due south

1. When stuck in traffic in an old American school bus covered in slogans like “Jesus is my co-pilot” in Spanish, it is hilarious to change the words to American pop songs so that you end up with lyrics such as “In the Chicken Bus, the mighty Chicken Bus, the Mayans sleep tonight.”

2. Sometimes, children in the streets of Xela set off fireworks. Sometimes, if they can smell your fear, they will throw these fireworks at you. Beware.

3. Yesterday, on the way to a café, we saw five children, between the ages of 2 and 5, standing on the counter of a bodega, dancing, while their mother directed them like a conductor. It was preciosa.

4. There is a store on 10th calle in Zona 1 called “moda for Lady Men´s.” I get the reference, but think it´s hilarious that the English term for a man who´s good with the ladies is just an apostrophe away from implying gender queerness.

5. Zil buys her yarn from a married Guatemalan couple named Telma and Luis.

6. Sarah, while trying to conjugate the Spanish verb “pedir,” meaning “to ask for,” accidentily discovered the word for “pedo” meaning “fart.”

7. Megan, attempting to say that while drinking tea you cannot also drink coffee, said that while drinking Edna, her teacher, she could not also drink coffee. Even though this is true, it was not what she was intending.

There is a natural hot spring outside of Xela called Fuentes Georginas. We were there over the weekend. We stayed the night with our friends Zil, Cori, and Trika in the little bungalows that dot the perimiter of the springs and at night we were the only people there. It doesn´t need any help being absolutely gorgeous… but, being human, we tried anyway. We turned off the lights, lit candles, and floated to our hearts content under a starry sky. It don´t get much better than that.

There´s another natural hot spring outside of Xela called Aguas Amargas (we are in volcano country, after all). We went there today. Here, the pool is lukewarm, but there is the promise of calientísimo (super freaking hot) baths just up the hill. Since we´re tough-isimo (super freaking tough), we decided to take “the plunge.” Well, it turned out our plunge was more of a “toe-dip.” They weren´t lying about the -isimo of the caliente. When our big toes took their first timid venture into these baths, we were surrounded by the older Mayan folks who run the place. They were very amused at our feeble attempt and suggested that we go get a bucket of cold water. Three buckets later, we were bathing away. Later, a woman by the lukewarm pool applauded our efforts, only half-sarcastically. Who´s tough(isimo) now? Dulce.

-Las Dos

San Marcos on Thankgiving Day

Originally uploaded by skavanagh.

The turkey was locked in the bathroom. It had pooped everywhere. But we´re getting ahead of ourselves… let´s begin from the beginning.

Pete and Pete, our two new friends from Minnesota, bought a live turkey at the market for 175Q (about $25). It spent a happy day living in their bathroom, nestled under the sink.

Pete and Pete had killed chickens, pheasants and even a dove before and explained to us that they had learned this skill from their fathers who had learned it from their fathers, who had learned it from their fathers. They are very Minnesotan.

We arrived at their (and Zil´s) house just in time to say our last goodbye to the bird, whom they had dubbed San Marcos. The three of us (Megan, Zil, and Sarah) huddled outside the bathroom with our cameras as Pete and Pete soothed San Marcos by stroking its feathers before tying its legs together. Then they put the little poppet in a bag and brought it outside. As we all hovered over the Petes and San Marcos with our cameras, the boys wrung our feathered friend´s neck. It was like wringing out a wet towel. Then, since it hadn´t quite bit it, they cut off its oxygen supply for several minutes. This all resulted in San Marcos becoming quite dead.

Or so it seemed.

Pete #1 started to string the bird up by its legs in order to aid the loosening of the feathers… or some such thing. As he stood holding the bird, which had been really quite dead for about 5 minutes, the bird let out a final frenzy of wing-flapping. It´s poor snapped neck hadn´t quite killed off the brain´s desire to flee from danger. It was like in those horror movies when someone has been dead for several moments when suddenly their grayish hand grabs the pretty girl and everybody in the audience screams. In this case, Zil screamed and ran away. Sarah didn´t scream, but did run away. And Megan stared intently.

The next morning, Thanksgiving day, we ran into Zil on our way to school. She showed us a picture of a freshly plucked San Marcos and informed us that Pete and Pete had been working on derobing our friend all morning. They had done a magnificent job.

