Each morning we awake a little before 7am to windchimes just outside our bedroom door, a lukewarm shower if we´re lucky (though after a week of this we FINALLY figured out how to make it hot), and a big desayuno (breakfast) prepared by our host sister before we head off to school a few blocks away. Each morning we unsucessfully try to befriend their dog who frequently growls at us and only takes bread bribes every now and then. We fill our brains with spanish articulos, sujectivos, vocabulario, chistes and verbos for 5 hours, then head home where an even bigger amuerzo (lunch) awaits us. We explore all afternoon, then return home to eat a slightly smaller cena (dinner) and laugh histerically with our familia as we compare the names of fruits, vegetables, animals, and how many more parts of a cow Guatemaltecos eat than us wasteful Norteamericanos. Who knew that liver, kidneys, lungs, tongues, hearts, and eyes commonly appear on people´s plates in these parts? Nuestra familia promised us we would never find eyeballs floating around in our sopa during our stay. Yah. Por favor y Gracias.
Monday afternoon we explored Xela a bit, mostly around Parque Central - a lovely park filled with big lush trees, little rose gardens, a fountain, several statues and two huge flags. El Parque is surrounded by grand buildings in neo-classical architecture including the ¨Museo Casas de la Cultura¨ (more on our trip to the museum later), cafes, banks, city hall (where there are always about 5 or 6 armed policia congregated) and of course a McDonalds. Every day there are shoe-shiners set up throughout the park, from young boys to old men, and they always have customers. En la noche, we pulled out all our past-time charade tricks during dinner, attempting to understand what on earth our family was saying to us...hablan muy rapido.
Tuesday after class our host brothers walked up to the Zoologico with us. The zoo here is gratis, thankfully, as it´s very small and boasts a couple monkeys, some un-exotic looking birds and a couple of exotic looking ones, a few racoons and foxes, some anteater-type creatures, and some fish swimming around in water we wouldn´t dare touch with a ten foot pole. It looked like a great place to get robbed. Realizing after a few minutes we had seen all there was to see, we bolted across the busy street to peruse the big fancy mall and get a few provisions. A mall is a mall is a mall. There´s a big fancy clothing store, lots of zapatarias (shoe stores), a food market, everything sparkling clean and each store equipped with security guards.
Our next destination could not have been more different. Across the street from the big fancy mall beyond ¨La Terminal¨ - the bus terminal (which is really just a long line of chicken buses) - is a huge market ¨Mercado Minerva¨ stretching blocks and blocks. It was a little overwhelming to walk into - dust and trash flying under the feet of indigenous mothers dodging in and out of the crowd with bundles balanced on their heads and babies on their backs, chicos and chicas yelling out prices for their fresh fruit, men wandering around shouting how much for the belts piled on their shoulders, the chicos sitting atop enormous piles of clothing yelling ¨Quinze Quetzales, la ropa, la ropa, la ROOOOOOOPAAAA!¨ trying to out-yell the woman atop the pile of clothing next door who´s yelling ¨La Ropa, tres Quetzales, TRES QUETZALES!¨ We were on a mission to find sweaters and long johns. Digging through the piles and piles of clothes - some still sitting in the back of pickup trucks - we found some pretty decent name brands...basically all the rejects from Estados Unidos. Keep in mind that 1 US dollar = approximately 7.8 Quetzales. It felt a little bit wrong to haggle over a sweater that was only going to cost me $2 (and would cost at least $10 or more at home), but it was still pretty fun. Every so often a truck would come driving through and people would have to move the wares they had set up in the middle of the street. As soon as the trucks passed, the streets were immediately full again. Beyond the clothing piles we walked by stall after stall selling grains, fruits, vegetables, spices, pastas, raw meat, fried platanos and tortillas and corn on the cob, machetes, bouquets of roses, shoes upon shoes upon shoes, traditional woven skirts and shawls, stacks of brand new Deisel jeans (we imagine they went out of business or something, anyone know?)....pretty much everything you could think of and a lot you couldn´t even imagine. No wonder it was mobbed with Guatemaltecas...we most definitely stood out in the crowd. We somehow found our way out of the Mercado maze tired, dirty and very pleased with our purchases.
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