On Friday, I arrived in Guatemala City at what was easily the smallest international airport I have ever seen. (I'm sure there are smaller ones. I just haven't seen them.) Our flight was the only one arriving at the time. The baggage claim was such that we could see them unloading the bags from the plane and placing them on the conveyor belt, which seemed to be an unnecessary formality. Immigration and customs were mere formalities, minor ones at that. The airport procedure took so little time that I was in my pensiones within 45 minutes of landing.
The pensiones was, shall I say, interesting. It was a one story building with two courtyards. I opened the door onto the first courtyard to find a few dead trees with some construction tape hanging from them, even though it was readily apparent that no work had ever been done on the place. I walked around the yard to find the office, a glass enclosure that consisted of nothing more than a table and two chairs. Fortunately, the glass door was littered with stickers, and a Basque flag with the word Ëuskael (the Basque cycling team) ensured me that I had not stepped into another dimension. "Check in" consisted of the owner informing me that the price of a room was 45Q, roughly $6, and giving me my choice of two rooms in the back courtyard. Both were neat, but one could only imaging just how much untoward activity had taken place in them.
The room was painted yellow (quite obviously several decades ago) and had a couple of murals and a painting that was as covered in graffiti as the walls. The "window" was a ripped out screen above the door, while the door was secured with a padlock. The bed was neatly made, but I could not help but question whether the sheets had been cleaned since they were purchased. I was quite happy that I had managed to get a sleeping bag at the last minute before leaving the States.
After dropping my things, I got myself lost in Guatemala City (Guate, as the locals call it). I did not see much of the city, but from what I did see, it seemed to have quite a bit of life in it. After wandering the streets for a while, I stopped in a square in front of the national Cathedral and national palace (which looked like anything but). It was an ideal spot for people watching. I was especially struck by the young kids chasing the birds and could not help but think of just how many times I had seen the same thing, be it in Central Park, on O´Connell Street, or in front of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires.
After returning to the hotel, I went next door to a small bar. There, I tried the local brew, Gallo. Frankly, I have my doubts as to whether it is really a beer unto itself. It tasted much like well traveled Guinness that had been sitting around too long. I met a guy there in his 40s who spoke broken English. He said as much as he could, which did not go much farter than criticizing capitalism, something I thought was especially interesting coming from an accountant.
Yesterday, I took what is commonly referred to as the ¨chicken bus¨ to Panajachel. I boarded the bus as a fairly empty terminal, and my backpack was tied down on the roof. There were five or six passengers who boarded with me. For reasons still unknown to me, they had us all lie down on the bus for the first ten minutes of the ride. Needless to say, my mind went wild with the possible reasons for such a strange practice, starting with the idea that it was to prevent robbers from knowing how many people were on the bus. Fortunately, that didn´t last and they allowed us to sit up after a few minutes.
On the bus, I met a man who had been a trucker in the US for several years. His English was fair, and he essentially chewed my ear for most of the ride, happy to have the chance to practice his English. He said that his wife intentionally had one of their children in the US to give him the opportunity to live there. That son is now 14 and avoids the subject, not wanting to discuss the difficult decision of having to choose between economic opportunity and being near his family.
When I arrived in Panajachel, I made a bee line for the docks where I needed to catch a boat to San Pedro. On the way, a peddler attempted to sell me a machete ¨for protection¨. I brushed him off and found an Amiercan tourist with a Guatemalan wife to point me in the right direction. The boat was like a bad Disney ride. There were eight people on board, the maximum that it could handle. The water on the lake was choppy, and the boat, which seemed more like a toy than a means of transportation, did little to ease the ride. It was small enough that the feet of the passengers were roughly on the water level, and the protection from splash consisted of plastic flaps that hung loosely over the side. I was soaked by the time I arrived in San Pedro, which was five stops into the ride. Upon my arrival I found out that one of the other passengers handed one of my bags to someone who had gotten off at an earlier stop. I had hoped to get it back, and a few people tried to help, but it was not to be.
While I was waiting and hoping to get the bag back, the skies opened up. I went into a small, covered but not enclosed sports bar to wait it out. To say that it poured is an understatement. The wind was not bad, but the rain was unbelievable. The steep street was like a mudslide, as debri and mud poured into the lake. The mountains on the other side of the lake, just a short distance away, disappeared behind a dense fog. Even during the worst of the storm, tiny boats like the one I took continued to arrive and their passengers joined those of us who were waiting for it to break. A couple of them went out in the rain for pictures, but most were just interested in getting dry.
When it finally broke, after about an hour and a half, I took a cab, which was a pickup truck, to my new school. The driver banged on the door of a room=sized building that I would never have found on my own. An old man who did not speak English answered and took me across the street to my new home. He showed me to a room in a small building that included a small, unkept garden in the front. It consisted of five rooms for students. As I went inside the gate, there were three students sitting in a small covered section just in front of the rooms. One of them greeted me in Spanish, and I immediately explained that I was a complete beginner. So each of them introduced themselves in English. The one who initially greeted me was from upstate New York. He graduated from college and proceeded to do agricultural work after completing his studies. By this I mean manual labor. When he returns to the US, he wants to go to law school and work to ensure ¨fairer¨labor standards for farmworkers.
The other two were athiest limeys who were just passing through. We went out to dinner and enjoyed an interesting conversation that went well into the morning and covered everything from immigration law to the role of religion in politics. It was entirely civil, but I can tell that I probably won´t come across another conservative until I get to another airport.
