Believe it or not, there’s a lot to tell this time. Things kind of picked up since the last post. It’s been a busy week. First, I got some good interviews in and a good amount of work done. But that’s the boring part. So I’ll skip to the good stuff.
Last Tuesday night a friend of a friend called me (we’d been trying to get in touch with each other for a week) and invited me out for some dinner. I’d already eaten but decided to head out anyway so I could meet some people in the city. Not only did I get to meet some fun people (not only this friend of a friend but also one of his friends) but I ended up joining them at the Carlos Santana concert at the national soccer stadium. He and his friends had tickets already, but we were able to buy one for me outside the stadium from some scalpers (and for Q200 less than what he and his friends paid!). The concert was amazing! Plus I made some great contacts with this group of people who are all members of couchsurfing.com, an online network for travelers. Wednesday I went out for coffee with another couchsurfer, which was wicked fun. I want to thank whoever thought of setting up that network.
Last Thursday I went to one of the private universities here to talk to an economics class another friend of a friend (and now friend of mine) teaches there. The professor (my friend….is this confusing yet?) asked me to come in and talk about my project with his students. It was a great class. The students were really excited about the topic and it started a big debate over what role the media should play in society, why civil society in Guatemala is so disorganized and what role the students can play in politics. It wasn’t so much a discussion of political ideology but of political action in terms of wanting to make a difference in society, to take an interest in what is going on in Guatemala. By the end of the class the students were planning to meet later in the week to discuss how they could make a difference in their university and how they could get the students there to be more active in wanting to make a difference in their country. I’m not sure if anything will come of it, but it was exciting to see the students want to do something about the issues we were discussing.
On Friday I took a chicken bus to Xela (in K’iche the city is called Xelaju; officially it’s name is Quetzaltenango) with a gal I met at the Santana concert (the friend of the friend of the friend). It was a crazy ride, kind of like being in a video game you can’t control. Those drivers are crazy and the roads were really bad. Not only were the roads curvy and steep, but they were also being repaired (if you call it repair) so much of the route was turned in to a two lane highway were people were constantly trying to pass on blind curves. It was kind of scary, really, and I tried to stop paying attention after the first hour or so. It’s about a three to four hour ride to Xela from the capital, so I had lots of time to get jostled and bounced around. But it was totally worth the trip! Xela is an incredible city. We stayed with another guy from the couchsurfing network that my new friend had stayed with before. We had a great time exploring the city, got a ride in the bed of a pickup truck (here they call them “picop”) to the hot springs in the mountains, and climbed up to a beautiful lake in the crater of a dormant volcano. The guy we were staying with works for the equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency here and got us a ride to the volcano with a group of TV reporters from one of the news channels…we might even be in the report they will air on Saturday about the lake, which is a sacred site for the local Maya populations. The plan was to do a two-day hike up the highest peak in Central America, Tajumulco, but we didn’t have the right clothes for the cold weather. Xela itself sits at 8,000 ft, and the volcano we were going to climb goes up to over 12,000 (not sure of exact altitude on that one, will have to check), so even in the warmest months the weather can be chilly. We got back to the city on Monday morning after leaving Xela at the crack of dawn.
Hey, gotta run but will write more later. Chau….
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