My first ancient Mayan City...

See Tikal in the Northeatern Region of Guatemala? That, my friends, is the jungle. It is also the site of the most famous of Mayan Ruins, Tikal, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.

Actually, Mayan civilations were Indiana Jones´ specialty. Being a child of the eighties, I had to check them out. Being a devout follower of Indiana Jones, I was more than a little interested in seeing the place where the ball rolls out of nowhere to smush him. Sadly, that section of the ruin has been closed off to the public.

But Tikal, Tikal. It was my first experience with an ancient civilization that actually built giant things. I have done some research on the Anasazi and Pueblos in Colorado and New Mexico, first on family vacation and second when I lived in Colorado, but their ruins are nothing compared to the Mayans. These people built, with their bare hands, temples...the one in the picture above is 230 feet high. Thats the size of 2 rolls of toilet paper, mas o menos. Wow!

My guide was a Guatemalan born man who grew up in Brooklyn, Caesar. Caesar told me that because there was no river in the area, meaning that there was no water for the people to drink, and because there were relatively few trees to use to haul the limestone slabs that were used to create the structures, the Mayan rulers had to make it easy-ish for the workers to create the pyramids. The slabs of stone that were used were the size of an arm, about a cubit (they were used in both ancient Egypt and ancient Central America), and easy enough to carry by hand...the rulers were power hungry, he told us. They tortured their own people, warred with other tribes, they were cruel. Seeing a masterpiece like Tikal, it was difficult to imagine ruthlessness, but it is also difficult to imagine something of that magnitude being built without it. It is the skyscraper of yesterday, holding up on high the powerful and rich...

The problem with being at Tikal in the middle of the day is that there are tons of people, and all they want to do is take pictures. They snap a couple and walk to the next site - do they get their $15 worth? Probably, I guess. Im pretty sure that in order to get to know a place, really, you have to sit quietly with it, feel its power. When you walk so fast and talk so much to the person sitting next to you, how can you hear the sacred, the age, the place speaking to you?

I sat at the bottom of Templo IV (the one in the picture), lay in the grass looking up at it and tried to imagine the Maya living there...they were tall, apparently. They were tall and wore a breastplate and skirt over their dark sculpted bodies, and feather headdresses and jewelery - jade and obsidian.

The Mayans had a totally different concept of death than we do: they were not afraid of it. Rather, they welcomed it, especially as a sign of nobility or honor, and as some sort of culmination of a spiritual search.

It is interesting that despite the concepts of heaven and of hell that we suck on like lollipops in our Christian culture, we are still afraid of death. Even though probably heaven and hell were created to deal with our fear of death, they dont work enough that we welcome it like the Mayans...Could it be that Christianity is no longer enough? That the story we have been given doesnt satiate us - that we dont trust the religion that we have created any longer?

That was some of the diary that I wrote the day after I left Tikal. Some interesting things happened to me there, including an invite to sleep at the top of Templo IV on the full moon...something that Im sure that hardly anyone in the world has done. The only problem is that to do it I would have to sleep with the guide...so I bet that the only people that have slept there have been women in their 20s!

If you are interested in more information about the Mayans or Tikal, check out the Tikal or Maya Civilization wikipedia articles. If you want even more, contact me and I will surely send you information.

The thing is, after I witnessed Tikal, I did not want to study spanish any longer- I wanted to stay there forever. There is something magical about that place...

Dontcha wanta fanta, fanta?

These are the ingredients for Central American Fanta...just in case anyone was wondering.
agua carbonata, azucar, saborizantes naturales e identicos a los naturales, acido citrico como acidulante, benzoato de sodio como preservante y colorante amarillo no 6

What? A soda with only 6 ingredients? And notice the conspicuous absence of high fructose corn syrup...see, not all countries are addicted to corn! I hope amarillo no 6 doesnt make my egg count go down or something, because I intend to drink this stuff night and day...

Un poco de mi diario

I want to make this blog into an online journal of my travel. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to download photos yet...Christina...so, partly I have been writing in my journal about twice a day and Im going to copy some of it out right now.

February 4th, 2010
When I left, Minnesota was gray and cold; I slipped on the ice walking down the ramp to the lightrail station. I hate goodbyes, especially long ones, because there is suspense - there is a sense of my being already gone and a depressing sheen covering the whole experience. More than this, though, there is finality, appearing at the doorstep like a bad omen, but refusing to come in...maybe I hate goodbyes because they seem somehow inauthentic, like I have to put on some kind of show to signal to the world that I care? There are expectations about how they should be played out, and I am aware of myself as I say goodbye, wondering if I am meeting expectations.

