THE 'MARAS' OF GUATEMALA CITY

These are dangerous times that we live in, and no more so than if you live in Guatemala City. In the last fortnight, a bomb was detonated on a chicken bus in the capital and a grenade thrown into another, both incidents killing many innocent people. The 'maras' are blamed for these attacks on Guate's public transport, criminal gangs that rule Ciudad De Guatemala like a mafia, and are responsible for most of the murders, kidnappings and extortion that occurs in the capital on a daily basis.

The results of a recent poll in Prensa Libre, Guatemala's national newspaper are staggering. 78% of businesses that were polled in the capital have been the victim of violence or some sort of other gang-related insecurity in the last six months, with 41% of the crime coming in the form of gang extortion. My Spanish maestra Clarita told me the other day that the Maras brazenly approach business owners and tell them to start giving them money or they will them. In the majority of cases, fearful Guatamaltecos simply pay up without going to the police, rather than themselves ending up in a future news article in the Prensa Libre, the victim of a shooting. 

According to the newspaper poll, a staggering 98% of crime carried out in Guatemala's capital is not even reported by the victim, let alone the the perpretators being brought to justice. The Maras are quite literally getting away with murder. The honest people of Guatemala City are tired, scared and and angry, blaming the 'gobierno' (government) with increasing vitriol for its apparent unwillingness to do anything to try to stop the bloodshed and bring the gangs to justice - unwillingness, incapability and inaction. 

Having suggested the exact same thing to my Spanish maestra a few days ago, I was interested to read one readers suggestion in the opinion section of yesterday Prensa that there is an urgent need to reintroduce capital punishment in the country, to combat the rising gang crime. This is something I strongly agree with, having often wondered when the UK government is going to realise that one sure way to reduce murder, rape and child abuse is by issuing the ultimate penalty - death - if and when it has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt that someone is guilty of such a heinous crime. A life sentence needs to mean life, and not being let out after 10-15 years for good behaviour and reintroduced into society to recommit the crime for which they were originally committed.

Tomorrow I head by bus for El Salvador, via Guatemala City. Wish me luck.

THE KITE RUNNERS OF SAN PEDRO

Today was ´Dia De La Barrilete´ in San Pedro. My homestay brothers had spent the last few days building decorative kites out of wood, paper and thread, but I didn´t realise it was all in preparation for ´Day Of The Kites´ until I arrived back from Panajachel this afternoon to find a nine year old standing on the corrugated iron roof of the house with a kite in his hand.

- '¿Que pasa Beto?' I shouted up at my homestay brother. I didn´t think his father Felipe would be too happy to find one of his sons running along the roof of the house trying to fly a kite.

- 'No hay viento.' he replied sheepishly. I think he knew his father Felipe would not be too happy if he caught him trying to fly his kite from the roof of the house.

- 'Vamos.' I motioned him back down to ground level, inadvertantly declaring myself an expert of flying kites in windless conditions in the process.

The next thirty minutes were spent running up and down the narrow street outside the house with Beto and his younger brother Juan, trying to get the kite up into the sky, but instead getting it first stuck in a tree, then wrapped around a telephone line (- '¿No es electricidad?' I asked Beto cautiously before offering to help him untangle it) and finally, when it was my turn to horse it up the street trying to get the kite in the air, I instead dragged it along the wet ground for about thirty metres before I eventually stopped running and turned around expecting to admire the kite dancing merrily in the sky.

- 'No hay viento.' I shook my head in defeat. Trying to ignore eye contact as Beto inspected what was left of his soggy kite, we walked sadly back to the house, lamenting the lack of a good windy hurricane when we most needed it on Dia De La Cometa.

GENDER CONFUSION IN SAN PEDRO

I have always struggled with the gender of Spanish nouns. Why is a table feminine (LA mesa) when it doesn´t have female genitalia? Why is a toilet masculine (EL servicio) when women sit on them just as much, yet both a crap (LA mierda) and diarrhea (LA diarrea) are both femininely gendered? Why is a woman´s breast masculine (EL pecho), and why is electricity feminine (LA electricidad) when it was invented by a man? Why cant all Spanish objects just be neutral like in the English language, so I don´t always have a 50% change of being correct, and a 50% change of being laughed at.

