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.

compost sin luces

so, not knowing what to do with myself, i finally sat down and wrote a little something about the church of compost. contrary to usual practice, i actually made a few revisions. then the lights went out, which i took as a sign that it was done.

i've been thinking about the church of compost a lot because i've been engaging in so much more than usual sacrilidge. it's doesn't cover everything, but it's a pretty good fundamental premise.

comienzo a las montanas

so this morning i pointed in a direction towards some mountains and started walking. in about a half-hour, i was walking along a mountain pass with little steep-sloped farm plots all over the place. it was beautiful, with sun streaming down, and mountain mists hanging in every nook and cranny. the farms mostly were growing some leafy green looking thing, and of course, corn and possibly potato. i got far enough to see another city in the distance, and then decided to turn around.

dolore en mi cabeza

so, after a nice brunch (platos vegetarianos) in this little place near el parque central, i hopped up the little steps to leave, and BANG, smack my head very hard into a metal roof beam. next thing i knew, i was sitting in a small puddle, and everyone was looking at me. surely it was pretty loud. i took me glasses off, felt for blood (thankfully none), sat for a bit, stood up, tried to say something funny in spanish and failed, and they were still staring at me, so i simple said "esta bien", and started walking off. it's a little raw.

i'm too tall for these parts.

history lesson

Guatemala has some brutal colonial history that still effects them to this day. from the spanish conquistadores, to involvement from the US as early as the 1820s, up through more recent times.

i often get this impression that there is US involvement in nearly every latin american country caught up in internal military strife. it's part of my ambient shame with being a US citizen. but to know more specifically, to learn about exactly how it has effected individuals, entire communities, countries and ecosystems, it tears me up a bit more.

the following is information i learned from two sources, a movie(in english) about a survivor of one of the 1982 massacres, as well as from a talk (en espanol) by an ex-combatante involved in in the armed resistance to opression in guatemala. i haven't verified much of this information with other sources.

as i understand it, during 1945-1955, there was a democratically elected government making wide-sweeping social changes for the health and welfare of it's people, including novel ideas like giving women voting rights and major land reforms for the agrarian workers. somewhere in the late 50s and early 60s, with the help of a US trained military, this style of government was swiftly turned into a military-dominated government that continued on through the 70s, 80s, 90s, and quite possibly through the present day. it's not infrequent that i see armed military walking around town on any given day.

in the 1960s up till 1996, there were small groups of poorly armed resistance. their numbers quite possible totaled around 2,000 individuals. in individual conflicts, the numbers were often 4 or more to 1. poorly funded and fed, they walked great distances in through mountainous regions. exactly how or what they accomplished, i unfrotunately couldn't discern. but they struggled for beliefs for better education, health care, land rights, and other reforms which were largely either turned back, or simply not implemented. they certainly believed in what they were doing.

one of the large examples of oprression, one could even go so far as to call it genocide, was a series of massacres by the military, primarily in rural indigenous mayan villages in and around 1982. an approximate count of the lives directly effected includes 1.5 million displaced from their homes, about 50,000 missing, and 200,000 murdered. the dead were buried in mass graves, and there's been recent international efforts to unearth these graves as proof in an attempt to hold those involved responsible.

to know that this military is US trained and supported is simultaneously no surprise, and repulsive. and i know the situation in guatemala is not unique.

so what to do? what to do...

homesick

ok, i've been pretty homesick this week. not that i really have a home. but yet, there are people, there are communities, and vegetables in sufficient quantities somewhere out there, and it's a little difficult for me to really find it here. i mean, i know there are possibilities here, but as much progress as i've made on my spanish, it's still pretty basic.

i both want to stay here longer in the hopes of getting over this phase, but also just want to race back immediately (well, as immediate as bus trips can be, anyways).

i spend a lot of time just lying in bed, thinking about so many things. and my old standby, default behavior when i don't know what to do with myself, working on free software, isn't so possible with my computer broken still(which has in many ways, been a good thing).