I watched my bag and shoes go through the bag and shoe machine and promptly the weight of goodbye passed through me, and the weight of lonliness. I remember telling myself to take it one moment at a time from there. All I can do is the thing that I must do next, and those little victories have to sustain me until I can look back and see that they added up to something bigger...

...I will explain - in any uncomfortable situation there is no planning ahead - none, because what is ahead, really, except a line of more things to do? One of the most beautiful things about being on vacation is the simplicity and the linear symmetry - I mean that each day is a line of needs, and put together all days look the same. The simplicity is similar, on vacation there is only one thing to do, and it is the next thing to do.


February 10 2010 2pm
Im waiting for my first spanish lesson. I spent 3 hours with my host family just now, mostly with Monica, the 4 or 5 year old - she doesnt know how old she is. When she talks to me, she doesnt care if I understand and I dont care really, either. We just play. She took me to the lake, just down some concrete steps that resemble the ones in St Peter - thin plant life growing around and through them. Monica is the most patient child I have ever met - more patient than me, even! We tried to catch minnows for a half hour, and every time I got bored and tried to talk to her, she shushed me and pointed at the pescaditos...My first bite of Guatemalan carne (beef with carrots, rice, and onions) was a little bit scary and shocking! There was a bone in the meat that in ingested - not something that we have in America at all. And because it is 85 degrees out, I was not in the mood for a hot meal of rice, meat, and masa tortillas. Especially a big meal - lunch is the biggest meal of the day...

February 6 2010 morning

Is it natural to feel this paranoid in a new place? Wondering what other people are thinking of me but unable to read the expressions on their faces or ask them many questions...Is this what culture shock feels like? Hypersensitivity and consequent exhaustion because, like a child, I am taking in all new information right now? Roosters keep landing on the roof of the house, banging on the tin roof, and I jump every time. The cats and dogs are just skin and bones - they would eat chandler alive!...

afternoon
Just down the street from the school, probably a quarter mile or less, you will come upon a house that looks no different from the other houses. It will have a red door - red french doors actually - that lock with a bolt on the inside of the house. Knock and go in, and you will witness la casa de Elida. The first room is dark and empty...walk straight through, this room will probably be of no use to you. Walk through and into the cemented courtyard, but watch your head because the courtyard is crisscrossed with low-hanging plastic covered wires that are full of drying laundry. This place, which is not covered with the high tin roofs of the rest of the house, has wooden beams hanging high above that connect the cement walls of the two parts of the house. To the east is where Elida and her children sleep...Jessica said that she cooks all day every day, and at night she watches soap operas. It would be hard for me to know what she thinks about it all- her life, her child, it all- because I dont speak spanish very well, but if I had to guess I would say that she is comfortable and content...

February 7, 2010 5 45 pm

As I was writing, the police came to tell me that the park I was sitting in is dangerous at night. The were short and stout men, three of them in one truck, with semi automatic weapons probably left over from the US backed military dictators here. Two of them shook my hand and asked what I was doing and I was too scared to say anything. Three police officers dont get out of their car in the US just to tell someone that theyre in an unsafe place. Maybe the world is more black and white down here?

February 8 2010 9 pm
Its a funny feeling that I have been having, somewhere between my mind wandering aimlessly and my mind wandering aimlessly toward something solid. As it stands now, it doesnt seem real. And not only do my thoughts not seem real, but this experience doesnt either - the people washing their clothes in the lake, firecrackers going off at all hours of the night, paying a quarter for a coke just to have something cold to drink...it seems like a dream, but so does the dream of my life before this...how did my mind wander so far into itself that reality became unreal?...The family is watching television in the room next to mine and I can hear them chatting. They wash the floor with an old t shirt tied to a stick. they wash their clothes in the same sink where they wash their dishes, outside. This must be it - the culture shock - I feel like simultaneously this life and my own life cannot be real, like they cannot coexist on the same planet...

11 pm
I realized, I think, what the feeling I was having earlier is about - I keep expecting that this is not reality, keep expecting to wake up and not be here, that the people exist only in my imagination, that this is not all they have. If this is all they have - a home, a tv, and each other, then I dont understand their lives at all like I thought I did. There must be meaning - something deeper, music or poetry...Ellida goes to church a couple of times a week - she sounds like she is crying when she thanks the Lord for all that she has been given. I remember when I was at church feeling like I didnt get it - why is she sitting next to me crying out to God and Im wondering what the proper reaction should be? ...