That said, I have started to notice the gender appropriateness of certain objects as I have continued learning the Spanish language. For example, almost all shops are femine (LA zapateria - shoe shop, LA peluqueria - hairdresser, LA joyeria - jewelers), presumably because it is generally women that spend most time there, whilst football is of course EL futbol. It should also be noted quietly that housework (LA faena) and hoover (LA aspiradora) are both feminine.

Today I also noticed that the word for wife (ESPOSA) is very similar to the word for handcuffs (ESPOSAS), which of course left me wondering if some ancient Spanish wordsmith was trying to suggest a similarity between getting married and the start of a prison sentence.

 Does a beer have a penis or a pair of breasts?    (Answer = LA cerveza)

PERFECT VERB CONJUGATION IN SAN PEDRO

CLIMBING A VOLCANO IN SAN PEDRO

Climbing Volcan San Pedro requires a 6AM start and some preparation the previous night. Armed with the water and bananas that the tour operator company had recommended I bring, and some packets of Chicharonnes that they had not, I met up with Manuel the local Guide and eight other extranjeros hoping to reach the summit of the dormant volcano that looms above San Pedro town outside the tour operators office in the early hours of Saturday morning.

The group consisted of three med students from Zaragoza on a University exchange programme in Antigua, three were Belgiums, a Thai and a Croatian female living in Neuve York. My heart immediately sank as I realised with dismay that this time there would be no overweight American in flipflops in the group. This time, all the group were younger than me, and none of them looked like they had been gorging themselves on Guatemalan pork scratchings for the last four weeks. This time, I started to panic, I could well be the dead weight at the tail end of the group as we climbed San Pedro Volcano.

As we started climbing, I cleverly positioned myself behind one of the female student doctors from Spain, partly so medical attention was close at hand if I needed it, but mainly because the rear view perspective acted as good motivation for me to keep going.

But even with that encouragement, it was extremely tough going. When Manuel the Guide informed us that we were not even half way up the volcano when we stopped at a view point, I nearly ended it all with his machete.

Me and the Thai girl both started to make jokes about tuk tuks and taxi availabilty half way up a Volcano, but I know she was crying inside as well. Then the Croat from New York started walking annoying close behind me as if to suggest I was going to slowly. In the end, I pretended to slip and poinged a branch back in her face so she would get the message that I was the pace-setter on this volcano and not her.

As we continued climbing at a slower and slower pace, I started to convince myself that failure could be just as enriching as success.  I told myself that I was struggling simply because I wasn´t fully recovered from the previous weeks hike up the Nariz de India. That my breakfast hadn´t provided enough energy. That my heavy hiking boots were slowing me down and were the only reason that I was struggling to keep up with the nimble-footed Spanish doctor trotting up the volcano in a pair of flimsy plimsoles. I tried with increasing difficulty to ignore the sombre truth: that I am probably just getting older.

To add insult to injury, when we finally got to the top, there wasn´t any lava (the volcano´s been dormant for many years), and there wasn´t even much of a view due to cloud cover. Unfortunately you pays your money and you takes your chance when you climb San Pedro Volcano: some days, there are no clouds and its possible to see for miles over Lago Atitlan, other days the clouds hang lower than an extranjeros underpants when he´s got a dose of the Belinda Carlisles.

The clouds closed in even further on the descent, and as the group spread out, I found myself alone in the Guatemala jungle, with only a packet of Chicharones and the dregs of my bottle of water to survive on if I got lost. Not that I really minded, as it meant I didn´t have to continue listening to Manuel the Guide telling me how poor he was, and how he would love a pair of sunglasses like mine, and how he thought the stick he had cut with his machete on the way up for me had really helped in my summit success, and basically dropping as many hints as he could without coming right out and telling me he expected a big tip when we got down to the bottom.

Unfortunately Manuel the Guide was out of luck, as when he slowed down to give the Spanish medical students behind me the same sob story, I picked up the pace and hurried to the bottom, tried not to think that one wrong slip could result in me impaling myself on the stick he had cut for me. I never saw Manual the Guide again, and I hope it stays that way for my last week in San Pedro, as his machete looked pretty sharp. 

When I finally limped into my homestay, I timed it as a seven hour round-trip, a couple less than Half Dome in Yosemite last month, but probably just as tough given almost all of the volcano climb was steep.

- 'Vas a dormir?'  (sleep?), my homestay host Rosa asked me, when I had eventually finished eating the lunch that she had kindly kept by for me long after the usual mealtime, by holding the fork with both hands.