We then spent the afternoon listening to an ex-guerrilla talk about the Guatemalan civil war, shopping in the outdoor market for camotes (yams), and then whipping up some scrumptious candied camote surprise to bring to the evening´s festivities.

All in all it was a wonderful Thanksgiving. We ate with a bunch of other language students from different schools who all had a connection to someone who lived with Pete, Pete, and Zil in “Yoga House.” We ate stuffing, mashed potatoes, pies, green bean casserole topped with funyons, gravy, and, of course, San Marcos, who was particularly tasty.

So, here´s a final “thank you” for good food, good pheasant like creatures, and all the very good people that we´ve met on our travels.

-Megan and Sarah

This is the story of Yesterday, when we hiked up a volcano and a lot of things went wrong:

On Friday night, Irma, our incredible host mother who has never let us down, told us to leave her a note about when we were leaving the next morning and when we would need breakfast. We did. But when we woke up (at six am), there was no breakfast. Oh sad.

No worries, on our way to the volcano, we stopped at a Texaco and spent way too much money (by Guatemalan standards) on donuts for breakfast and cold, pre-made sandwiches for lunch… oh, and coffee that we sipped through a straw. Tres chic.

On the way to our volcano we passed the scene of a car accident and saw a dead woman lying in the street. She was not covered up although there were police everywhere. I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite as disturbing. I still can’t really stop thinking about it.

Then, after all of this, we had to walk up… a mountain… Why did we think this would be an enjoyable activity? What were we thinking when we decided that we wanted to spend our Saturday climbing a steep hill for three hours?

But at the top we were able to dig in to our Texaco feast. I’m not quite sure why we hadn’t anticipated the fact that lunch from Texaco might be especially unappetizing. However, it came as quite a shock when my chicken sandwich, made of those breaded chicken patties that make my mouth water when in the States, had ground up chicken bones in it. I did not take more than three bites. Thank God… because on the way back down the mountain, it became quite clear that the chicken wanted out. And it wanted out NOW.

“Now” happened to occur right when we were approaching a small village and I enlisted Megan to help me find a bathroom. Our first stop was three nine year old boys. I leared something important from these boys: no matter where you are in the world, when you talk to nine year old boys about something that relates to a bathroom, they will find your conversation very funny. And often I agree with them. But on this particular occasion, I was not seeing the humor. Luckily, our guide, Luisl had been on the banyo hunt as well, and he was much more successful. A bathroom was found. Actually, it wasn’t quite a bathroom that was found, it was a wooden hut that had a pot sitting on the floor and lined paper covered with other people’s feces. But hey, when you gotta go… Luckily our friends from Australia had those little “wet one’s” napkins with them. They’re doctors. I like having doctors around.

So we hopped into the van that was taking us home and drove for, I kid you not, about two seconds before getting a flat tire. When it rains it pours.

However, all was redeemed when we ended our day by going to a Buena Vista de Corazon concert where Megan and I danced the night away. The group is made of a the living members of the Buena Vista Social Club and some other incredibly talented young Cuban musicians. I guess there’s always some kind of rainbow after a storm.

Needless to say, we went to sleep exhausted.

-Sarah (Megan helped by speaking to nine year old boys about bathrooms, salsa dancing, and finding all my spelling mistakes)

OH… we’ve got more pictures up. Go here to see them!

So sorry for the delay in posting. Time flies when you´re stumbling through Spanish phrases at the rate of a small turtle, or, I should say, a tortuga pequeña. Here´s a run-down of the day-to-day here in Xela:

1. Wake up when Irma, our host mother knocks on our door at 6:30 am.

2. Debate whether or not to take a shower.

3. When taking a shower, try to find the perfect balance of water pressure and heat (if you want water pressure, you don´t get heat and vice versa).

4. Try not to get electrocuted by the black box that controls the hot water and the exposed wires that connect it to the shower head.

5. Eat good breakfast food with Irma while she tells us that ¨we will learn more Spanish today¨ and that ¨our heads are very big.¨

6. Walk out the door of our house to a magnificent view of Xela. Notice that it´s quite cold.

7. Arrive at school and drink coffee with sugar, but no milk.

8. Sit for five hours with our respective Spanish teachers and speak in unbelievably broken and actually quite good Spanish (respectively).

