tikal part one

i don't really know where to begin describing our trip to tikal. i guess i'll update with pieces, poco a poco.

massacres in the history of guatemala have often occurred at the hands of foreigners, and, more recently, have been perpetrated by the country's own government. it was nature, though, that chisteled the gravestone of the mayans in tikal.

the ruins sat undiscovered for about a thousand years, after a severe drought killed off a majority of the massive city's population and left the city abandoned. rumor has it that the group of archaelogists was searching for a lost frisbee when they realized they were surrounded by 3,000 buildings of stone. just kidding (about the frisbee part).

the mayans could build temples that kissed the sky, cities that easily withstood the fury of earthquakes, and could design an elaborate aqueduct system that captured rain into huge reservoirs, but when tikal was dying of thirst, they could not summon water from the sky.

our guide - i forgot his name - had lived and worked in the jungle for decades. he could describe with an expert's knowledge the significance in everything the mayans did with regards to planning the city. all of the temples we saw were built with a reference point to a solar equinox or solstice in mind, and every step had a numerological significance as well. our guide could also imitate the cries of various monkies, as well as the birds, perfectly. he showed us the tree that an american company came, smelled, and started exporting to use for old spice deoderant. he told us that after the tour he was going to eat termites, and that they tasted like carrots. more later, probably? love ben

bus or microbus?

the way to get anywhere in xela for 1Q (15 cents) is to hop on a microbus.

a microbus is a minivan, stuffed to the gills with passengers - between a dozen and sixteen people. they stop at random intervals throughout the city, at which point one of the workers on the bus jump off the still-moving vehicle and start yelling the buses general direction, shepherding as many people as will fit into the van when its door is open. there are as many as 3 kids who have this job at the busier stops, and they ride with half their body hanging out as the driver careens through the streets, which are barely wide enough to accompany a pedestrian and a car at the same time and either unpaved or paved with uneven stone.

contrary to popular belief, the burrito is not a popular food item in guatemala, probably because corn - not flour - tortillas are a staple of their diet. still, we got some today before returning to help out at la escuela de la calle, and they were by far the worst thing i've had in guatemala - although they still weren't bad. next, i need to find a chili relleño.

love
ben

soy señor barba!

i'm not gonna write much because i'm about to bombard you with pictures!

i've tried to make it a habit of mine to greet almost everybody i pass on the street, in spanish. almost everyone returns my salutations with a grin and a response. i figure, if i'm going to look like an oafish gringo tourist, i might as well look like a friendly, oafish, gringo tourist.

today we went to the school corinne will be working at... the kids were awesome. full of energy and mischief. helped us paint some kiíche words on a wall.

i had a fried plaintain, stuffed with chocolate, and covered in sugar and cream. it was amazing.

hiking a volcano

setting out with 8 people loaded into a tiny, covered bed truck:


this is how far we hiked. no joke. to the top of that peak and back... well, i only made it the first two vertical kilometers... to the smaller peak...


this was the fog we encountered at the beginning of the hike:


this is what it looked like as we emerged:




relaxing!! at the halfway point:


(mi amigo nuevo scott):


el calle de la escuela (the school of the street: cori's future work place):

jose and anderson. jose is the one who wants to take a picture. he told me he was 13.


jose y yo (jose is the cool looking one):






various locations around quetzeltanango (xela) and guatemala city:

from the hostel we stayed at the first night:










from the room i slept in in guatemala city:


en route from guatemala city:






from the streets of xela:






the cafe where we watched a documentary on the buena vista social club:


the first delicious guatemala tostada:


finally, this is where i have class every morning:


love,
ben

what's that on your shirt?

when i first arrived here, cori told me that the local indigenous folks get upset if they see non-mayans wearing mayan clothing. i understood to an extent. there's not much in american culture i would feel upset about people casually adopting. i've seen plenty of people wearing nfl clothing, who probably don't know who joe montana is, and i could care less. if i saw someone using an american flag as a dishtowel, i wouldn't even care that much, though i don't imagine it'd be very practical.

i didn't really understand how connected the mayan way of life is with their clothing until today. i hate talking about these things, because i feel like the vocabulary we use for ''religion'' and ''culture'' is completely incapabale of fully describing other... cultures, but i don't really know how to broach the intersubjective on the internet, so here we go. i'll employ plenty of idiot quotes, most likely.

everything, from the way the cloth is made to the colors of the cloth to the ''symbols'' used on the clothing ''represent'' different parts of mayan ''culture'' and the ''earth.'' (i'll stop now.) the shirts are connected to the orbit of the earth, vegetation, animals, love, lifecycles, etc. etc. while they are doubtless also designed in a way to be visually appealing (vanity is part of nature, not just human nature), seeing someone wearing it solely for that reason must be like a diehard catholic seeing a stripper in a nun's outfit.