- 'Voy a morir.'  (die), I replied, before crawling from the kitchen to my bedroom, and swiftly into my sleeping bag. I had planned to have a shower to wash the mud from my legs and the sweat from everywhere, but was too weak to even get the wrapper off the bar of soap I had borrowed from a Vegas hotel last month.

I won´t sleep of course. Rosa my homestay host is playing loud music, and there are about 23 children playing a louder game of hide and seek outside my homestay bedroom. But at least I won´t have to move my legs.

MY HOMESTAY FAMILY IN SAN PEDRO

THE OLD MAN IN SAN PEDRO

A GAME OF SCRABBLE IN SAN PEDRO

My Spanish maestra Clarita challenged me to a game of scrabble today in my lesson ... in Spanish. Little did she know what she was getting herself into. She says she let me beat her, but personally I think my prowess around the red triple word squares was just too hot for her too handle...

THE INSECT WORLD IN SAN PEDRO

Living in my San Pedro homestay for the last month has resulted in me learning a whole array of Spanish vocabulary relating to the anthropod world that I did not previously know or think I would ever need to know.On my second day in the town, one of the brothers came into the homestay kitchen with a scorpion crawling on his bare arm, causing the frijoles (beans) that I had just eaten for lunch to shoot through my digestion system and propel me three feet out of my chair. As it turned out later, it was just an 'ALACRAN', a scorpion lookalike that according to my well-informed Spanish maestra Clarita, can give you a nasty bite, but on the positive side will not kill you.

I also learnt the word for ant ('HORMIGA') and fly ('MOSCA') fairly early on in my time back in Guatemala, as they like to come into my bedroom when the four brothers in my homestay leave my door wide open after they have paid me a visit to tell me to draw them a picture of Garfield.

I learnt the word for grasshopper ('GRILLO') more recently, when I had to ask Augustin, the eldest of my homestay brothers at age 11 to remove one from my bedroom wall earlier this week.

Mosquitos of course need no introduction (at least not to my nose whilst I sleep now I line my nostrils with DEET repellant before I go to bed), and also need no translation, as the word in Spanish and English is the exact same - 'MOSQUITO'. Cockroach ('CUCARACHA') I already knew long before I arrived in Guatemala, and infact this is one of the insects I have actually not yet come across here in San Pedro.

And then of course there are spiders, which I had originally thought were like mosquitos and needed no translation as Juan the youngest of the homestay brothers kept asking me to draw him a dibujo of Spiderman, but it has since turned out that the non-Marvel comic ones are actually called 'ARAÑAS'. Spiders are my best friend and also my worst enemty in Guatemala. There are my best friend because they cast their webs in high corners of my bedroom, eat the mosquitos and other insects that come into my room, and generally keep out of my way. They are my worst enemy because they are generally a lot bigger than Scottish spiders, and some of them have eyes that look at you as you sit on the toilet. 

I hadn't even noticed the large beady eyed spider that lives in the homestay toilet until Kelly the new homestay guest (that is now the old homestay guest as she has gone to Honduras) mentioned it to me last week in passing. Now I know that its there, I cannot sit on the toilet without 1) first checking it hasn't moved and 2) then watching it watching me. In fact, the beady eyed spider in the homestay toilet doesn't in fact move very much, but when I blew on it lightly the other day to check it wasnt dead, it moved across the wall with the velocity of a red-faced extranjero leaving a Guatemalan farmacia after buying hemorrhoid suppositories. 

Which has left me suddenly wondering: perhaps it is from from sitting on the toilet seat staring at the large beady eyed spider on the wall for too long  that has led to my unfortunate recent brush with the Belinda Carlisles.

Like Charlottes Web, but with a fetish for watching me 
whilst I do a dump

MY AUGUST JOURNEY ON THE BACK OF A FAG PACKET

...except I don´t smoke, so I had to do my travel planning on notepad paper instead.

In summary, I intend to travel from Guate to El Salvador to Honduras to Nicuaragua to Costa Rica to Panama, then catch a flight from Panama City to Colombia (via Fort Lauderdale in Florida because flying an extra 1000 miles made the flight 30% cheaper for some strange reason) to do a couple of months of volunteer work in Bogòta.