9. If you´re Sarah, say things like ¨I live with my brothers when I am 11, 12, 13, and 40,¨ when intending to say ¨I lived with step-brothers when I was 11 to 14 years old.¨

10. If you´re Megan, say things like ¨We need to fight with the tomatoes,¨ when intending to say ¨We need to peel the tomatoes.¨

11. Walk back home to Irma´s and eat good lunch food while Irma tells us that ¨we learned more Spanish today,¨ and that ¨our heads are very big.¨ Again.

12. Walk back to school for some kind of afternoon activity (dance classes, movies, trips to pueblos, hikes, etc…)

OR

Go to one of several FABULOUS cafes in Xela that sell ridiculously good hot chocolate. Drink said hot chocolate. Make flashcards. Knock over the chair when trying to get up. Laugh like it´s funny while everybody looks at you.

13. Walk home and eat dinner with Irma while she tells us that ¨we learned more Spanish today¨ and ¨our heads are very big.¨ Still.

14. Read and fall asleep happy, exhausted, and earlier than we have since we were nine years old.

15. Repeat.

-Sarah (with help from Megan)

So I suppose it´s my turn to discuss Spanish school and the frustrations of learning a new language. For example, my teacher today asked me if I ate McDonalds´ hamburgers. I thought he asked me if I ate Madonna´s hamburgers, to which I responded, ¨No, is that a place or a type of hamburger?¨ He explained what he had actually said, and I said, oh, I thought you said Madonna´s, like the singer or the mother of Jesus, and was trying to picture what type of hamburger either of them might make. He laughed for about a minute, then proceeded to tell me a joke about why women haven´t yet walked on the moon. Apparently, it´s because they haven´t finished sweeping up the earth yet. Get it? I didn´t, for a very long time, mostly because I couldn´t believe someone was telling me that type of joke. Then I didn´t understand it because I wasn´t sure whether it was funny because women sweep a lot or because there´s a lot of dirt on the earth and the job that they´re doing is silly because it will never be completed.

Then, my teacher proceeded to explain to me the following things: 1) 9/11 was perpetrated by the U.S. government; and 2) Ancient Mayan civilization ended because they discovered a way to fly to Mars and that´s where they´re living. Of course, in 5 hours of class, we discussed several other things that aren´t as interesting, like drinking and smoking, religion, polygamy, scandals, and an American diplomat that he met and is now living in Myanmar.

I can´t wait to see what tomorrow has in store.

-Megan (with help from Sarah)

This morning I learned my alphabet.
Megan learned about the history of Guatemala.
I learned the names of the days of the week.
Megan learned about traditional Guatemalan healing practices.
I learned how to say ¨food.¨

This is going to be a long month.

Other than feeling like an overgrown kindergardener, I´m settling in very nicely. We got unbelievably lucky and are staying with a family that is headed by an incredibly loving woman named Irma. Irma cooks for a living, which means that every meal we´ve had since we arrived in her house yesterday afternoon has been absolutely delicious (unlike the food we´ve had in restaurants in Guatemala). She has two teenage daughters and one teenage son. The son, like so many teenage boys, has said about three words in the past two days. His room is covered with pictures of the ladies and he watches football religiously. The two daughters, on the other hand, are vivacious and incredibly welcoming. They giggle a lot. I like them.

So now we´re spending our meal times with Irma pointing at household objects and saying their names (¨spoon¨ ¨table¨ ¨floor¨ ¨tortilla¨), while her two daughters smile gamely and ask us what music we like, to which I respond ¨todos.¨ Because it´s all I know how to say (besides the days of the week). And we´re spending our days learning Spanish at a small school called Sakribal that has been really wonderful. The handprints of the school´s previous students grace the walls and everybody smiles a lot. Megan has probably noticed more about the place because she can understand what they´re all saying. She likes it too, so I´m guessing they´re only saying nice things.

-Sarah (with help from Megan)

1. All three of us, Megan, Sarah and Zil, rode a ferris wheel in Todos Santos. The ticket booth indicated that the ride had, at one point, lived in Chicago (like Zil). We were on the ferris wheel for, I kid you not, 1 hour.

2. We successfully navigated our way through the Guatemalan hillsides using only a map drawn on a napkin. We dubbed this map our “mapkin.”

3. Sarah and Megan both became ill and spent some quality time in the bathroom.

4. Megan met John, an attorney from San Francisco, who had previously been law partners and close personal friends with Bob Lieff, of Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, Megan’s last place of employment. Megan has never met Bob Lieff personally, though she has seen him in the elevator on two occasions. He wears expensive cuff links and, according to John, recently married his sixth wife. John, unlike Bob Lieff, knows Megan’s name.