i've been living with a family for two weeks, and i barely know anything about them. it's also really hard for me, the gender stereotypes- the women cooking, cleaning, everything domestic, and the men presumably going off somewhere to work, and when they come home, they're expectant... not that they're cruel or even disrespectful really. personally, i'm not even allowed to wash my own dish or clear the table or help in much of any way. it feels so awkward.

i'll be staying in a hostel this coming week, just so i can cook for myself and eat vegetables, and maybe be more likely to stumble upon opportunities to get into these beautiful mountains. i'll only be studying spanish for three days instead of five. depending on funds, i might study at the school for another week.

luces

the other night when i went to sleep, i kept seeing a bright flash out of the corner of my eye. a little disturbed that i might be having hallucinations or something, i investigated further and figured out it was a very large firefly that had snuck into my room. it was comforting to me to see it. i remembered a time when i had been in the northwest for several years, and returned to the midwest at the right time, and realized that i had totally forgotten fireflies existed. i was such a wonderful rediscovery, and i felt a bit of that again.

linux en espanol

so, working with my instructor, we convinced (they were pretty willing) the school to let us install linux on the second computer. so now i have at least one mostly working linux environment. por supuesto, i installed debian sarge. unfortunately, it was a little more difficult that i expected. so far, i've only gotten X to work at 640x480@16. the network card is some weird model, encore 10/100, that doesn't work with the standard sundance module in debian sarge (hmmm... maybe i should try a newer kernel from backports.org). there's some talk about recompiling a module for it from different sources on the intarweb. fortunately, i had a USB ethernet device that i'm currently loaning the school. hopefully i can figure out how to get this card working or find an alternative before i leave.

getting a working linux install is a crucial step towards getting my laptop working again. all i need now is that USB disk caddy for laptop drives that my instructor's freind has... it's suffering a little from the manana syndrome. manana notwithstanding, i hope i'll be able to install linux on an extra partition, and then fsck my borked partition.

casa argentina

so here i am in a hostal called casa argentina. but i'm really still in guatemala, in case you're wondering.

the kitchen hs been sufficient, though sometimes difficult to find things like a knife, and the frying pans don't have any handles or anything.

but i've managed to overall eat much healthier here. lots of vegetables. makes my head less cloudy. i generally fry a bunch of vegetables, or throw them all into a pot and call it soup, or make what i like to call "huevos gringos", which is essentially scrambled eggs with equal (or more) vegetables mixed in.

sometimes, i overdo it with the spice(especially with soups, for some reason), and i find myself slightly delerious and unable to think clearly, but shortly thereafter, i usually feel more alive and alert, so i suppose it's worth it.

it feels good to cook for myself, and usually i'm even able to wash my own dishes, though occasionally there's mayan women (girls?) who clean up after everyone else, and sometimes they manage to wash my dishes too. but usually, i manage to wash them myself, an act of seeming self-sufficiency.

mercado los flores

so, probably to the great amazement of many of the locals, i, as an individual vegetarian, consume more vegetbles in one meal than many folks do all week. i've found i need to go to the market once every other day or so. i've gone to a few different vendors, sometimes one will have something the others don't. eggs seem to vary a lot, who has them on any given day.

but i kept going back to this one that seemed to have better quality produce than some of the others, staffed by some seemingly relatively young mayan women. so, i pick out various vegetables, they usually try and nudge me to pick out some other things, and then i have this huge bag full of vegetables. i figure i have enough, and use one of the few spanish phrases i feel i have more or less mastered, "quanto questa?" their response is to discuss amoung themselves in some indigenous language, possibly k'iche mayan, and eventually spit out a price in spanish which usually feels like slightly overcharged, but ridiculously cheap at the same time. sometimes i have to ask them to repeat the price, and i can't help but think it's a different price, like with an extra 50 centavos added or something. the centavos always thow me off.

caminamos a lago atitlan

so, i managed to get into the mountains finally. so good. for the first time in my life, i took a guided tour. the group is called quetzaltrekkers, which is a non-profit that donates to a local school for street kids in xela.

we started off the night before, packing and divvying up the communal resources. i got the cooking pot, which just barely fit in my backpack. in fact, i waited till the next morning and woke up a half-hour early just to be able to re-pack it, because it didn't really fit.