POR, PARA AND PILE CREAM IN SAN PEDRO

The Spanish word for hemorrhoid is hemorroid. I know this because I just looked it up on the Internet. I know this because I am going to have to make a highly embarrassing visit to a Guatemalan farmacia today to ask for a 'tubo de crema para hemorroid'. Por and para both mean 'for' in Spanish, but have different purposes:

I struggled with these differences in my last Spanish exam, but I think I need to use para in this instance because hemorrhoid is the destination of the tube of cream, and do not use por even though the problem is related to painful motions. Either way, I am not going to double-check this with my Spanish maestra Clarita before I make my embarrasing visit to the farmacia.

I am not quite sure when or why my brush with old age in Guatemala has happened. I don't think it can result from stress given my highly relaxed sabbatical lifestyle. Was it from sitting on a concrete payment in Santa Clara on Saturday, waiting for a life in the back of a pickup van back to San Pedro? Was it from too much exerted squeezing after too many frijoles (beans) for dinner in my Guatemalan homestay? Was it from sitting for too long on the plastic seats at my Spanish school now I am doing six hours each day of lessons?

Who knows. All I know is I had a night of broken sleep around several different dreams relating to an uncomfortable feeling in the crease of my culo. All I know is that I am walking like John Wayne and need urgent medical relief. All I know is that Guatemalan pharmacists better have some sort of hippocratic oath that will prevent the news of an extranjero's hemorrhoid from spreading around the close-knit local community quicker than I can spread the pile cream on my backside.

Is the embarrassing trip that I need to make to a Guatemalan farmacia to ask for hemorrhoid cream further Karmatic punishment for laughing at the barefooted boy that stood on dog-shit yesterday?

If so, I hope he got it underneath his toenails.


Prologue: The farmacia only had suppositories. And they only had two in stock, so if my problem does not clear within 24 hours, I will have to make another embarrassing visit to another farmacia to buy some more.

KARMA IN SAN PEDRO

Today, I learnt what Karma is. 

At lunchtime, I chuckled heartily to myself as I watched a barefooted young Guatemalan boy step in a dogshit in the street. This evening, I stood in the same dogshit. To be fair, I was wearing trainers so it wasn't quite as bad, but it is still proving a right bugger to get the crap out of my grips.

NOT STUDYING IN SAN PEDRO

I have a big exam tomorrow at my Spanish school, so naturally, I have spent toay doing everything I can think of that will prevent me from having to study.

I woke up around 10AM, grudgingly, when the noise of 10 children screaming outside my homestay eventually seeped through my ear plugs and state of unconsciousness. The rest of the morning was then spent sauntering around the locals shopsin San Pedro, trying not to thinkabout the present and imperfect subjunctive verb forms that I struggled with last week and my Spanish maestra Clarita had already warned me on Friday would figure heavily in Mondays exam as I picked up a genuine replica Barcelona football top for GBP 9, and my second GBP 5 woolen poncho of my Latin American travels.

Shopping completed around midday, I hurried back to my homestay, having been kindly invited by my homestay host Felipe to have lunch and watch the world cup final with him and the rest of the familia Chanajay-Samol. Domingos are the day when Guatemalan families go to church and spend the day together, and homestay students are supposed to make themselves scarce, so it was an offer that was gratefully received, not least because having watched virtually evern football match with Felipe since arriving back in Guatemala three weeks ago, I could think of no other place in San Pedro that I would rather have watched the football.

120 minutes of diving, dirty tackling and a wet English referee that should have sent a Dutchman off much earlier so the rest of the players cut out it out, Spain had won 1-0 and it was 3PM and I suddenly realised that with only a fortnight until I finished my Spanish schoolin San Pedro, I had better urgently start planning my journey down through Central America in August at a local Internet cafe, and sacrifice the learning of subjunctive Spanish verbs for another few hours

My itenary planning took me to 6PM, whereupon I went for dinner. Following this, I stopped off at another cybercafe on the walk back to my homestay, as it would have been rude not to finetune my August travel plans and risk indigestion by studying subjunctive conjugations so soon after a meal.

Its now 21:50 and I am finally back at my homestay trying to study, whilst also guarding the house whilst the family are all at church. Unfortunately, it is raining heavily and every noise of dripping water outside sounds like a potential intruder that needs investigating, and so I am still not getting far with my verb revision.

