Guatemala!

Quote for the day from the dean’s memo:
Whatever you can do, or believe you can do, begin it. BOLDNESS has genius, power and magic in it. -- Anonymous

Guatemala was looking to be pretty exciting. Angie and her coworker Amie were gonna come meet up with me in Guatemala via a flight from DC to El Salvador and then onto Guatemala City (only 4 hours total from D.C.!) ISE told SAS that the state department had issued a mandatory curfew of 11:30 pm, and the whole country was kind of famous for crime that ranged from pick pocketing and armed robbery, all the way to child kidnappings. Honestly though, none of us knew what to expect – SAS scared the shit out of us in numerous countries; in India they made us wary of every possible terrorist attack. Guatemala was around the same safety level of South Africa, and though I never had any problems in South Africa, I knew lots and lots of people who’d been robbed. However, I’d never had any problems at all these past four months, so I figured it’d all work out. I was so excited in fact (and on a messed up sleep schedule from finals) that I didn’t end up sleeping until 5am, so after two hours of sleep I got up and showered and finished packing for Guatemala.

We docked far earlier than originally expected – around 8 instead of the originally scheduled 11am (thanks captain Jeremy!) But by the time the gates of Puerto Quetzal had opened and the shuttles to said gates had started running, it was 11 anyways. I’d gotten the heads up the night before that Angie and Amie weren’t going to be able to meet me at the port itself but that we’d find each other at the hostel she’d been looking at. I was thankful to get out of the port since we were in the same kind of situation as Laem Chabang in Thailand; the port was a good 1.5/2 hours away from Antigua or Guatemala City and there was no real city around the port itself. Plus SAS was geeking out about curfews and safety and had made all these rules about when we’d be allowed on the ship (only until 11:30) and off again (10am) but there were also some rule about sometimes you wouldn’t be able to get off until 3pm… I don’t know. I appreciate the concern for our safety, but in a country where a hostel costs something like an average of $4 per bed, there was absolutely no need for me to be anywhere around the boat.

Anyways, Allie and I took the little cramped shuttle that sat around for 45 minutes in mass confusion before leaving to take us to the port taxi area. This turned out to be another SAS sponsored lie though, because no actual taxis were there, and in their stead were massive tourist shuttles sponsoring tours to Antigua for the original asking price of 30 dollars a person, though pre-port said that a taxi ought to cost 10-20 dollars a car to be split between however many people we could cram in. We heard a rumor about real taxis parked outside of the port area but we had absolutely no idea where we were going and I wanted to get to Antigua already since I told Angie and Amie I’d meet up with them around noon and we were already running late. So Allie and I walked back towards the port center and hopped in a way too crowded van. Allie sat on the pullout chair and I sat on the floor while all the car parts I don’t really understand – pipes? Engine? Burnt through the Van’s floor and scalded my ass. Amongst about a billion backpacking bags and with a burning butt, for 15 dollars a person, I figured this was a worrisome start to my last time in any port.

The ride there we were seated next to a bunch of bros and hos who’d rented a house on the edge of Antigua and were planning to get, like totally wasted the whole time. For $1,000 dollars for two nights and two days, I thought they were retarded. The house was nice but nothing spectacular. One story and on the edge of town they were going to pay each for a normal hotel in cab fares alone. Not to mention there was no way they were going to see that much of Guatemala from inside their little pocket of fratboy hell. Also, considering the average income of a Guatemalan is around $3,000 a year, I felt like that money should have been better distributed throughout all sectors of the economy to lots of different families. Whatever; do you I guess. We saw them off and headed to the center of town to the hostel. Neither Amie or Ang were at the hostel when we’d arrived 45 minutes later than originally planned so I asked the hostel receptionist of a good authentic restaurant nearby, and we left a note telling them to meet us there whenever they got back. Both Allie and I were starving at this point since we’d had the normal crappy breakfast at 7 and hadn’t eaten anything since. So we went to the Café de la Calle Fontane (anyways that’s what I think it might be called – I forgot to pick up a card.) I’d asked our taxi driver what his favorite Guatemalan food was and he said chilerianos, or bell peppers stuffed with minced meet, rice, and vegetables, covered in an egg, and then fried. We figured that sounded pretty awesome, so we both ordered those, and Allie got a tumbler of the expensive Guatemalan rum she’d heard good things from, while I ordered a side of plantains with honey and cream and a Gallo beer. The chilerianos were amazing, very spicy but very delicious. There was a light green dish of chile sauce that I later came to think of as a ubiquitous part of Antigua, as it was on every table. The gallo beer tasted like a Guatemalan natty light, but I do have to admit, when your mouth is on fire, it starts to taste significantly better.

