Panajachel - Lago de Atitlan - I climbed a volcano! - oops, my spanish teacher is in love with me.

Whoops! Well, I just remembered that Im supposed to be putting pictures on facebook and words on blog. So i will put the rest of the pictures on facebook and the rest of the words here. This is Lago de Atitlan. I stayed here for two weeks in an apartment by myself - i helped the owner fix the place up and also helped her build some fences and a roof garden (pictures on facebook). I carried some serious loads up to the roof for padma. serious. She reminded me of a cross between Katie Becker, Mom and Aunt Cindy. Also she was like me, but also she was almost 60. This woman sang with Grace Slick. I think. Im sure. She told me, and i believed her.

Anyway, Panajachel on Lago de Atitlan is a place where people go to forget the rest of the world. It is about half gringo (white people), and the rest mayans, with a little ladino thrown in for effect. I have been studying under some sort of feminist yoda there, whose name, appropriately, is padma. She went to the lago to teach indigenous women to use the internet, and decided to stay for 15 years. she doesnt have a job, and she likes it that way. It is so refreshing to meet people who dont give a damn if they have a job or not - actually, who don´t even want one! They just want to learn, and working so hard as we work in the US everyday I am beginning to think is detrimental to my mental capacity. I do not learn nearly as much when Im stuck in some sort of routine...I want to be a traveller for my job, and Im looking at ways to facilitate it.

So I got to the town and almost immediately ran into this woman, who I heard speaking english on the street. I asked her if she knew of any apartament that I could rent, and she took me up to hers and set me up inside. I am positive that somehow this was meant to be. I can´t explain it, but this woman was like a mother and a teacher to me, and she needed my help! So I helped her set up her upstairs garden, build some fences around the roof, and clean out her apartments. I also provided her with a daughter figure, and she provided me with a mother. Her daughter moved to the states to go to school for music, and she needed some emotional support. We were meant to be, right?

It is difficult to describe the feeling that I have known someone for longer than life, and irrational. I think the best that I can do without incriminating my craziness too much is to say that I had a very strong feeling when I met her that I wanted to know her better, that we were alike, and that i would learn a lot from her.

She set about teaching me all about guatemalan culture. I read some of her books, I, Rigoberta Menchu, and The Managua Lectures, by Noam Chomsky. From these I learned the story of the Guatemalan war, the genocide, the hatred of the indigenous people. I learned the same stories that I have been learning about other places with different names, different labels. People all over the world with a little bit of power have these same habits of believing, I think without guilt (except that I did see the robert macnamara interviews, fog of war...please watch this if you havent- it is a really good documentary about the vietnam war), that they are entitled to anything that they want. Indigenous people all over central america, and actually, all over the world, have been exploited since way before our time, and they are still being exploited today.

The thing is, though, that they stick with life even though it is hard. The story of Rigoberta Menchu, a mayan woman who helped start the guatemalan revolution, is about a woman and a community and a people that knows how hard life is and yet chooses life every time, over and over again. This is, I think, part of the answer to a lot of my questions about guatemalan culture. When I asked how people could live this kind of life - they just do. They choose life, and life means this life. We dont have the luxury in my circle of knowing what a hard life feels like - the kind of life that abject poverty necessitates, and we also don´t know the satisfaction of providing for ourselves, the gratitude, and the communal experience of a village living through another year. We have lost that with all of the power that we have gained.

So anyway, I am getting hungry. I climbed a volcano in Panajachel - it is called San Pedro Volcano. The Guatemalan people do not understand switchbacks, or easy trails. They get up and get down and probably dont get as sore as I did, but my partners in crime and I were sore for 3 days after we got down from there. It was about 2 miles straight up this thing, with hundreds of stairs to climb as well. It was sort of worth it when I got to the top within seconds of the entire valley being covered by clouds - i mean, i saw a glimpse and then everything was gone. but now i can say that ive climbed a volcano, and even if the experience was only one of pain, hunger, and frustration, I climbed a volcano and you probably didnt.