Monday Prologue: I did surprisingly well in my exam, my first attempt at the Advanced Level test in the school I am studying, which is particularly ironic given I am still greeting Guatamaltecos in the street with a cheerful good morning at 10 o'clock in the evening.

FISHING ON LAGO ATITLAN

Last week I generously gave the four brothers at my Guatemalan homestay the fishing rod and tackle box that had brought me such litle success in the US last month, when I realised that the rod had got broken at some point during the two planes, taxi ride, three chicken buses, toyota pick up truck and three wheeled tuk tuk that got me from Las Vegas to San Pedro. 

On giving them the regalo, I was immediately invited to join the eldest two brothers on a fishing expedition to Lago Atitlan, where I was promised we would catch pescado as big as an 11 and a 9 year old can hold their hands apart. - 'Sabado.' I promised them last Tuesday. - 'Despues de Nariz de Indo y el partido de futbol.'

Today was Sabado, and no sooner had the referee blown the final whistle and Ze Germans had won again, came the first - 'Vamos a pescar.' I sighed inwardly and pretended not to hear, partly because I was tired from getting up at 6AM to go climb Indians Nose, and partly because my recent fishing at Lake Tahoe had reminded me that although I like the idea of catching fish, I don't particularly like the actual fishing part as I invariably spend half my time untying knots in my line and trying to unhook my hook from rocks or weeds at the bottom of wherever I'm fishing. To make matters even worse, since I would be with an 11 year old and a 9 year old on this fishing trip, I wouldn't even get to drink beer whilst I untied the knots from my line, nor would I be able to swear as I tried to unhook my hook from rocks and weeds.

Unfortunately, it wasn't long before the second - 'Vamos a pescar' came, this time followed by a firm - 'Me dijiste' - you said. Sighing inwardly again, I knew I had to go.

I waited whilst the two brothers dug up worms in the garden, and then I put the biscuits I had recently bought as comfort food for studying for the Spanish exam I have on Monday in my pocket when the boys astutely reminded me that all three of us would probably get hungry later as we fished. - 'Vamos a tomar un Kayake?' the brothers then asked me as we walked towards the lake, explaining that the fish were much bigger in the centre of the lake than the minnows we would surely only catch from Lago Atitlan´s shoreline.

Sighing inwardly for the third time, I checked my wallet to make sure I had money in it, and on we walked, me with my chocolate biscuits in my pocket, Augustin with an empty crips packet he had filled with worms, and Beto with our fishing equipment, consisting of a tin can with some fishing line and a hook wrapped around it, and another reel with some line and a hook.

- 'Donde es mi ...?' I motioned a fishing rod with my hands, unfortunately having not yet covered essential fishing vocabulary during my Spanish lessons in San Pedro thus far. One of the brothers explained that my broken rod had not yet been fixed by their father, so we would have to make do with the tin can and the reel.

To summarise the fishing trip on Lake Atitlan that followed, the kayake cost me GBP 1.60 for two hours, "we" spent most of the time fishing in shallow waters (that we could have fished from shore without the kayake) amongst reeds, floating pumice stones and other lake detritus such as plastic forks and the sole of a flip flop, and "we" caught one measly fish between us.

I say "we" fished and "we" caught, because the reality is Augustin and Beto did all of the fishing, whilst I sat at the back of the kayake eating chicharrones and chocolate biscuits and getting wet. Its a safe bet that I won't be going fishing again any time soon.

 The Catch Of The Day, on Lago Atitlan.
Note: You may have to save the photo to your local computer drive and then use Microsoft Paint to zoom, but I assure you there is a fish in this picture

CLIMBING LA NARIZ DE INDIO (INDIANS NOSE)

The highlight of the two hour hike to the top of Nariz De Indio, a hill overlooking Lago Atitlan near San Pedro was definitely when Delfin, the gardiner at my Spanish school, and our guide through the jungle today, told an overweight American woman who had been lagging behind the rest of the group during the walk that she was ¨una poca gorda¨ and probably wouldn´t make it to the top.

At least I think that is what he said in Spanish, and not just what I was already thinking in my head. As it turned out, the American female and her daughter turned around about ten minutes after Delfin´s sensitive words of encouragement, leaving someone else that has almost certainly been eating too many chicharrones recently to be the tail end of the group to the summit.