February 10 2010, 6 20 am
Every day is the same, predictable, safe...Safe, comfortable, and full of family here. Neighbors visit every once in a while, but for the most part the family sticks to itself. There is a gas stove inside that they choose not to use - a fully stocked kitchen that has been abandoned for food cooked over a wood fire, knives that have browned with age and use. She prefers the heat of a wood fire in the hot afternoon to the cool air inside the kitchen? Before I thought that this life was an ignorant one, but I am realizing now that this is at least something of a choice...It is a lot more like my family than I had previously believed, it just happens to be on a different continent with a different standard of living...When I said this is their reality? what i think I meant was that they dont understand my reality or, for that matter, the reality of a lot of the rest of the world, but they are happy...

EcoEscuela de Español

EcoEscuela - Mi primer escuela
EcoEscuela de Espanol - the fire!

These are the links to my school! Sitting in the classroom, going to the caves and to the park, taking walks around town, I have learned more Spanish than I ever should have. If you are considering studying spanish, consider this school. If you are considering studying spanish abroad soon, call me.

Rockamala.

I had to. It was the first thing that i thought of to write about Guatemala, and since this is my blog, I wrote it. Please, if you are not impressed, do not write. I am in Guatemala!
thanks for all of your concern. i have made it here safely, and I am happy and healthy in la casa de mi familia nueva. Find Flores on the map...at the north end of Guatemala. Then look across the lake to the north and mostly west. This is the tiny Guatemalan town of san andres. How I got here is not important. All that matters for the time being is this town. I am living with a family of 9 for the week, not including the animals. My host mother has all daughters, four of them, and three grandchildren. There are roosters here! Serious roosters that cock their doodles at 4 in the morning. The sun has not even begun the shallow morning breaths, and already the villiage boys are setting off bombas, the loudest kind of firecracker, and the roosters are busy waking me up. After that racket, the birds and parrots sing in the trees, and my host mother gets up to begin cooking breakfast for her husband, who works very early in the morning. At 5, the bus for the next town over, Santa Elena, drives through the town, honking and hollering Elleeeenaaa. Living without windows in a town that rises before the sun is, well, new for me.
After I get up, I write in my journal for an hour or so ... trying to get my dreams down, trying to make sense of it all ... and practice my spanish for a bit before going out to breakfast at around 7 15. When I go out into the courtyard outside of my room, the chickens and roosters make a narrow berth, and i walk through quickly so I dont get pecked. The dog usually says hello to me, and the cats look up expectantly for some food. I never feed the cats. You know how I feel about them, and anyway, they get enough food.
i learn spanish every day for 4 hours. It is some of the more exhausting work that I have ever done. Marta, my teacher, talks to me and I write down the things I know, the things I don't, and the things I wish I could know someday. She is incredibly patient, and we laugh a lot at not being able to understand each other, and also because in my spanglish meanderings, I frequently use improper words and even...gasp...vocabularia sexual...and then I get shushed and we both laugh. After school I take lunch in the dining room, and a nap in my bedroom- possibly the only doored room in the house. But actually, i have only napped when I needed to... when I didnt compensate for the roosters and bombas.
In the evenings, I usually walk around the town. Its a town of 7000, not unlike St Peter, except that to walk around the town I have to walk up the most giant ass hill that I have ever climbed. It is as tall as Mount Everest, or at least as tall as Mount Cook. I have to huff and puff my way up the hill to get to the internet cafe, that is usually offline. Then I huff back down the hill, careful not to fall, con mucho cuidado porque es un poco peligroso, and make it back to my house in time to watch spanish television. Its not great, but it helps me with my spanish! Plus, I need a break every night after listening to a new language every day...so we watch the tele. And then I go to my room to practice my Spanish, write in my journal, and start it all again tomorrow. I know, i know, I am leading an exciting existence right now. When i go to Antigua, hopefully I will be able to make friends, but in San Andres, everyone hangs out with their families at night and goes to bed pretty early. I havent met white people until today, so maybe I can hang out with otro gringos for the rest of the week.
Anyway, I am way over my internet allotment for the day. I hope that everyone is okay in Minnesota...I heard you got dumped on by the snow! Love you,
Lora