5. Since then, we have met more than 5 people who live in San Francisco. It seems that there are far more Americans in Guatemala than in Mexico.

6. We watched the coronation of the Queen of Todos Santos, in which several young women paraded up and down a high-school auditorium floor and an announcer spoke into a microphone so muffled that absolutely none of the event was intelligible to us gringos. The only part we understood was the dancing.

7. We watched the All Saints Days festivities in Todos Santos, during which incredibly drunk men attempt to stay mounted on their horses as they raced back and forth. All day. In red striped pants.

8. Megan and Zil entered a Todosantero bar to escape from the horse races, where they encountered Julia, a small Mam woman who’s father had passed away. Since it was the eve of Day of the Dead, Julia was celebrating her father’s life by drinking and dancing. Julia proceeded to dance with Megan and Zil, grabbing tightly onto their index fingers, until her relatives took her home. Since Julia was about half the size of both Megan and Zil, things got interesting whenever she attempted to twirl them.

9. We took 2 buses on a 5 hour journey from Todos Santos to Xela, paying only $4 U.S. each. Each of these buses let us off at the bus station, which, conveniently, is on the Lonely Planet map.

10. Last but not least, we signed up for a Spanish school at Sakribal to start on Monday. The tuition, room and board comes to a whopping $145 U.S. per person per week.

-Megan and Sarah

I don´t even know where to start. Just the past few days have given us so many stories… try we must.

Crossing the border from Mexico to Guatemala was a study in complexity. We hired a van to smooth the border crossing, having learned that the several steps necessary were not at all easily navigated. Boy, were we glad we did. Before leaving Mexico, you have to sign out. The Mexican immigration office is well-kept, the luxuriously wide roads relatively free of trash, and the people confined to buidlings or sidewalks. From there, you drive 4 km into Guate. The road narrows and fills with people, trash, and rain water. There is barely enough room for the van to pass through, and had our van not taken us directly to the Guatemalan immigration office, we might still be at the Mexican border.

We had planned on meeting Zil (our friend from college) in Huehuetenango, which is a small city that is off the tourist trail (compared, at least, to every where we´ve been so far). It´s far enough off the tourist trail that while arranging our transport, we had a difficult time convincing the van driver that we were headed to Huehuetenango. We ended up in a van full of people headed to hotter tourist spots like Xela, but Huehue was on the way and no one objected to our paying the same price for a shorter ride. Imagine our surprise when our van driver pulled up next to a tire shop on the highway, announced that we were in Huehue, and left us and our bags by the side of the road. Everywhere we´ve ended up so far has been accompanied by a Lonely Planet map… this was not. Half and hour later and $11 U.S. dollars poorer (a ridiculous sum in Guate), we found ourselves in Huehue. It was our first off-the-map adventure, but we made it through and met up with Zil that evening.

The next morning we found our way to a chicken bus (an old recycled American school bus) to Todos Santos. The trip from Huehue is about 20 miles, but it takes three and a half hours. The last hour of the drive is on a dirt road. Todos Santos is a very small Mayan Villiage full of people who speak Mam. All of the men and boys wear the same outfit of red striped pants and blue and white striped shirts while the women and girls all wear the same skirt and shawl. It´s pretty incredible. At first I thought it was like nothing I had every seen, until I realized that when you´re walking the financial district of San Francisco or Mid-town Manhattan, the uniform is a dark business suit. This one is a little different becuase it involves red striped pants… the idea is basically the same.

We´re off for a hike in the local hills — our map is drawn on a napkin and involves directions like ¨when you reach the place where it seems like no one should be able to farm broccoli because it´s so steep, turn right.¨ Thankfully everyone here seems willing to help out lost gringas on their way south.

Even though there´s so much more to say, we´ll have to cut it off here. Stay tuned for more.

-Sarah and Megan

Do a google search of San Juan Chamula, the small Mayan town that we visited today, and everything you´ve ever learned or experienced about the stereotyping and demonizing of native people of the Americas will be on display. But first, our experience in the town:

We organized a tour to two of the Mayan towns outside of San Cristobal de las Casas that left the city at 9:30 this morning. We decided to organize a tour instead of going it alone because our guidebook had advised that we travel with a guide familiar with the area if we wanted to steer clear of offense while a visitor in another´s community. This made complete sense to both of us. Neither of us wanted to overstep our bounds as visitors and we soon found that having a guide who knew the local people made us feel less like intruders and more like welcome visitors and consumers.