We’d found my friend Sarah throughout all of this and had her sit with us for a bit while she ordered wine (except we found in a lot of Guatemalan restaurants you have to buy wine by the bottle more often than not) so she was drinking a bottle by herself and eating some garlic bread. The restaurant itself was really gorgeous and airy – there was an open pavilion with tables around it and a second floor with more tables overlooking the center of the restaurant. The walls were yellow with pottery and poetry all over. We’d been seated beside the window so I was keeping lookout for Angie, when BAM! She arrived. We hugged and Sarah met back up with the rest of the smokers while Angie and I caught up a bit. This was also my first time meeting Amie so we all chatted a bit before wandering off in search of a hotel. The first place we were originally going to meet up at only had rooms on the first floor which Angie had read on trip advisor were really noisy at night, so we looked around Antigua for another place. We ended up reserving a room at a really cute place with three beds, a fan, t.v., and an enormous shower. I’ll just add photos once I’m back because I wouldn’t do it justice to describe it – it’s not as though it was gorgeous and extravagant. It was homey and sweet. Lots of plants and ceramics, hammocks and wood tables. Exactly the kind of place I wanted to stay, and all for around 20 dollars.

We went across the street and down a block to the artisans market – on the way we passed a grocery store where I pulled out some money (overseen by a couple armed guards) and passed an SAS student who said he’d bought a baby turtle nearby. We found the pet store where we figured he’d bought it and took lots of pictures of all the crazy animals. I’m pretty sure I’ve snapped photos of adorable puppies in nearly every country by now, but I still love them. We walked along the lines of stalls in the outside of the market and talked to a bunch of the vendors. Angie bought an awesome Technicolor Virgin Mary shawl thing with fluorescent roses and tasseled edges, Allie bought an embarrassing and yet kind of cool backpack that says “Guatemala” with the crazy textile patterns that are seen on nearly everything there. Oh! And a small interjection; in Antigua, you can actually see locals wearing “authentic” kind of clothes. In Antigua that means a lot of women in the same textiles of brightly colored, thick fabric, that they fashion into short sleeve shirts and long skirts to their ankles. It’s pretty cool. I bought a few bracelets and a couple necklaces. I haggled a little bit but I was really enjoying the vendors themselves – after a series of non-haggling countries and considering the last place I’d really bargained for everything was Vietnam where the vendors lacked any finesse and had no concept of polite banter and back-and-forth, I was excited to be back in my element.

We wandered around a little more and found our way inside a sheltered section of the market; there were still stalls but they were built into the sides of walls and were clearly sectioned off from one another. I wandered around some and found a crazy white blanket with hand-embroidered different scenes with fluorescent yarn. With scenes of little brown children playing around a see saw (this is a big thing for me. I can’t stand when art from a country with people who are obviously not white are depicted as such. It’s weird. And it perpetuates an even weirder standard of beauty that paler skin is better looking, which is just wrong. In India and Africa there were bleaching creams all over the place and all the models had skin the color of butter. That’s so fucked-up and wrong! Here we are in these countries full of absolutely gorgeous people with skin ranging from light toffee to a color so black it almost looks like dark blue. I’ve seen so many people with skin that looks so warm and beautiful that it makes me so sad that my souvenirs from those people look like me and nothing like them.) Moving on, there were also scenes of a quetzal flying over the three local volcanoes nearby Antigua. The quetzal is the Guatemalan national bird and a big deal. It’s a crazy-looking green thing with a long curly tail that they name everything after. Even their money are called Quetzales.

