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
who dere?
- ben horowitz
- "Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day." - E.B. White
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Friday, June 15, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Friday, June 08, 2007
i applied for my passport 13 weeks ago and haven't gotten it yet.
my sister applied for hers and got it in 8 weeks (it wasn't expedited or anything).
i knew helping out no mas muertes and singing populist songs was a bad idea.
braaaaaaaaghrewrawearsdf
i was supposed to be boarding a plane for guatemala in 10 hours. instead, i'll probably be making lunch. in my kitchen. maybe something vaguely reminiscent of latin america? chipotle veggie burgers anyone?
my sister applied for hers and got it in 8 weeks (it wasn't expedited or anything).
i knew helping out no mas muertes and singing populist songs was a bad idea.
braaaaaaaaghrewrawearsdf
i was supposed to be boarding a plane for guatemala in 10 hours. instead, i'll probably be making lunch. in my kitchen. maybe something vaguely reminiscent of latin america? chipotle veggie burgers anyone?
Thursday, May 24, 2007
preparacciones (and other fake spanish)
hey! if you've got one of these blog thingies, lemme know. i've been kind of out of the internet loop for awhile.
i leave for guatemala in two weeks. my passport was supposed to come in the mail this week. i just checked my status on the passport homepage, and it said they didn't have my application on file. but, they cashed my checks. so, i'll be calling them tomorrow after i perform a ritualistic hex on my phone to bypass the long lines i've been assured i'll have to wait through in phone-hold-limbo.
in the meantime, i've been reading up on the country i'm headed to. i'm starting by reading a case study from a reader i have on latin america, politics of latin america: the power game, put out by the oxford press, that's really quite good. in addition, i'm reading a novel by miguel angel asturias, who won the nobel prize and has a national literary award named after him in guatemala, so i'm guessing he's a big deal of some kind. the book is men of maize and it is tragic and beautiful so far.
it's going to be very interesting going to guatemala. as recently as 1990, about 90% of the population was living below the poverty line. for reference, in the united states in 1990, the census reports that figure at 13.5% - still significantly larger than i'd suspect most people would guess.
the country's economic, social, and political history seems to be a case study of how the united states abused our power internationally, and is one strike among an uncountable collection against the sheer short-sighted paranoid and unbelievable foreign policy of the dulles brothers (more like DULLEST brothers! burn.). basically, we supported a dictatorial regime; when that regime was overthrown in favor of democratic elections in the fifties, the new guys in charge decided to take the land currently not in use by the businesses that owned them and redistribute it to the poor and indigenous communities that had been effectively exploited and robbed of their land since the colonial period 300 years before, thanks to the previous regimes selfish and corrupt business deals with folks like the united fruit company.
we decide that such a move is clearly communist and anti-capitalist (nevermind that, by providing people a sustainable means of living, the average guatemalan would have enjoyed an increase in expendable income, which would've been just about the most important aspect in any truly capitalist economy), and support a new dictator and military overthrow with a massive propaganda campaign and a bombing campaign. fast forward to the present, and we're pretty much directly responsible for generations of civil war, and more than 200,000 civilian casualties who suffered at the hands of the regime we supported - a regime that unabashedly tried to not only stop the guerilla resistance by slaughtering civilians, it also attempted to crush the entire mayan way of life (sound familiar?).
to our credit, i guess we did play a role in the relatively new peace accords between the warring factions.
men of maize, meanwhile, weaves in elements of guatemalan and mayan history into a story that could be placed into that category of "magical realism" - whatever that really means. i'm taking it 30 or 40 pages at a time, on account of the fact that for every page i read, i have to flip to the back of the book 2 or 3 times to understand a sentence with the "notes" section. as with all of my favorite latin american writers, asturias has a way of weaving page long sentences together that leave you breathless and don't even require re-reading to grasp - kind of like kerouac with all of the energy and none of the drugs.
adios mis encantos.
benjamin
i leave for guatemala in two weeks. my passport was supposed to come in the mail this week. i just checked my status on the passport homepage, and it said they didn't have my application on file. but, they cashed my checks. so, i'll be calling them tomorrow after i perform a ritualistic hex on my phone to bypass the long lines i've been assured i'll have to wait through in phone-hold-limbo.
in the meantime, i've been reading up on the country i'm headed to. i'm starting by reading a case study from a reader i have on latin america, politics of latin america: the power game, put out by the oxford press, that's really quite good. in addition, i'm reading a novel by miguel angel asturias, who won the nobel prize and has a national literary award named after him in guatemala, so i'm guessing he's a big deal of some kind. the book is men of maize and it is tragic and beautiful so far.
it's going to be very interesting going to guatemala. as recently as 1990, about 90% of the population was living below the poverty line. for reference, in the united states in 1990, the census reports that figure at 13.5% - still significantly larger than i'd suspect most people would guess.
the country's economic, social, and political history seems to be a case study of how the united states abused our power internationally, and is one strike among an uncountable collection against the sheer short-sighted paranoid and unbelievable foreign policy of the dulles brothers (more like DULLEST brothers! burn.). basically, we supported a dictatorial regime; when that regime was overthrown in favor of democratic elections in the fifties, the new guys in charge decided to take the land currently not in use by the businesses that owned them and redistribute it to the poor and indigenous communities that had been effectively exploited and robbed of their land since the colonial period 300 years before, thanks to the previous regimes selfish and corrupt business deals with folks like the united fruit company.
we decide that such a move is clearly communist and anti-capitalist (nevermind that, by providing people a sustainable means of living, the average guatemalan would have enjoyed an increase in expendable income, which would've been just about the most important aspect in any truly capitalist economy), and support a new dictator and military overthrow with a massive propaganda campaign and a bombing campaign. fast forward to the present, and we're pretty much directly responsible for generations of civil war, and more than 200,000 civilian casualties who suffered at the hands of the regime we supported - a regime that unabashedly tried to not only stop the guerilla resistance by slaughtering civilians, it also attempted to crush the entire mayan way of life (sound familiar?).
to our credit, i guess we did play a role in the relatively new peace accords between the warring factions.
men of maize, meanwhile, weaves in elements of guatemalan and mayan history into a story that could be placed into that category of "magical realism" - whatever that really means. i'm taking it 30 or 40 pages at a time, on account of the fact that for every page i read, i have to flip to the back of the book 2 or 3 times to understand a sentence with the "notes" section. as with all of my favorite latin american writers, asturias has a way of weaving page long sentences together that leave you breathless and don't even require re-reading to grasp - kind of like kerouac with all of the energy and none of the drugs.
adios mis encantos.
benjamin
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