we took a chicken bus for about an hour or so up to about 2,500 meters in altitude, and then hiked up little trails to about 3,000 meters(about 9,900 feet). it also started raining at this point. this was probably the highest i have ever been, and i was surprised i didn't feel it more, what with less oxygen and all.

everywhere, there was corn. everywhere. it didn't matter if it was an 80 degree slope, there was corn. inches from the edge of a cliff, corn. these people were corn.

ok, there was also gorgeous forest everywhere along most of the hike too. this "cloud rainforest" i'd been hearing so much about. it felt in many ways similar to the forests of cascadia, though some of the trees had swapped bark and/or leaves, and the underground vegetation looked like a million varieties of mint (some was stinging nettles, i think). could definitely get the feeling that from some of these precarious trails, you could get some really amazing views on a clear day. instead, i got some pretty amazingly mystical feeling views of clouds drifting through the mountains, just knowing there was more to see.

it was a pretty rough climb, but nothing compared to the 1,500 meteres of downhill we would do over the next 3 days.

near the high point, we passed through a village that had been largely destroyed in one of the many hurricnes of recent years. my stupid assumption was that this high up in the mountains, hurricanes wouldn't be much of a problem. there was also huge earth moving equipment and whatnot making the muddy roads very difficult to walk on or even near. but they're re-building their community, hopefully for the best.

all throughout our treks, people would pass up by with huge stacks of firewood or other things strapped to their head. nearly everyone had a machete, and nearly everyone wore colorful clothing and skirts, though the men's skirts looked much studier and shorter, usually. no matter how remote it seemed, usually there was somebody else popping out from around the corner at least once every couple hours.

we made really good time, what with it raining and all of us wanting to make it to shelter.

eventually, we made it to our first place to crash for the night, which was this creepy hallway with rooms and tiny windows and very sketchy looking toilets. the rooms could be locked from both the inside and the outside(this added significantly to the creepy factor). the main advantage of this place was that it was dry, which was plenty enough. another added bonus was that nearby we could go to this little sauna like thing. it was tiny- i had to crawl into it and had to crouch over the whole time. but it was hot and after a long day hiking in the rain, felt so wonderful. when i left the sauna, somehow crouching like that the whole time, or maybe i twisted my knee a little on the downhills, but my knee began to feel sharp pains. not pleasant.

after a long, long time heating up water, we cooked dinner, which amounted to some overly thin "crema asparagus" y "crema hongos", and when we were done burning our tounges on that, we made some pasta ad red sauce which was actually fairly good, with a little spice to it.

we chatted some, and it turned out one of the israeli people on the hike had done his obligatory 3 years in the israeli military, proudly. when asked what he thought of palestine, he began with "first off, there is no palestine" which pretty much ended all discussion right there, and most people didn't want to get into it(a common topic on some of these hikes, as there are frequently israeli's present).

dia dos a lago atitlan

thankfully, when i woke up, my knee mostly felt better and i could walk normal again. seeing as i had another two days of hiking, and this day was supposed to be the hardest, this was a good sign.

the weather was gorgeous, partly cloudy, with clouds drifting in between the mountains. we walked downhill, downhill, downhill some more. eventually we came across a really rocky area, and stopped for a wonderful scenic break. right around the corner was a big bulldozer, seemingly trapped there. no idea how it got there, or how or if it would ever get out of there.

more downhill. so much downhill. sometimes the path was not wide enough for me to put both feet side-by side. the mountains were everywhere. it was gorgeous. still lots of corn everywhere.

there was a beatifully scenic rickety bridge we crossed, over this rampaging waterfall that had carved the mot curvy sculptures out of the rock. moss everywhere.

as afternoon set in, it began to rain a little, which was somewhat of a concern, as we needed to do about 15 river crossings later in the day, and could get to dangerous if it rained too much. so people were rushing a little too fast, and with all the downhill, my knee started hurting more.

