and even square brackets. most are us keyboards with latin american mappings, or latin american keyboards with an inappropriate latin american mapping.