I haggled for a long time with the guy who started at 700 Q which was crazy. I liked it a lot but not 60 dollars. Eventually I got him down to 250 Q, or twenty dollars, which I figured was good enough. I hope when I get home my Aunt Bah could help me make it a part of a quilt since I’m worried the stitches in the back might become unraveled if I don’t put it against some more fabric. Plus I just think it would make a good quilt, haha. So during all of this haggling it’d become really hot. All the foot traffic combined with a hot day in Central America, and Angie said she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to step outside. Angie hadn’t eaten anything at the restaurant and I was worried about her getting lightheaded, so as soon as I’d finished up with the vendor I found Allie and went outside. We found Angie really sick. She’d been throwing up in the trashcan on the edge of the indoor market and was pale and greenish. She said she just needed to lay down back at the hotel so she walked back there and hung out for a little bit while Amie and I tried to workout a cab back to the port for Allie since she had a field program trip to the Pacaya and had to be back there since she’d already paid 90 dollars for it. We searched for a really long time but it seemed the lowest price we could find was $50 USD for the ride back. This is the kind of problem we’ve encountered in numerous countries.

When a whole town knows 700 rich white kids are coming (and don’t underestimate the fact that EVERYONE knows you’re coming and apart of a circumnavigating trip – I’ve had locals tell me our itinerary) things get crazy. We’re talking really crazy. They can charge us outrageous prices for whatever and since so many of these kids from the ship haven’t traveled much and are INSANELY loaded with their parent’s money, they’ll pay it. Thus setting the asking price for some things exponentially higher than they would be for me as a normal traveler unassociated with a program like SAS. Usually things work out despite this –except in the case of Allie with these freaking cabs back to the port. I’d heard one girl paid $116 dollars to get back that night so there was no way anyone was going lower than 50 bucks. Eventually though I found another girl who wanted to go back to the ship and said she’d split the money with Allie so they’d only have to pay 25 dollars. It was already about 8pm and they didn’t want to get dock time or anything for being late past the curfew so they decided to just go. A note on how sketchy this whole place was though: they paid their money to a travel agency before they left in a cab the company called with a driver that spoke essentially no English. The agency guys then chatted Amie and I up, told us to go salsa dancing that night, asked if I had a boyfriend, and when I said yes, he asked if we could have a one night stand. He then proceeded to give Amie a bag of macadamia nuts still in their shells. I was really confused.

So we left and Amie and I went back to the hotel to check on Angie. She was a serious mess and only getting worse – she was throwing up blood and she thought she’d need to go to an emergency room. Angie’s usually really good with pain so I figured if she wanted to go to a hospital that’s exactly where she needed to be, we got the name of a good private hospital and took a tuk tuk there. (note to travelers: tuk tuks are fine on the relatively paved roads of India and Thailand – however on the old-timey cobblestone streets of Guatemala they make for an even more harrowing ride…) We checked her into the hospital of Santiago de Apostal and they hooked her up to an IV. No one there really spoke English and so things were really confusing for a while there – though I should note it seems in extreme situations, like that of my being falling-down drunk at DC United games and sitting with Bolivian fans, as well as when my best friend is in the emergency room in Antigua, I miraculously know Spanish.