the moment we started the river crossings, it started to rain a little more seriously. great. fortunately, usually it didn't come much past the ankles. a few came as high as the knees, near the end. it was pretty slippery on some of the muddy, clay trails. and of course. my knee was definitely hurtig more and more, even on the uphills sometimes, but it was a lot closer to keep going that to turn back. so i kept going. eventually, we made it past all of them and stumbled upon a road. only 12 minutes to don pedro's, where we would be staying that night. the road made me feel like i was back in the US, well maintained blacktop, a bright yellow line down the middle. i hadn't seen anything that well maintained in mexico or guatemala. odd feelings aside, it was actually easier on my knee, so i appreciated it.

don pedro lets us crash in his big recreation/party room. dinner plates were set out, and for the non-vegetarians, the famed "don pedro's chicken", or probably more aptly, his wife's chicken, was et with much enthusiasm. for the three vegetarians amoungst us, we had some hard-boiled eggs. of course, arroz, frijoles and tortillas, as well as some vegetales and various other niceties. after a long day, food you didn't have to work hard for is always very tasty.

we also had other amenities i'm not so used to on a hike, like a mp3 CD player with very american pop music through the ages- an impressive selection, for sure. it had a song from the who's tommy album which got stuck in my head for days. and, of course, a television. irresistable, what with the world cup going on and all. we also had a nice grill with a bed of coals in it, and roasted a few marshmallows. though, what i appreciated most was the sleeping mats, made of some sort of thick grass or something. definitely cozy.

lago atitlan

so, the plan was to wake up pre-dawn and hike to this great spot to catch the sunrise. we tried, but it was raining and overcast, so we slept in a bit and had mosh for breakfast in the comfort of the dry don pedro's rec room. i spent much of the time stretching and doing little aikido or escrima excercises. my knee was mostly feeling good, but certainly not perfect.

we took off a bit late, but the weather was very kind to us the rest of the day. we walked along a few roads, and eventually back to the trails. i saw folks waiting for a chicken bus, and a woman had actual chickens and turkeys in netted baskets, with their heads sticking out, which just got tossed up onto the root like any other luggage. the proverbial chickens.

back to the trails, back to more downhill. eventually, we got a look at lake atitlan. only about 1000 meters of downhill left! it was steep, it was beautiful, and it really hurt. another person wa also having knee troubles, and was using old corn stalks for walking sticks. she offered me half of one, and that helped some. the whole way down, we had beuatiful suny views of this lake nestled in the crater of an ancient huge volcano.

we stopped at this ridge with a cross and some corn planted all around (we probably trampled a bit) for a while to rest and eat some trail mix, which is so good when you're hungry and hurting a little. we could see a few of the towns on lake atitlan, and a number of farm fields near the lake. i also managed to strip down to my thermal leggings, which were definitely overkill at this point, and made me a bit too warm. but it was tricky to change out of them.

more downhill, more pain. people were trying to construct a more permanent staircase along this last stretch, as they probably walk up here daily and it's prone to washouts and erosion. what they had done so far was definitely helping me a bit. but there was a lot of work left to do, building a staircase up the side of these mountains.

eventually we reached the bottom. the farms plots we could see from up on the ridge we passed through. corn, of course, as well as potatos, some beans, maybe, and numerous other things.

the beach. full of sunshine. i managed to use my poncho to discreetly change into my underwear that could pass for an obnoxious swimming suit, and swam quite a ways. it was cool, but not overly so. it felt so good to have most of my skin exposed to sunshine after so many days of rain. the lake is huge, and relatively clear, though the omnipresent trash bits were scattered along the beach and here and there at the bottom. there's no river outlets for the water, it's just a huge water catchment system that gradually drains through the earth.

eventually, we caught a boat to san pedro, and a few feet away was a restaurant we ate at. you could tell you were in a tourist town, because all of the people spoke passable market english if the spanish wasn't working. one woman even managed to make a joke in hebrew when someone wasn't buying the wares she was hocking. the food wasn't real vegetarian freindly, but oh well. i got a good plate of thick tortilla chips and guacamole, and a sandwhiche de queso, which fortunately had vegetables because the cheese was some sort of kraft single sort of thing that i just picked out and left on the plate. usually around here, cheese has been prtty good. tourist towns, gah.