also, today i had the most declicious squash ever for lunch. two different kinds. with a soup, tortillas, a carrot, and a potato with two flavors of agua fresca. lunch is the central meal of the day for guatemaltecas, although the portions were still a little small for me. rather than frequent snacking, i'm going to try and adapt my diet to eat smaller meals, which is supposedly better for you anyway.

tonight. movie about buena vista social club.

love,
ben

ben and cori vs. the AGGROCRAG

ok. quick update, because corinne and i are going to meet our family soon.

the busride down, the bus decided to show scary movie 4. terrible movie. once it was over, they switched to boleros. nice.

the cavern walls and mountain villages were littered with political graffiti, mostly for FRG, who i've heard ain't so great. i'll find out more later.

not too much else to report. i wish i had a window seat. pictures later.

the first person i met in xela was oscar, my cabdriver. his taxi smelled awful. we hold an awkward conversation in spanish. its pouring rain outside, and he offers me toilet paper to dry off. i like being wet. his favorite food in xela is from the chinese restaurant. he says xela is the best city in the world. my verdict is still out, but i think there is already a strong case. after we dropped off another girl at the school, oscar and me had hard time finding the hostel cori reserved for us, driving around and around, eventually stopping back at the school to telephone the hostel.

once we got there, the rain had died down a bit. i met cori and we took to the city streets, first a bakery (more on both the bakery and the streets when i have more time). after we got a quick dinner, we went back to the hostel, just in time avoid another downpour, giving us a good reason to stay inside and talk for hours.

we ventured out later. bought tamales from a mayan woman on a streetcorner. sipped tea in a cafe where a guy was playing amazing music.

today, we just got back from hiking a volcano. for those of you who missed the volcano episode of reading rainbow, levar burton told us all that after a volcano covers the ground in lava and ash, the ground becomes very fertile. it was one of the most beautiful hikes i've been on, and without a doubt the most intense - about 4 kilometers vertically, and the last half was intensely steep.

about 30 minutes past the halfway point, a beautiful hill, my weak knee was starting to buckle. another member of our hiking party named scott was already waiting at the halfway point due to fatigue. i ran back down the side of the volcano to join him, and we lounged in the shade and talked tillich, buber, music, and food - 3 of which are my favorite subjects. scott is a seventh day adventist pastor, and i learned a lot about their church.

the silence on the side of a volcano is different than the silence in the city. silence in the city makes me nervous. on the side of a mountain, as miguel asturias put it, the noises of the bugs, the birds, and the leaves rustling in the breeze intensify the silence even more by providing a subtle contrast. i watched bees pollinate flowers, we watched kids walking horses packed with firewood (with a friendly buenas tardes) and we napped.

three and a half hours later, we met back up with the rest of the group - corinne, julio (our guide from the school), deidre, and rayna, two sisters who also plan on becoming seventh day adventist ministers. we hiked all the way back down.

i had ice cream from the back of a truck. it was delicious.

love
ben

whoa dude

i've never experienced the world with an ipod before. never lived the ilife, done the ibike, or ridden on an itrain. i remember being in middle school and making my own mixtapes to listen to before i had a discman, then getting a coveted discman, and then losing interest in listening to music all the time.

3 weeks without tunes would be a bit much to handle, though. fortunately mr. ginsbug has lent me his ipod, and thus cut my packing supplies in half by eliminating a metric butt ton of cd-rs.

moral of the story, anyway, is that the first song the ipod picked on shuffle was ´´untitled song for latin america´´ by the minutemen. way to go, steve jobs!

at this point, i was hoping i'd be at a hostel, meeting more grizzled and veteran travelers, and seeing what guatemala city was like on a friday night. unfortunately, the hostel was full, so i'm at a really nice woman and her son's house all by my lonesome. if i was feeling a bit less tired, i'd probably ask them for somewhere to go, but i don't think i have the mental energy to eke by on my minimal spanish without one other ally in crime.

my minimal encounter with guatemalan people, so far, has me pretty stoked, though. the airport was way different than sky harbor. the people working there looked more or less just as bored, but were incredibly helpful and friendly, and patient with the language barrier.

to end with another musical footnote, the folks who picked me up at the airport are apparently fans of the charlie daniels band, u2, and queen. it's funny how my first impulse was to think ´´they like american music´´ when only 1 of those bands is from america. go team!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

pretty interesting how such radical geographical relocation can take place with such little fanfare.

tomorrow!

i leave tomorrow! as in, in about 11 hours. huzzah!