It seemed that both a billion things were happening and yet nothing at all was going on that night. They gave her medicine to protect her stomach before anti-biotics, but the anti-biotics never came. They tried to give her a sedative (maybe?) but they couldn’t explain what it was and Angie didn’t want mystery medicine. This is actually really interesting in retrospect since I took a class on patient rights and biomedical ethics around the world this semester. Remember when I wrote in an earlier blog about how American patients want to know every possible outcome, what exactly is going in their bodies, and when exactly they’ll be better, latin patients are fine with paternalistic approaches. But since all my FDPs for that class are long over and I am now technically a senior with a whole new series of courses waiting for me back home, I’ll be moving on now. There was no way I would be sleeping much in that hospital room (though they did let me stay thankfully since we kept saying I was her sister, while Amie got some sleep back at the hotel) and I wasn’t about to leave Angie there alone, so for the second and a half day I’d be getting 2ish hours of sleep. The next afternoon they finally called the actual doctor back who finally gave her the full diagnosis of two parasites, a throat infection, and a bladder infection. Like I said, she was a mess.

She really wanted to go home at this point, and I felt like she would be in better hands with a doctor who not only had her medical history and knew how to treat all these problems but also spoke fluent English. I was worried if she got worse there wouldn’t be anything else the hospital there could do considering all they essentially did in a day with her was hook her up to three IVs. We went back to the hotel and she left to take an emergency flight home on the flight that was leaving in exactly two hours. Amie decided to stay and signed up for a trip to Pacaya (the active volcano that’s something like 40 minutes from the center of Antigua) that was picking her up around 2 – we went for lunch at a little theater café down the street in the meantime. I ordered a sandwich that was essentially a baguette with garlic butter, pesto, actual basil leaves, and a thick slice of mozzarella, and fries with the Guatemalan version of orangeade. I mixed that green chile sauce with ketchup on the fries (spicy and delicious!)

Amie headed back to the hostel and I wandered around the city. I had planned to meet Allie from 4:30 to 5:30 in the central square of town, which meant I had essentially three hours to kill. I wandered all around town, bought a tortoise for Dad, and a pastry to give to Allie when I saw her since she’s obsessed (the bakery was actually called “Hansel y Gretel” which I found delightful and had a nice conversation in broken Spanish/English with the shop owner about which were her favorites. I prayed in the main church beside the plaza, I visited an art gallery and got to look around the day before everything would be unveiled, I escaped a guy who nearly crashed his motorcycle while trying to talk to me, who then parked his bike down the street I was walking along.

I waited in the plaza for Allie to show up, gave her pastry to a dirty kid who was looking for food in the trash can, but when it was 5:30 and she hadn’t shown up I decided to get to the black cat hostel where I told Allie to meet me if she was running late. Originally we’d planned to head to the earth lodge, a hotel of treehouses overlooking an avocado farm, where Amie would try to meet up with us later. I asked the information guy how to get there and he gave me a map with elaborate directions to go down certain roads. I figured I’d just take the most direct route because I was already running late and lots of streets in Antigua aren’t marked. So while walking along I began to realize I was essentially in the ghetto. Nothing was going on and it was kind of creepy. Remind you I stick out a lot right now. I’m in a bright multicolored dress and a yellow cardigan, with a huge backpacker’s bag on my back, and big purse on my arm, clutching a map. An old guy comes up to me and touches my shoulder and says something like, “Aqui estas muy silencio; aqui estas muy peligrosso. Something else in Spanish I don’t know.” Considering I have never taken a Spanish class and what I do know is pretty severely limited, I’m a little surprised I got the gist of what he was saying, which went along something like: “Here is really quiet. It’s really dangerous.” He was shooing me to leave but my hotel was on the end of the street so I headed there, which was really fucking stupid in retrospect, but I figured I was already in the ghetto, and to retrace my steps would mean I would still have to walk in the ghetto for 5 more minutes so I might as well be headed in the right direction…

