Muchas Fotos y Aventuras

It's been a bit since I last posted, and I have lots of pictures and adventures to share. First, I want to show you a bit more of the city and the places where I spend most of my time.

This picture is in the courtyard of my house. I'm standing between my hostparents, Juan and Marianna (I feel so tall here!). The door on the right is the kitchen/dining room where we eat our meals. The door on the left is where their daughter and her family eat/cook. We hardly spend any time in there. Juan sells gas in the tanks you can see behind him. I can hear them banging in the courtyard, and it took me a couple of days to figure out what the sound was. People come to the door and ring the bell all day. Secia, the little girl, says ¨Ding Dong!¨ every time it rings.


These pictures are of my room. I've been using my scarf as a makeshift curtain to cover the very thin curtains they provided.

This is the street where I live (My Fair Lady, anyone?). You can't see my door; it's maybe thirty feet past the door you can see on the left. This view is from the intersection with the main street where my school is.


This is the busy street near my house. My school is across from the Mercado Las Flores, the big pink building. There are street vendors here everyday, selling mostly produce, but also cereal and toilet paper, etc. The produce here is amazing! It is so fresh, and it sometimes even has the dirt still on it. It is incredible to look the vendor in the eye and know they were intimately involved in the growing/harvesting process, rather than going to a gleaming, sanitized grocery store completely removed from any of that. That being said, unless it has a peel, it's generally not safe to eat if you're not used to the water here. There are also a couple butcher shops along the way to my school. It's quite a bit different buying meat here than in the States where you buy meat on conveniently wrapped styrofoam trays that looks nothing like the animal it came from, making it easier to forget the animal altogether. Not so here. The meat hangs on hooks and sometimes looks uncomfortably close to the original animal. You can't forget that the meat you're eating was once a living, breathing being. While I very much appreciate that more direct, honest system of buying and consuming meat, I have to confess that I am glad to be a vegetarian here.

Here is my school, Miguel Angel Asturias. It takes up the entire second story of this building, and on the lower level are various stores. Asturias was a Guatemalan Nobel laureate in literature and also an activist in the 1960's and 70's against the dictatorships here. I would give you the link to the school's website, but it never works, so if you're curious, just Google the name, and you should find it.

This is a picture inside the main room of the school. At the end of every week, the students and teachers get together for dinner and a small graduation ceremony for students leaving that weekend. Everyone brings something to share and it's a great community-building time.

This is the central park (el parque central). Every town or city of a reasonable size in Latin America has one, and if it's big enough, like Xela, there are multiple. This is the one closest to my house. The picture below is of a church in the park. There was an earthquake here (I don't know when, sorry), that was apparently pretty forceful, and it destroyed the whole church except for this facade. They rebuilt the church around it, and while I haven't been inside, the outside is stunning.

The first Sunday of every month, there is a big market in the central park. It's mostly textiles and jewelry, much of which is handmade and gorgeous, but you can also find woodwork, toys, music, etc.

A group of other students and I went to the market together, and afterwards went to a cafe above the park. The picture above is the view from the cafe looking down on the park. You can see the blue tops of the booths at the market. Below is a picture of us at the cafe. The girl sitting next to me and the girl on the other end both live in Atlanta and have connections with Emory health care. The other girl is a fourth-year student at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Last Saturday, the school took a trip to the Pacific coast (la costa), and the rest of the pictures are from that trip. The first two are of a volcano we saw on the way. One side was incredibly lush, and the other was completely desolate. I'm not sure if that's from the volcano erupting or if it's from strip mining, which is pretty common here. It doesn't sound very intelligent to me to blast explosives on the side of a volcano, so it's perhaps more likely that the desolation is from lava or other volcanic effects. The pictures don't do it justice. It was absolutely awe inspiring in person.

Here is the beach (la playa). It's a black sand beach, which I had never seen before. It was sweltering hot, and the sand just absorbed the heat. I ran up from my towel to a restaurant at the top of the beach without my shoes on, and by the time I got there, I felt like I had lost a layer of skin. Needless to say, I kept my sandals on after that. The water was also really warm, which was nice at first, but after being in such incredible heat out of the water, I began to want it to be a bit cooler and more refreshing.

I have never experienced such strong undertow! It was great fun to body surf and get tossed around in the waves, but it was quite a struggle to get back up and stay up. After we had been in for a while, three waves came one right after the other with no time to recover between, and I began to get that panicky feeling like I was starting to drown, so I decided I had had enough for the day.

After we were done in the water and had some lunch, a few of us went out on the pier where people were fishing, mending nets, and tending to their boats. I got a shot of the waves crashing under the supports, and I don't know how the pier stays up against all that force, let alone how it was even built in the first place.

There was a flock of pelicans hanging out next to the pier. The picture doesn't give you a sense of their size, but they were huge.

This last picture is looking back on the beach from the pier. It was really cool to see the waves form out in the ocean and crash onto the shore from the other direction. Its power was both beautiful and terrifying.

Things continue to be good here. I'm getting to know the city better, and it feels really good to know where I am, where I'm going, and how to get there. The students at my school are all very nice, and I'm finding it difficult to strike a balance between forming relationships, which for the most part requires speaking English, and practicing my Spanish. If I weren't going to be here fro so long, I might be more concernced. I'm feeling good, though, about my overall progress. I've been learning irregular verbs, and I told my teacher that while I know there are irregular verbs in English, since I speak English, it doesn't bother me, but I don't like them in Spanish. He just laughed.

Later this afternoon, the students and teachers are going to play soccer (futbol here), and on Saturday morning, we'll go to the volcanic hot springs up in the mountains. Also on Saturday, the Xela soccer team is playing against Guatemala City. I've heard that Xela wins nearly all its home games because the team is used to playing at such a high altitude and in cooler weather. Guatemala City is like the Yankees, though, and they can give Xela a run for their money, so it should be a good game.

I hope you are all doing well. I'm off to the central park to study some irregular verbs.