Gringo Giants

Updated news: I just edited this blog, my younger homestay sister just got a job. Yay!

I know, I know, it's been a while, so hopefully this long post will catch you all up to speed. Sorry, spell check doesn´t work again, so I did my best. Here's a pic of some folks from the Spanish school on a trip to an indigenous community called Zunil. From left (Me, Ana, Doris, Lisa, Reena, and Tom). Nothing on Picassa right now, but perhaps in the next couple of days. Keep an eye out!

Weather in Xela

I've been in Xela now for more than two weeks (prounced Shay-la, by the way.) As I said before in the last post, Xela is about 8,000 feet above sea level, and with high altitude comes drastic temeperature contrasts. It's super cold in the morning and evenings, so I was able to get a cheap used down coat for only 60 Quetzales ($7.5 Q to the $), not a bad deal. Nevertheless things can get pretty hot during the day, and the morning clouds usually burn off before 9, and the air being much thiner up here, you can really feel the sun's intensity. This is the Boulder, Colorado of Central America, well kind of. Of course, around 4 oclock the October rains come in. Foutunately "summer," is approaching, and the rains haven´t come in a few days, but supposedly frosts and high winds in November and December are highly common. The last couple of nights have been bitter cold, ugh I thought it was called summer?

My Spanish teacher recounted a very historic moment in Xela about 15 years ago when the city was covered in a couple of inches of snow only a couple of weeks before Christmas. "How cool," I said, "No, it was scary," he said. It's all relative I suppose. Recently, I experienced the first earthquake in my life, (sorry guys I slept through the baby northeast earthquake back in 2002). Xela is said to get earthquakes every few months, typically they aren´t too damaging, but this was one of the bigger earthquakes Xela had experienced in a while. The epicenter was in Chiappas, Mexico, so when it reached Xela, it was 4 point something on the ricter scale.

City Life

While many alternative backpacking travellers come to Xela to avoid the gringafied ambiance of Antigua, Xela certainly has its own scene, with a list of Spanish schools and hundreds of NGO's concentrating on everything under the sun, from fair trade coffee farming, to teaching English to indigenous families, to rescuing street animals, Xela really is for the alternative traveller. Like Antigua, Xela has a host of the same arty liberal locales, like live trova music (Latin revolutionary folk), veggie burritos, and an array of cafes. At the same time the scene is much more diverse, and when you move beyond Zona 1 of the city, the real Guatemalan flavor co-exists with the Gringo giants. (Seriously, I´m a giant here).

Spanish immersion

The idea of Spanish immersion has really been the sole character of alternative travelling in Xela for quite a while. Xela is divided into different zones, and most of the Spanish schools, bars, and hostels are concentrated near the central park of Zona 1. La Paz, where I was taking classes is tucked away into the highlands of the city, still in Zona 1. As part of the informal yet effective immersion, students and teachers are encouraged to walk about the city, go into cafes and museums and simply practice conversations in Spanish. Walking around town, the entire Zona 1 is an alternate universe of wise Guatemalan teachers guiding their giant gringo buddies around town teaching them the ways of Spanish. It´s a pretty funny site if you look at it that way.

My Spanish may be at an advanced level, but I´ve realized how much there is to learn still, and Luis, my teacher helped me fine tune my grammar, and we also read a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book (don´t know the title in English), a true story about a Colombian sailor whose ship goes down, and he´s stranded on a life boat with no food and water for 10 days. I´m not sure if it´s the style of his work, but after trying many Spanish books, and giving up in frustration I finally feel like I can read with fluency, and although I don´t understand everything, I´m reading without thinking in English.

Volunteer

Since I got here I started volunteering with a human rights based magazine in Xela called Entre Mundos (Between Worlds). They not only have a magazine, but they also organize events. Last night we had an Idian themed benefit party, and did it all by candlelight after the electricity went out. Primarily they serve as the main network for NGO´s in Xela, a place where travellers can come, and look through lists of volunteer opportunities during their stay in Xela. As the magazine is bilingual, I´ve been helping them with translations and copy editing, which has been a challenge, but has helped me immensely with my formal written Spanish. Next issue, I´ll contribute an article, and in this issue a blurb about my blog will appear. Sweet, I´m famous, and so are all the peeps in the pics.

