Guatemala Cuatro- The School

Our school in Xela was called ICA. Stands for, uh.....I honestly forget. Something about a spanish school, I'm pretty sure. It was the tallest building around, with some nice views from the roof, and an open central courtyard where we'd take breaks, hang out, warm up from the sun- the weather was usually cloudy or even rainy, often around 60 degrees, and actually kinda chilly in the shade inside the "classrooms" of the school, which were basically just larger rooms with partitions into very small rooms adjoining the courtyard. No insulation, no nothing, just wood walls and metal roofs, like its Jamaica or...Guatemala, I guess. There were like 25 students there the first week we were there, and we made friends with a handful of them on our weekend excursion, but more on that later. They had coffee and purified water for us to drink, and thats about it. We met here to go on our adventures too. It wasn't really a school in any traditional sense. I think they were doing quite well, despite the fact that school and room and board for a week is $150. Wow.

Sitting around the courtyard:

The computer cluster room, where this dude was almost constantly taking the covers off the PCs for no apparent reason, cause he never seemed to be doing anything hardware related- so maybe they just needed some fresh air. I dunno. He was usually just poking around on the screen and rebooting them. Whatever. The machines were Pentium IIIs and either they or the internet or both, SUCKED. But hey, internet in Guatemala is sweet period.

The courtyard, some stairs leading...well, upstairs.

Good old dad, the subject of many photos. Often people would come and set up their woven things to sell to us.

The school (yellow building, ICA written on top) and volcano.

The courtyard more. And stairs. And people.

Courtyard.

Hallway to classrooms.

Peeps.

More peeps. Dude in the front with the beard is a French Rastafarian named Fabian who smokes weed daily, but doesn't drink. Nice guy. Listens to lots of reggae, as one would expect. Has some dreds that he keeps in his hat most of the time.

Guatemala Numero Trez

Alright continuing on with the house. Concrete floors, skylights letting light down the stairwell into my room through an INTERIOR window in the wall, and the weirdest stairs I've ever seen. Also, she had an old stove covered up with a sheet and used as countertop space. Showers in Guatemala (apparently this is normal) are hooked up with a heater attached to the head of the shower that heats the water right there, rather than downstairs in the water heater. Looks a bit like electrocution waiting to happen. There was no AC or central heat, because the climate is mild enough in both directions that you either put more blankets on the bed or open the windows. Some pictures:

My dad outside the house we stayed at:

The deathtrap:

My room.

Our host lady Lily. She liked to wave constantly to the camera while repeatedly saying "hola, hola, hola" as if we were taking a video. Stop bloody moving!!

And now I shall get on with talking about the school, before I get to discussing our excursions and our new friends that we made.

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.

Guatemala #1

The funny thing about writing is I'm going back and reading my friend Anne's posts now. She was there before we were, and is still there now. More on her later. Like pictures. So we started out getting up, taking the El to O'Hare (I bloody hate O'Hare, but taking public transportation with your parents is somehow interesting, almost anachronistic in a way...?) and chilling out there. We flew to DFW and had a little layover, and saw these two sculptures there:

My dad trying to decide why someone would make this...thing.

Then we arrived in Guatemala City. No shock yet, but humorous to fill out little forms about our state of health (worry about the swine flu, which I of course told everyone there I had (okay no I didn't) and we were greeted by people collecting the papers, while wearing dust masks. We got picked up by a nice lady named Gilda who drove us to her house where we stayed, slept, had breakfast, and an early drive to the bus station to take the bus four hours to Quetzaltenango, traditionally known as Xela (shay-la) from the Mayans.

Gilda's place:

We drove four hours in not a bad bus, on some pretty bad roads through the mountains, all of which were being constructed as if they were just recently brought into existence at all. They were often dirt with a lane of concrete that was maybe or not blocked off. Never know. The lanes were constantly changing. The scenery was great though. We got a rest stop some random place, and I slept a bit, also reading Musicophilia (by Oliver Sacks, a psychologist, writing about people with different music disorders and obsessions or abhorrences, which I'm just finishing now) and writing in my journal. This is where I shall finish post #1. Pictures.

Every bit of countryside that wasn't forest or an actual house was cultivated farmland, no matter how steep. Looked pretty cool. And hard to work.

Frank Lloyd Wright Tour!

The moment you've all been waiting for. Time to write about my trip. Well, not yet, more the prelude to the trip. First I gotta serve myself a bowl of my newly made/invented (but I'm not the first sadly) potato-avocado soup. It tastes salty, potatoey, avocadoey, limey, and hot saucey.

SO. First, my dad was in town for a conference, and stayed with me the night before the Frank Lloyd Wright Tour. As a preface, its a once-a-year tour of *some* of his houses in a neighborhood in Oak Park, a nice suburb teeming with his architecture, as well as somewhat yuppie wealthy white people. But anyway my dad and I and Tiffany went out for tapas (Spanish appetizer-sized dishes of food-tasty) and had sangria, walked to another bar, had a beer, and walked home. We walked like three miles all in all- good cause we were stuffed.

Then Chris and my mom showed up Saturday morning and we drove to Oak Park. We got to see five of his houses from the inside, though there are probably 10-12 in the neighborhood. Annoyance #1. Then we waited in line for anywhere from 15 minutes to closer to 40. Annoyance #2 (we're not counting the price of the tickets here, which was steep, since my dad paid for mine). Then we found out we couldn't take pictures of the interiors. You guessed it- Annoyance #4. The icing on the cake was the house we waited about 40 minutes to see, which we saw for all of two minutes as they ushered us in the front door, through the family room, and out the back door of the kitchen into the back yard. No upstairs. Same for the next house. AWESOME. As was waiting in line for it next to a sweet as hell house, which we were not able to tour. So the tour was cool, but kind of a let down in some ways. If I was loaded and could return each year for five or so years and see all the houses, maybe it'd be better, but I'd still leave without seeing some upstairs or being able to take pictures.