I was at the edge of the street when two guys started yelling things at me. I kept walking. (Another side note, I got a lot more attention here than any other port by a lot. A lot of catcalls and whistling and guys staring. Sometimes it came in handy, like when I got really good prices from shopkeepers, and sometimes it didn’t, like when those two guys cornered me and edged me against the wall, talking about how pretty I was. I flipped out and started yelling and essentially sprinted to the black cat hotel that I could see from there. The guy there locked up the gate outside the hotel (lots of hotels in Antigua had big wrought-iron gates) while I sprawled out on the couch hyperventilating. We talked for a bit and he told me about how they’d increased security exponentially that month – probably because they knew we were coming and would need a lot more security. I know it’s usually not that great though; our diplomatic briefing guys told us there is only one police officer for every 1,400 citizens… So the guy calls the earth lodge people where their shuttle is and he’s told they’re picking people up from the other black cat hotel. This was the Black Cat Inn, which was totally different from the Black Cat Hotel/Hostel. What. The. Fuck.

It’s raining now. And so I walk back the safe route as outlined originally by the information guy to the center square and towards the right hotel. Remember I’m essentially running on four hours of sleep for the past three days, and am now walking in the rain after being harassed and narrowly escaping something that could have possibly been a lot, a lot worse, alone in a city I don’t know and that doesn’t speak English, my best friend was diagnosed with Lupus and went home on an emergency flight, and my cellphone doesn’t work. So when I see my friend Amy in the center square I of course burst into tears and dissolve into a puddle of mess. She was hanging out with her boyfriend (kind of?) and I had to get to the other black cat to see if Allie was there waiting since the Earth Lodge people were picking everyone up in 10 minutes, so I leave Amy and run there only to find the shuttle had already left and the asshole who ran the desk couldn’t tell me who was on the shuttle or the number of the place. I go to an internet café for a few minutes to see if anyone wrote where they were since at this point I was really over being alone in Antigua, dropped my bags off at the hotel we’d booked that first night, and talked to the guy working there.

I have to note that this man was the sweetest guy ever. I’ve been thinking a lot about how in Judaism there’s a concept of how the world is sustained by 36 people, no one knows exactly who these people are, and they don’t know they themselves are what is keeping the world in balance. I feel like in these past 4 months I’ve met a couple of those people – these selfless and absolutely amazing, beautiful people who keep the world right. This guy might have been one of those lamed vav tzadikim. He let me keep my bags there all the time even though he knew I wasn’t going to stay there again, asked me if I was okay, how my friend was doing, and constantly asked if there was anything he could do, anyone he could call, or translate. I left my bags there and said I’d be back at 8pm when Amie was supposed to be coming back from the volcano hike. I went to the center square to see if anyone I knew was there since I really didn’t want to be alone anymore.

Once there I met up with Amy, Stephanie, Scott, and Jordan. It was a huge relief to be around people I knew again… We all went to dinner where I was still a little too upset to eat but Amy bought me a beer and we talked for a while. Around 8 I met back up with Amie who had an awesome time at the volcano. I have to admit, I was a little jealous, since it looked so, so, cool. However, everyone I’d met who’d been up there had big gashes on them from the volcanic rocks and Amie’s shoe even caught on fire. We all met up and dropped our bags off at the hotel they were all staying at. Since they had 4 beds they said we could just crash with them, which was really generous. We went out for drinks at El Mono Loco since Amie was meeting up with Liz (Cassie’s roommate) there. It was like Senior Frogs all freaking over again. It was literally all SAS kids it seemed.

A redeeming quality of the crazy monkey’s though, was their 8 Q ($1.25) shots of rum and rum and cokes. We drank a couple of those each and talked to some people outside. One pretentious obnoxious Brit was just giving everyone shit – he made fun of the fact that I was wearing an I heart DC shirt (my sleep shirt, but considering we had our last laundry day three days before we even reached Guatemala, I was wearing it out anyways) and from around DC. I asked him where in the UK he was from and when I didn’t know where it was he said, “Well of course you wouldn’t.” He was awful. However, we did meet some hilarious police officers who wanted to chat us up outside. Seriously, I have become increasingly aware of the fact that cops love me. As you can imagine, this is an incredibly handy facet of my personality – we posed with them and I got to wear their hat. Anyways, we met up with a cute Brazilian guy who’d been staying at that first hotel and was much too old but really very cute, that Amie had her eye on. We also found Liz as she was leaving dinner and was headed back with a big group of girls to their hotel. She said she’d be back for drinks once she saw her friends off, but she never made it back. Later I found out it was because they’d all been robbed and groped at knifepoint.