Lake Atitlan

Last weekend Reena and I went to Lake Atitlan, a few hours from Xela, a crater lake, the deepest in Central America, which is now a candidate to be one of the next natural wonders of the world. We chicken bused it all the way there (yes now chicken bus is a verb), and arrived nice and shooken up and nautious, and stayed one night in the lake´s main hub, Panajachel. We stayed away from the center, and closer to the lake for some better views, in a nice hotel, which we wouldn´t have found if it were not for the help of an 11 year old girl that gets paid by some of the hotels on informal commission to help tourists find hotels. This is pretty typical in Central America, as soon as you exit the bus, someone is there waiting to escort you to the hotel of your choice, although it´s still not quite clear to me whether the traveller is charged more so that the escort can get the commission, nor is it clear whether all of the escorts get commision from all the hotels. In this case, the little girl, Rosa Maria, almost got shorted. She told us the hotel wasn´t going to give her the regular commission, so Reena and I explained in the office that it was Rosa who helped us find the hotel. According to Rosa, they only gave her about half of what she ordinarily recieved. Whether I believed her or not, she became our best friend for the next couple of hours, and we bought her some ice cream while she held our hands down the street. Around 5 she sort of dissapeared, while we were using the internet.

The next day we took a little boat to the other side of the lake to a well known hippy community called San Pedro. The previous generation of hippies came to Lake Atitlan in the 60´s and 70´s, and while they´re still present, a lot of them have moved to other parts of the lake like San Marcos, and a new generation has transformed San Pedro into a small lakeside port complete with cafes, middle eastern food, and a pub owned by a guy from Northern England. Entre Mundos had a great article last issue about some of the social and cultural implications that tourism, especially drug and alcohol flavored toursim has had on the locals, both good and bad.
The views around the lake are spectacular, (more volcanoes), and during the day the sun bakes you. Kayaks were easy to rent, so we took a nice dip in the lake near some cliffs where some San Pedro hippies were hanging out and smoking pot.

Back to Xela

The next day we chicken bused it back to chilly Xela, and Reena stayed in a hostel for a couple of days before she her trip to Mexico, while I´m continuing with the family for at least another week. It´s not a bad deal, a good price for a bed, three meals a day, and all the Spanish you could want.

An American guy is staying with us now, Brad, he´s an older guy from Colorodo, and came a couple of years ago to stay with the family, and comes now and again to work on his Spanish and seek out real estate opportunities. Now that I have some more time, Brad and I, well mostly Brad, but I´m starting to help now, have begun to seek out job opportunities for the daughters (aged 23 and 27). Times are a little tough now for the family, although things appear great on the ouside, they´re in huge debt, dad isn´t working either, and mom has some glaucoma issues. Brad and I get to practice our Spanish a lot, and he´s been paying the older daughter to read the Prensa Libre (National newspaper), so I sat in on with them yesterday.

After dinner, mom talks with us, and continues with her stock phrases of tough love and lecturing about respecting God and the house. ¨Please don´t slam the door chica,¨ "despacio," "despacio chica" "Slow, slow, everything is slow in Guatemala,¨ and her funny stories of previous students, and an interesting tale of how one day she began speaking in tounges in church, but you can´t help but love her all the same, she lets me do my thing, and doesn´t even care when I come home at 2 in the monring. Last night she recounted the history of how they became to house foreigners. About 9 years ago, she started asking God to help her find a job, (I believe around this time dad was on his way to Los Angeles for the next 8 years), but the answers from God weren´t yet clear. Her sister gave her the idea to house students. She shook her head in dicouragement, it was too much work, ¨I don´t know the kinds of foods that they eat, I don´t know anything about their customs or traditions.¨ Then one night she had a dream that two giant men with backpacks knocked on her door. It was fate. She went to visit a local Spanish school, and asked if she could work as a host family. They visited her home, interviewed her, and not long after, sure enough two giant Englishmen with backpacks came to her doorstep. ¨Un regalito de Dios,¨ she sighed in happiness. (A little gift from God).