But then I guess thats what I subsequently bought the Frank Lloyd Wright bible, titled "The Houses" for. It retails for $75! And weighs its worth in pennies too. I paid less, thank you Half.com So here's a few pictures:

I should mention that we came across the car of a packrat/hoarder. And as we were taking pictures and saying how embarrassing it was, I was apparently the last to know until after we had walked away, but the guy standing by it selling newspapers was THE OWNER. He said something like "quite the spectacle I guess?" And I said "heck yeah!" which I guess is when Chris and my dad heard him say "yeah I guess I should take care of that" while I went on to make an ass of myself saying how embarrassed the owner would be if they saw people taking pictures of their car. Foot in mouth disease.

The coolest house we actually got to see, the Robie House, on University of Chicago campus. Still in the process of renovation. (Which cost TEN MIL).

The coolest house we didn't get to see.

The second coolest house we didn't get to see. :P

iPhones. My dad joined the resistance (sorry just saw Terminator tonight)

The Oak Park library, built by some other guy but still cool looking.

And now its time to write about Guatemala............

A Job!

I should note that I got a job. I applied to/contacted over 100 firms in Chicago- basically every single one I could find, including professors. I heard from maybe 20-30 saying they weren't looking or had filled the position, heard from like 4-5 asking for more information, and got an interview with one place. My professor Bill Worn, who I would have LOVED to work for. He's big on sustainable design/"green" architecture in many ways, he's very smart and interested in technology like solar panels and gray water reusing systems, and knows not only about their value but their shortcomings and the calculations behind it all. I've had him for two classes.

I really don't know what I did to deserve the job, because most of my classmates didn't find anything, and a couple are working for FREE just for the experience (good experience, yes, but I think I'd rather teach myself software and skills all summer, but its good on a resume). SO, I get paid, I get work hour credits towards being able to sit for the licensing exam someday, and I get something good on my resume, as well as lots of new knowledge and skills. So I'm pretty lucky, and pretty thankful. And I even have a nice view out a huge window, and the whole office runs on Macs. Another thanks :)

Minnesota ho!

So for my next adventure, after a couple days of recovery from Finals, Tiffany and I took the Mega Bus to Minneapolis. Its a bus line owned by Greyhound that goes from Chicago to all the surrounding major cities, including St. Louis, Detroit, and much of Ohio. If you buy your ticket more than 3 months in advance, its a dollar :) They keep costs low by having no stations- just drop points with a sign on the sidewalk.

This was our view out the bus:

So we took an 8 hour bus ride up. Sweet cause they have wifi on the bus (same bus I took to Indy in December) but unsweet because they don't have power outlets for your computer. And THAT is why I need a 7 hour battery in my laptop. Soon, my child.

I went to visit Rob and Michelle, two independent friends from college who un-independently got married and moved back to MN, where Michelle is from, and had Logan a couple years ago and now recently Oliver. So I went to visit them again. No offense to Oliver, but he was kinda boring- cute, but infants are just boring to me. Toddlers, kids, they rock. Logan turned 3. He rocks. Smartest tallest most athletic kid I've ever seen at that age. Incredible.

We played whiffle ball (I pitched and he rocked the ball across the yard), soccer, basketball, whatever. Walked around the gardens next to the Walker Art Museum (which I wanted to see but was closed Mondays, as were the two other cultural architectural things I wanted to see- oh well, next time) and otherwise kinda mostly just hung out, outside and in. Time for some pictures.

The Family Dineen sans Oliver:

Three happy kids:

One kid who thinks he knows how to rock:

And one kid who doesn't know how to do a whole lot

(and also his son Oliver):

They like the hammock.

School Stuff

Well I guess since I finished another semester I should write about that also. Not only did I frighteningly finish my second year of grad school, Tiffany is going to grad school (as I mentioned), Jenny finished grad school and has a DOCTORATE of Physical Therapy (and passed her licensing exam) AND got a great job making a whopping $XX,XXX a year!! (She said she'd be mad if I told people how much she was making).

AND. Nathan got into Notre Dame!!!

So this semester actually went pretty smoothly, partially due to the fact that I had strategically (or lazily, but gimme a break our workload is crazy!) taken a theory class that I knew would be basically zero work. With an oooooooold professor who drones on and on...smart guy, but not very interesting, not a compelling or riveting style of lecturing...nor one that "facilitates note-taking" (as the end-of-the-semester survey asks) or results in much actual learning. But it eased up my semester.

I did enjoy my design studio because we made cool models, I learned a lot, worked hard but not too hard, and felt it went at a good pace. And the professor who lead the studio was great- he is basically a badass architect who built a house for the most important architectural family in Chicago (who give out the Nobel-equivalent Prize of architecture each year). Here are some pictures of my models, followed by group photos of everyone's models. My parents even came to watch my little 5 minute presentation followed by 15 minute grilling by the jury (a panel of professors both from the university and from other universities or firms, invited by our professors or by our dean).

First, a study model from the beginning of the semester, done as a team with my friend Shauna, then a picture of many peoples' models grouped together (3 weeks into the semester):

Now mid-terms, we did the same thing- except individually. So instead of 24 models, there were 48. I think. Again, my model plus other peoples' models:

Finally, our final models. We were basically designing housing, 12-22 units, for a 125'x125' square generic plot that would be for somewhere in Chicago. I focused on efficiency living, cheaper condos (that looked like trailers yes) for first-time buyers who don't have $250,000 for a condo yet. Everyone's models were sweet and I took lots of pictures but bloody hell it'd take forever to post all the cool ones here.

Here's a friend of mine Alex's model- one of the cooler ones.