POLITICAL CORRUPTION AROUND SAN PEDRO

Yesterday during my Spanish lesson, the conversation with my maestra Clarita turned to local government corruption in the towns around Lago Atitlan. Apparently, the previous mayor of San Pedro went to prison a few years ago for siphoning off public funding, and there is currently a scandal in the neighbouring pueblo San Juan, as some political opponents have gone public with some documented evidence that the current 'acalde' in San Juan has been skimming off money from the town budget.

According to Clarita, the crooked mayor in San Juan has a lovely big house with all the latest mod cons including a designer kitchen imported from Switzerland, and he has even been able to afford to send his daughter to study in Canada, something few Guatemaltecos (and certainly not rural town officials) would be able to afford in a month of Domingos.

However as I listened further to my Spanish teacher, I started to think to myself that the pilfering mayor in San Juan is perhaps not all that bad after all, as apparently the town of San Juan was a real crime-ridden shithole a few years ago, and since he became the mayor, the town has seen something of a transformation into a pueblo that Guatemaltecos want to live in, with regular refuse collection (something San Pedro does not have) and the opportunity for all children to go to school and onto further education, regardless of their families financial situation.

As I have mentioned previously, a child was killed during a landslide in San Pedro a month ago during Hurrican Agatha, and her body was never found. In the days after the tragedy, the distraught family went to the mayor in San Pedro to plead for some financial help from the town coffers to rent a tractor to help search for their daughters body so they couyld give her a proper burial. According to Clarita, the mayor of San Pedro turned them away point blank with some insensitive excuses. As a last resort, the grieving family went to nearby San Juan to beg to the mayor there if he could help, even though they were not even his constituents. Within a few hours, the crooked mayor of San Juan had provided the money (approx GBP 3000) to rent a tractor for 48 hours to help search for the dead child in San Pedro.

Unfortunately the search effort with the rented tractor was ultimately unsuccessful, and the family then went back to the alcalde in San Pedro to ask him for a sniffer dog to help look for their child. Again, the Mayor of their town turned them away, and again, the family made the journey to neighbouring San Juan to ask the mayor their if he could help him. Again, within hours, the crooked mayor of San Juan had organised for a specialised sniffer dog from Argentina to be flown up to Guatemala to help search for the missing childs body, so her grieving family could put her to rest and start to get on with their lives.

My Spanish teacher told me that the whole epison has turned the entire population of San Pedro against their local alcalde, and that he now has absolutely no hope of being relected at the end of his current mayoral term, whilst everbody thinks the corrupt mayor of San Juan is the best thing since sliced bread for stepping in to help the family in San Pedro find their daughter, even if he does have a swiss kitchen that he bought with money from San Juans public coffers.

 
The moral of this story is simple for any UK politicians that happen to be reading my blog: If you want to get re-elected for another term, expense your chandeliers, fountains and mortgage repayments on your pied-à-terre near Westminster that you do not even life in to the British taxpayer AFTER you´ve sorted out our countries economic crisis.

AN EARTHQUAKE IN SAN PEDRO

According to Rosa´s mother (and since confirmed on the Internet), there was some tremblors de tierra in San Pedro last night around 1AM. Annoyingly, I slept through it and didn’t feel a thing. Annoying in the sense that having already missed a powerful earthquake in Mexico City by three weeks and a dramatic eruption of Pacaya volcano in Guatemala by less than a fortnight during my travels, this time I was actually in the thick of the excitement, but as it turned out, too busy snoring to realise it.

The fact I slept through it is a particularly bitter pill to swallow, given I have endured broken sleep almost every night since arriving back in Guatemala three weeks ago, due to a combination of avocados falling onto my corrugated iron bedroom roof in the middle of the night, randy feral cats with long toenails running across said roof during the mating hour around midnight, music blaring / fireworks exploding from the Feria in the early hours and local dogs and cockerels having long conversations with each other from about 4AM every morning. And that is not to mention the tail end of Tropical Storm Alex howling outside my bedroom all last week, four young boys at my home-stay preparing themselves noisily for school around 7AM each morning, mosquitoes flying up my nose in the middle of the night (this happened two nights ago – presumably because I forgot to snort DEET before I went to bed), and of course my queasy vomitus stomach of a fortnight ago. 

Last night I slept like a baby, and asides from sleeping through the first seismic activity of my travels through the Americas, didn´t wake up until an ungodly 09:30, after a solid eleven hours sleep. 