Everyone else wanted to go home but Amie and I and considering I was running on no sleep and only lunch for the day I probably should have gone in too, but I was already out and I felt like I hadn’t seen nearly enough of Guatemala yet, so Amie and I went back out to see some different clubs. Also – I was really wary because it was around 11 already and clubs in Antigua close down by midnight and there was that curfew of 11:30. We went to Reilley’s, a really crowded Irish pub where we ordered rum and cokes and hung out with a gay Jew from DC (that shirt came in handy after all) and his Israeli traveling companion. We chatted and drank some and then headed across the street to club casaba. It was alright there and the dj seemed pretty good but there was seriously only like 5 or 6 people there and all of them middle aged Guatemalans. We stayed until midnight when everything was shut down and then headed back to the hotel.

The next day we slept in until around 10 which meant we didn’t have much time to see the rest of Antigua our last day in port. Scott arranged for a chill taxi driver they’d met to take us back to the ship around 1 – it was a two hour drive and over 200 students on SAS trips were going to be coming back all during 5-6pm, so we all figured we’d ought to be there sooner rather than later. We had breakfast overlooking the central square (fresh fruit with crepes and unsweetened yoghurt for me with sweetened iced cappuccino, fried eggs with bean paste and plantains with Mayan hot chocolate for Scott and Steph, and a plate of pineapple for Amie.) It was really, really good. We then headed out to a local emporium style place that sold all kinds of Guatemalan stuff. It was all sticker priced but the prices were fair and they had all kinds of stuff under one roof. I had $25 dollars left to spend so I bought a mask for my mom, some hot sauce for Million and my dad, a statue of the virgin mary for myself (they had a gooooorgeous old one priced for 60 dollars with dark skin and fingers so intricately carved you could see her fingernails, along with gold foiled robes and a huge intricate crown. Instead I bought a more solid big wood 6 dollar one…) and some other little things for friends back home.

We were running out of time so I hurried up and spent the very last of my money and walked to the square where we were all going to meet up and get in the van together. We met up with Carlos, our driver, and all piled into the van. No longer than 5 minutes into the trip someone asked if we could smoke and Carlos said, “Hell yeah. You can even drink. In fact, we can stop by a cheap liquor store on the way there – I know how you SAS kids are.” So Joe was getting drunk in the back off a bottle of rum, and Scott, Jordan, Steph, and Carlos, were all drinking really good rum. Amy and I drank a beer each but it was more because it was just hot out; I wasn’t really about to get drunk right before getting on the ship. I was way too tired. We get only a few miles out of town when the police pulled us over. Carlos told us to all put the beer and liquor between our feet because the police were all really corrupt in Guatemala. We were all legal to drink, and it wasn’t as though our driver had been drinking, but the police held people up and did weird random searches just to try to get money from everyone. They searched the sides of the van and the back and demanded to see if we had all the right equipment to change a tire and all kinds of strange things before letting us go on.

I wasn’t really all that worried about it, but it was kind of just the cherry on the weirdness of my Guatemala cake. Honestly, after so many easy trips and having spent so much time on my own in these countries it seemed as though everything was not necessarily going wrong, but just getting weird. It was a very strange trip. Despite my mini-meltdown and some of the tougher parts of my time in Guatemala, I really liked it there. There was a lot of Spanish culture, architecture, and influences in their food, language, music, and art, and yet it was significantly less expensive and with outstandingly beautiful scenery all around. It was a lot more dangerous too, but I guess that’s the price you pay – I guess it was an adventure to say the least.