New itinerary!

Its for those of you that care, so that you will not think im dead all the time...

Today - Im in livingstone, a little carribean town on the coast of Guatemala. Im smelling the ocean!
Friday - Im going to Honduras to pick up my mister, so that we can learn to scuba dive together
The weekend - We´re going to South western honduras to see Copan
Next week - the little island of Utila in Honduras to scuba...
Next weekend - Something else.
After that - Ill just have to keep you updated.

Antigua.

The giant church in the town center at the beginning of semana santa...

and a little confessional booth...


This is one of those must-sees in antigua, the arch, like the eiffel tower or the statue of liberty.


That same giant church...

my school! que bonita!
All of the trees are topiaried here. they all look like weird popsicles.

The fountain of the sirens - los sirenes


La merced - the coolest building in antigua. look at the maize curling up the pillars - guatemala is a mixure of catholic and mayan religion






This is a church outside of town, in a village whose name i cant remember



The band i heard in the park on the first day i was in town! and a fruit seller - guatemalan women can hold anything they want on their heads, im convinced.


Antigua. It is one of the most beautiful old cities that I have ever seen, with old world european feel and baroque architecture and art all over the place. How do you spell architecture, and why do we insist on including hard to spell words in our language?

Anyway, antigua is a protected place, i think at least. It is. A UNESCO world heritage sight. So a lot of the buildings have been kept nice and pretty so that the world will visit the city. Antigua is the most touristy city in Guatemala. There are white people everywhere, and you dont actually have to speak spanish at all. There are european coffee shops everywhere, and restaurants that cater to the gringos.

this is the wikipedia article on Antigua. I would type more about the history, but somebody else already did and my hands are getting sore..

I studied here for a week, living with a cute little old lady named Hilda. She cooked the oddest things - grean beans fried in a mushroom soup batter and covered in eggs, like a croquette. uh, what else? I cant remember.

What I do remember is a feeling of absolute safety - there were so many tourists here and they all spoke english...i was not out of my comfort zone at all here. So that was a bit of a let down for me, because I really want to travel to places where I dont feel comfortable, where it doesnt feel like I am just wandering through to take pictures. I dont know if that is possible here.

It was, however, really nice to be able to hang out with people who understand the world in a similar way to my understanding...very different from San Andres in that way...it was much less serious and a more enjoyable week altogether. In san andres, I felt a little like I was banging my head against a wall trying to understand - in Antigua, I learned to breathe again...
I went salsa dancing with my Korean roommate, drank beer with Canadians and argentinians and americans, climbed a minor hill with a Japanese woman, and went to the market and garden shop and town centre with my spanish teacher to learn vocab! She seriously rocked my business all over antigua. And then it was over -

Oh, here is something I wrote about Antigua that I think can sum it up...spoiler alert- dont read this if you dont want to hear something naughty...

antigua is a city of sex. Everything here has rounded curves like the body of some nubian princess and always the volcano spurting smoke looms in the south...this city is full of the smell of acid and the smell of decay - shit and vinegar. it doesnt fool me and i wont drink the water no matter how thirsty i feel. lotus blossoms bloom in the water here, in eernal sun and facades of romance and the temptation of the salsa.

Coffee!

Coffee! This one has a lot of pictures, but I think it´ll be good. A couple of weeks ago, I visited a coffee plantation that was connected to a museum of Mayan music. I got to drink coffee and listen to music, like at a coffee shop, but with learning. Que bueno. An aside- i have begun to think in spanglish. I think this is only a couple of steps away from thinking in spanish. But the coffee...Im going to learn everybody about coffee and its production and then I will also, because I have the time, moralize at you about the merits of fair trade coffee. Im sorry if it bothers you, but in the end this is my blog and anyway, you´re still reading.