Hell, sabbaticals can be tough-going sometimes.

AN ADDICTION IN SAN PEDRO

My name is Ross and I am addicted to pork scratchings.

Having lived in London for over a decade without developing any sort of habit for pork rind, I am not quite sure how or when it happened, but now I cannot walk past a shop in Guatemala without buying a packet (or five) of chicharonnes.

 Question: How long will five packets of Chicharrones last?

Perhaps it it is because pork cracking is actually quite healthy, or because they only cost 30 pence a packet, but either way, I am now having to stray further and further afield from my San Pedro homestay to get my fix, as local shops are already starting to run out of stock.

The other night, I generously bought a packet for each of the four young brothers in my homestay because one of them told me he also liked chicharonnes, something I am now regretting bitterly since realising it means there are four less packets in the village for me.

  Answer: Not Very

 
I can only hope they sell pork scratchings in the next countries I visit. Chicharonnes is a Guatamalteco brand, but reading the back of the packet the other day as I polished off its contents confirmed that they do also have factories in Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, the next few countries I will be visiting on my travels. I can only hope they also sell them when I get down to Panama, and in South America, as if they don´t I am not quite sure what I am going to do. I am already getting withdrawal symptoms just thinking about them as I write this blog post.

In fact I think I will go and buy a

CLARITA MY SPANISH TEACHER

My Spanish maestra Clarita and I have developed a bit of a love-hate relationship during my first two weeks og classes. She loves to tease me for beng a tacaño Scotsman, and I hate all the homework she gives me.

During my first lesson a fortnight ago, I made the fatal mistake of telling my teacher that the stereotypical Scotsman is extremely mean with his money. As a result, everything I now do in Clarita's eyes is because I am a mean, tacaño Scotsman.When I refill my bottle of water at the school, it is because I am a tacaño Scotsman and don't want to fork out buying a new bottle (of course, the real reason is because I am being environmentally conscious, as everyone that is aware of my green credentials would testify). Similarly, when I eat a slice of banana bread that the school coordinators wife has baked during the 'pausa' midway through the afternoon lessons, it is because I am a tacaño Scotsman that wants to fill up my stomach on free school food so I don't have to pay for my own. And when it starts pouring down when I am at the school and I have forgotten to bring my plastic poncho, it is because I am a tacaño Scotsman that doesn't want to spend money on an umbrella and would rather get soaked in the rain. Apparently, I am only slightly less tacaño than the many Israelis that visit Guatemala, and that have created an unfavourable stereotype for themselves in San Pedro by always asking if they can pay less than the advertised price for everything, including food, hotel rooms and even spanish classes.

Fortunately, Clarita isn't getting things all her own way. Guatemala being an ex-colony of Spain, I have been taking great delight in reminding my maestra at every opportunity that Spain is still in the World Cup whilst Guatemala came nowhere near to going to South Africa (fortunately, she has not yet asked about the Scottish national team), and using the fact that there are differences in how Spanish is spoken in Latin America and in Spain as an excuse whenever I make a mistake, telling my teacher that I am only doing things the way they are done in the "proper" Spanish spoken in España.

Clarita's sense of humour and ability to talk the hind legs of a Guatemalan burro make for highly enjoyable classes, and I am already realising that I have been extremely fortunate to get her as my maestra at the Co-Operative of Guatemalan Spanish Teachers. During my first week in the school, one of the other students asked for a new maestro as he wasn't happy with the Mexican teacher he had been allocated, and last week, Kelly the new American in my homestay also asked to switch maestros as the one she had been given was apparently showing signs of boredom with her slow progress at learning Spanish. Meanwhile, in between my own steady progress in improving my Spanish, I am winding up my teacher by telling her she doesn't speak proper Spanish and that I am thinking about buying a Mexican Football top  (Mexico is the Guatemalteco equivalents of England for Scots), and she is taking the mickey out of me for being a Scottish Shylock, which of course I vehemently deny.

At the moment, I have two more weeks of classes booked, however I may well extend by another week or two beyond this, because everything is really cheap in Guatemala and I don't have to spend much money I am keen to further improve my Spanish before I start heading south to Panama.

A tacaño Scotsman trying to conjugate a present subjunctive verb

 Maestra Clarita scorning derisorily as she reviews my latest attempt to conjugate a present subjunctive verb

CHICHI MARKET IN CHICHICASTENANGO