Guatemala #2

As soon as we got into Xela, we got picked up by the director of the school, who apparently doesn't speak all that much English- or else he just doesn't care to try. He drove us to our house and showed us where the school was, around the corner, enough that we could walk there from the house. We dropped our stuff off, ate a quick meal made by our host lady Lily, who speaks basically no English, and scooted off to our first day of class- yeah- within one hour-ish of getting into town we started Spanish classes.

The brief is this- the town of like 3-400,ooo didn't look like it. Most buildings were 2-3 stories max. Concrete. With lots of rebar sticking out the top in case they want to add on in the future. If I didn't know better before, after 2 years of education I can certainly tell you that pouring concrete over rusted rebar is a terrible idea. The streets are mostly bumpy cobblestone, and the few streets that are busy are very busy. Many many vehicles are not only diesel, but crappy old buses burning oil and belching clouds of dark smog into the air. Every day our walk to school (until we found a side-street route) was a diesel-smog choked ten minutes.

The house we stayed at was actually pretty large, but conspicously empty. Lots of bedrooms where other people like us could stay (she'd been doing this for like 15 years) and then a small apartment on the first floor where her daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren Carlito and Marie-ta live. And a garage, one car wide but three cars deep. Weird. With open windows into the house. Mmmm, fumes are tasty.

The sidewalks are also ridiculously narrow, sometimes high off the street, and often bisected by random telephone poles. There are shops everywhere that open right onto the sidewalk. There's a volcano in the distance called Santa Maria that we didn't get to climb- left the day before that group trip happened :( It apparently caused tremors twice, one which failed to wake me up, the other which I missed while playing soccer with the kids.

Most roofs were metal, but the few that were tile had stuff like this growing:

The is Parque Central (I hope you can figure out what that means):

One of the only steep streets in the city, near our school.

The town, and El Vulcan in the background again...

A typical gaudy ish house.

Our typical environment walking around.

The other kid often in the house was Fernandito (or Fern), who was three- his mom would drop him off for grandma Lily to watch him. But the kids called her Lily. So I called her abuela (grandma) instead. She liked treating me like the kid, and called me "el bebe".

This picture was in the kitchen- another grandkid, Andrea, had her 13th birthday- and got a new cell phone- meaning she had one before. This was when I played soccer with the kids...

Fern, "Ita"& Andrea (sisters), Carlito (12), Marie-ta his sister, and random kid with too much energy.

Its time to start a new post.