eventually, we had to leave to catch another chicken bus, and the pickup that was supposed to pick us up didn't show. fortunately, it wasn't that far of a walk, and we caught the last chicken bus of the day. oh, was it cramped. this bus was packed so full, three people to a seat plus people packed into the aisles. i spent the next hour trying to arrange my knees in a variety of uncomfortable positions, so that one position wouldn't win out. it ws a long ride out of the crater, winding through many little towns, all over the place. many good views of the lake from the bus, and many sketchy switchbacks where the driver would have to back up all the way to the cliff just to be able to make a turn.

about an hour and a half later, we switched to another bus, which was narly as crowded, but had a fraction of an inch more leg room. this time, i didn't take a window seat, so i could sprawl into the aisle a little. an hour an a half later, we hit xela again. the bus let us off in a part of town i han't been to much, or at least didn't recognize.

back at the hostal, i pretty much crashed out and slept hard for 10 hours.

reparo mi computadora

it took four weeks or so to fix my computer. early on in my stay in guatemala, it seemed promising- i almost had my hands on a laptop USB drive caddy. but it was not meant to be- that shop was consistantly closed for two weeks.

eventually, an alternate option turned up. my intructor knew a freind of a freind in half a dozen internet cafe/general random computer stuff stores, and one of them had a laptop to conventional IDE adaptor, and a computer i could work on to fix my computer.

so, i booted up a... ubuntu installer CD (with a small amount of shame)... detected the LVM setup... switched to the commandline and ran fsck.ext3. problem fixed in about 4 seconds. (maybe 4 minutes with boot time, and 15 minutes with the swapping drive caddy and such).

4 weeks for a 4 second fix. i laughed a little, and smiled.

to continue with the shame, i installed ubuntu on a spare partition, just as a back-up emergency measure. of course, it overwrote my master boot record without asking. gah ubuntu. soon, i'll cleanse it with debian.

seems to be working so far.

almuerzo y cafta

so i met up with someone from the extended freegeek family for lunch. she and her freind were studying spanish as for work in schools back in portland, where some of the programs have a very high latino population.

we went to the restaurant that was practically part of the hostal i was staying at, only to find it wasn't quite as vegetarian-freindly as i'd thought. i got a large fresa pina licuado, and huevos mexicanos (frijoles, huevos con tomate y tortillas). a good standby, though i had eggs for breakfast. very high protein day. the licuado was great. also, i seemed to have the best spanish skills of the three of us, and was feeling highly functional for once, which felt kind of good.

conversations was multifaceted and varied. life being injected into a guatemalan family as part of spanish school, school systems, buerocracy, corrupt and arguably evil governments (domesticly and back home), a bit about free software (specificly in schools), and surely other things i've already forgotten.

as a bonus, she picked up the check, after the "do we have to ask for the check?" phase. they pretty much only bring it when you ask. so they rummaged around for a bit in a guide book, and i just asked, and all was well.

i showed them around the slightly bizzarre casa argentina a bit before they left, and they invited me to a conference at their school about nafta (well, actually cafta, but the family resemblance is remarkable).

it was in a part of town i was only slightly familiar with, but i found the place without trouble, only about a half-hour too early. i thought it was near "el bake shop" where i'd needed to pick up granola the next day, so i figured i'd wander around a bit and see if it was open, or at least re-onfirm my idea of where it was. i wandered around a bunch, got slightly lost and found myself again, eventually found the bake shop, and then got more lost. and more lost.

and i kept wandering around and around, with this little tourist map of the area, and after about 45 minutes stumbled upon the school where the conference was. only about 20 minutes late, and what starts on time?

so i wandered in, waited while some folks had a conversation, they broke off, and i walked into the conference. it was in spanish, with english translation, but i found i didn't need the translation too much (though it certainly reconfirmed a lot of things i was unsure of).

he went into detail of the background of the situation in guatemala- that 60% of the population is indigenous, another sigificant percentage is mixed indigenous, and the ruling elite is generally a tiny fraction of the population, that 70% of the population lives in poverty. and that the government doesn't really acknowledge these figures(which are often accepted by international organizations sucha as the UN), always something lower. otherwise it would have to do something, maybe. he explained how corruption in government, on many levels, means that what programs are in place often don't quite make it to the people who need it, especially foreign assistance. the short of it is people are barely scraping by. it's not an uncommon story.