However, even our guide (who was obsessed with American music from the 60s and 70s, who kept singing Hotel California to us, and who claimed that John Lennon was his spiritual guide), seemed to have a low opinion of the people of Chamula (as San Juan Chamula is most often called). I think that his low opinion of Chamula had a lot to do with the fact that the town has long been a staunch supporter of the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party which ruled Mexico without interuption for more than 70 years until recently. Our tour guide, who declared himself a feminist (but, he was sure to mention, not a gay feminist), was a critic of the PRI and I think Chamula´s support of the political party, for him, cast a shadow over the people of the town. He often referred to folks from Chamula as macho capitalists who would do anything for a buck. He seemed to think they were very shrewd business-people with a rigid class system and often compared them to the people from the town next door who (according to him) approached their local economy in a much more socialist manner. However, the town seemed quite poor and our tour guide´s speeches about how these people loved money so much seemed (to me) to echo the American infatuation with Indian casinos and the contemporary myth regarding how North American Indians are all rolling in gambling money. But, aside from my slight discomfort with some of the language that he was using the describe the people, he was very kind to everyone that we came in contact with and referred to several old women, who seemed to love him very much, as his girlfriends and went and bought them cokes while we waited for him to return.

Coke brings us to another elephant of a topic. The Tzotzil people who live in Chamula practice a religion that blends traditional Mayan practices and Catholicism in an incredibly fascinating way. One of their central religious practices is drinking carbonated beverages to induce burping, which for them, is an important spiritual and medicinal act. For many years the primary beverage used for this purpose was pox (pronounced posh) which is an incredibly alcoholic drink that gets its carbonation through the fermentation process. Once soft drinks, which obviously have the same gassy effect, were introduced to the Tzotzil people, they began using them in their religious practices as well. So much so that when you enter the church (which is unbelievably beautiful and like nothing I´ve ever seen before), you cannot help but notice that there are Coca Colas everywhere.

Now, after a little bit of internet research (and an understanding that everything I´ve read could very well be false), I´ve been able make some connections between these two seemingly unrelated topics: the use of coke in religious practice, and the town´s support of the PRI, whose logo is displayed at the entrance to the town (the logo itself is a whole other topic of discussion as it is made of the colors of the Mexican flag, which the party´s critics have obvious problems with). Apparently in the weeks before elections, the PRI will supply store owners in Chamula with Coke and Pepsi (which, at fifty cents a can, costs the local people a day´s salary) free of charge if they will promise to support their candidate. Also, the PRI owns the companies that own the trucks that transport Coke and Pepsi into Chamula. If Chamula were to break with the PRI, they would in effect, cut off their cola supply, which would render them unable to practice important parts of their religion.

All of this political, economic, and religious complexity is displayed in the local church which is, I think I can say in all honesty, the most incredible place I may have ever been. It is unbelievably beautiful. From the outside, it doesn´t look much different from any other church I´ve seen in Mexico, but inside it is magnificent. It´s covered in candles, more candles than I´ve ever seen in one room. The walls are lined with statues of saints in glass cases and people sit on the floor in front of the statues speaking to the saints about their personal and spiritual problems. The floor is covered in pine needles, there are no pews and no priest or minister. People hire shamans to pray with them in the church, especially when someone in the family is sick or suffering. Cloths hang from the (very high) ceiling. And at the altar, in the center, is not the statue of Jesus (he is off to the left), but a statue of Saint John the Baptist. Megan pointed out to me that Saint John the Baptist was the predecessor to Jesus and this seemed quite fitting in a church that melded two religions, one that was in the area long before Jesus was ever introduced to the people there.

Anyway, I have a lot of thinking to do about the time that we spent in Chamula. For some reason all of the political, economic, and religious issues that the town brings up keep twisting themselves around in my mind. I am perfectly aware that I know very little about the Tzotzil people, the history of the town, or Mexican politics in general — so know that these musings are mostly just questions that I am asking myself.

But do take the time to google San Juan Chamula. One writer starts their discussion of the church at Chamula like this: ¨As we walked through the door of this former Catholic church, it was like stepping into Dante´s Inferno.¨ It´s this kind of bullshit that drives me crazy.

-Sarah