Okay, a coffee tree produces flowers, like the one above. They are the cutest little white blossoms, made all the more cute with the knowledge that one day they will be caffeinating me. They smell like the perfume of the most seductive women - the ones that wear silk and carry long cigarrette holders - the scent hangs in the air even in the mountains where it is dry. It is a scent that you could get lost in for days. When the flowers begin to ripen, they create the little berries that most flowers produce. There are two seeds inside each berry. We know these as beans. When the beans are red, like in the picture, they are ready to harvest. I ate one - it was sweet and green tasting, a little slimy, like starfruit or lychee, green tasting like summer smells.



This is the method of killing bugs that organic farms use, called integrated pest management. They do this in the states too, mostly in fruit orchards, but probably they dont use gasoline...this bottle holds gas in the bottom and something good smellig in the top. the theory is that bugs smell the goods, get stuck in the bad below, and die peaceful drunken deaths. It must work, because these things are all over the plantation.

Whoops. This picture is a little bit out of order, but when the red skins come off of the beans, they make a giant stinkin´ compost pile to use for fertilizer on the trees.

They use a water bath to get the skins off...

and this dude helps them along through their bath...

after the skins are all washed off, the beans (they are still gold, called cafe de oro) are dried in the sun for a couple of weeks - that is my guide showing us the dried coffee beans.
Back in the day, the ladies hated coffee - i wonder what they would think of the coffee klatsch gossip circles of today - but they actually hated coffeeshops, because their husbands would hang out there and talk politics until all hours of the night...

So, then the coffee is either shipped to a developed country to be roasted or roasted on site. Because i was at a museum, the coffee was roasted on site. This is an old roaster.
The longer it is roasted, the darker the roast (mmm. duh). The darker the roast, the less caffeine, and the more smoky and charred the taste. In guatemala, they drink their coffee dark. In the states, I drink it light because, like i said, i think dark coffee tastes burned.


These are some cool old style coffee grinders. They put my p.o.s. coffeemate to shame.

Okay, the fair trade spiel.

In guatemala, a lot of people work to grow the coffee that we put on our tables. This is awesome, and I thank them daily for it. But Guatemalans dont get to drink the coffee that they produce, because in guatemala it is too expensive. Just look at the table up above...sixteen percent, sixteen cents on the dollar stays in the country where the coffee is produced - why?

because the money and the power lies in the hands of developed countries such as the united states. so the workers arent getting a fair wage for working harder, seriously, every day than i have worked in my life. They dont have education, advocates, or economic influence to be able to make a case for themselves, to demand fair pay. Unions? don´t bet on it. The guatemalan government doesnt have time for luxuries such as welfare or healh care for its people. it doesnt have the money for it either.

Fair trade was developed because free trade in the capitalist system(supply and demand economics) is not good for countries that have resources and no money or power. Because all of the demand for coffee is in the developed countries, places like guatemala have to take what we give them as far as price. We would never think to pay our workers such a low wage, but because we dont have to see these workers and we want everything to be cheap cheap cheap, we dont think about the fact that they work for dollars a day out in the sun.

So fair trade basically means that workers, plantation owners, everyone gets a fair price according to the world market for their labor and product. It takes into consideration the fact that we in the developed world have a lot of power over the market. it isnt free, like the name implies, because it is built on the backs of poor farmers and laborers in other countries - even in US territories. here is a link to the fair trade foundation in america. and to Peace Coffee, a Minneapolis roaster that makes the best coffee that I have ever tasted! You should drink it!

It doesnt stop at coffee, though. In guatemala i have been realizing again and again the need for local markets for our food - if only so that Guatemalan people can actually eat the food that they grow here instead of exporting all of it! buy local!

Okay, I love you,
Goodbye.

Check out these knockers...

The doors in Antigua are the most intricate part of the building, probably because all of the walls are adobe, painted in some bright color but otherwise bare. They have giant doors (so that they can drive their cars inside) and then little mini doors built right into them that they use to walk in and out...








This one is one of my favorite doors so far...