so, with cafta(central america free trade agreement), central american farmers who are barely able to make enough money selling their corn at the market will have to compete with US-subsidized industrial farms, with some of the fanciest (though arguably short-sighted) technologies available. it's crazy, but it's actually possible to grow corn in the US, ship it all the way to guatemala, and still sell it cheaper than the locals. this also does some interesting things like introducing hybridized or genetically modified strains of corn to a region that has been developing local strains of corn for thousands of years.

another topic is that generic medicines are commonly used here, even though sometimes the patents in the US haven't yet expired. cafta would likely require this to change, which means in many cases tripling the prices of medication.

essentially, cafta would be economic sabotage on an already economically challenged region. it's highly doubtful that what few jobs could be brought to these high-mountain rural areas would possibly make up for the loss of local economies.

salida guatemala

my last full day in xela was full of errands i had put off till nearly the last minute. it would be inconsistant with nearly every trip in my life otherwise.

so, i woke up, made some "huevos gringos", and put on my fancy chilean wool suit pants, with my classy debconf6 t-shirt, and took my clothes to the lavendaria.

then, i went on my dual mission to find fingernail clippers and granola. i arrived at "El Bake Shop" and read that it wasn't only open two days a week, and one of those days was not this day. fortunately, signs can be decieving and someone was actually there and very eagre to sell me everything, though the shelves were a little sparse- i think they're only open two days a week or something, "normally". granola achieved. i was tempted to get some queso fresco, but i had a cold and thought better of it. fingernail clippers were nowhere to be found, though i didn't really look at that hard, or even attempt to ask anyone.

i wandered my way back, picked up a pineapple, mango, some bananas and some avocados. i was a bit sick, still, and felt like pineapple might kick it. so i made some banana pineapple smoothie sort of thing. i didn't add enough water to really qualify it as a licuado, i think. it was good, though i think the top half of the pineapple wasn't as potent as the bottom half.

so, feeling like i had more or less accomplished the most crucial errands, i figured i'd drop by the school, make use of the intarweb, and say my goodbyes to folks. that was definitely good, though goodbyes are sometimes a bit awkward, especially in a foreign language.

back at the hostal, i made a vegetable soup for dinner, largely left over from the previous day, but i added a few more vegetables and a lot of hot sauce to try and burn out the cold. it helped some, though i definitely felt a little dizzy from the spice.

instead of attempting to pack that night, i of course just decided to just go to sleep and wake up early and pack then. i haven't got much to pack and i know just how to do it, having been traveling for two months.

i woke up around 6, made some pineapple banana granola for breakfast, chopped the rest of the pineapple and put it in several layers of plastic bags, and began packing my backpack. around 7, someone kept ringing the doorbell to the hostal, and i had a suspicion that my driver showed up a half-hour early. i kept packing, and when i was nearly ready to go, someone found me and asked if i was expecting a microbus. sure enough, the guy was early. i quickly finished up, and off i went. i kept packing, and when i was nearly ready to go, someone found me and asked if i was expecting a microbus. sure enough, the guy was early. i quickly finished up, and off i went, wondering if i'd run into some of the folks from the lake atitlan hike, as we were planning on heading to san cristobal about the same time. sure enough, not too much further away, we stopped, and there two of them were. another short drive, and the fourth person. off we went to cuatro caminas. where we changed into a much more cramped bus.

many hours of gorgeous guatemalan mountain scenery passed, and i had no idea if i was recognizing things, or just thinking i was recognizing things. we stopped for a breif rest, and i peed and got a bag of some guatemalan brand of potato chips. they were really greasy and not overly salty. we hopped back in, and eventually got to la mesilla... la fronterra. getting my exit stamp from guatemala went smoothly.

our connection to mexico was actually there on time this time, or we were perfectly late. this microbus was definitely more cozy and plush. so i was back in mexico, er... that weird place between the border and the place where they actually let you into the country.