Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Week 7: Fiestas & Mudslides

Last Tuesday was Merete's birthday, so we ate cake and attempted to sing "Happy Birthday" in Spanish at the school. Then later in the evening everyone went out to a tapas bar and drank a whole lot of wine. Unfortunately (sorry, Merete!) I got absolutely zero good pictures of either event. Wednesday I went with a group of folks and played a bit of indoor soccer, and was sore for the next three days.

On Thursday we went up to a village in which our school had previously been very active with social projects. Over the last ten years Pop Wuj has built dozens of stoves there, given many children scholarships to attend primary school, and reforested some of the surrounding hills. So as a token of the village's gratitude, each year during the first harvest of elote they have a small fiesta for Pop Wuj. This basically means that once a year most of the school hops in a shuttle, heads up to the village, and everyone stuffs their face silly with super fresh and delicious sweet corn served up by the community leader's family. It was easily be best corn I've ever had.

It may look like plain ol' corn on the cob, but no, it is elote, and it is much more delicious. It is usually prepared in one of two ways: the more sane way is to squeeze some fresh lime juice onto the cob, sprinkle it with salt, and nibble off individual kernels. The crazier way, and hence why this particular preparation is called "elote loco", is to paint the ear of corn with stripes of mayo, ketchup, and picante sauce, and then garnish with a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese. Eating elote this way is ultimately a bit sloppier (and more fun). I, of course, prefer the crazy corn method. Here's a photo of Merete and Shuvani showing off their cobs:

Shuvani and Merete with their elote loco


I and most folks ate three cobs of corn, and were completely, totally stuffed afterward. But my teacher Ulises and Shuvani, one of the students here, got into a corn-eating contest. They tied by eating /seven/ cobs of corn. Seven! I'm sure Kobayashi could have eaten ten times as much, but for us mere mortals it was quite impressive watching those two go at it.

Also, the village kids that ate elote with us were extremely photogenic. Here are a couple of my favorite pictures of them:

Village girl

and

Super cute

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Last Thursday Merete, Tom, Shuvani, Amy, and I cooked for the school dinner, and it was delicious. We made a Norwegian fish stew accompanied by whole wheat garlic bread and buttered grean beans. Dessert was chocobananas and cookies. And of course there was a whole bunch of wine. One of the teachers informed us that, in his 20 years of teaching at Pop Wuj, our group was only the second to attempt a fish dish. Good job, us! We had a ton of stew, bread, and cookie dough left over too, so we had another dinner of fish stew on Friday night while watching a movie at the school.

The weekend itself was pretty tranquil. I studied a bunch in coffee shops with friends, watched Casino Royale at a movie cafe (also with friends), and went to the mall with Matt Percy and Tom. We went to see if any of us could find some pants and shoes, since all of us had packed light. We first went to a Kohls- or JC Penny's- sized store that sells off-brand clothing of surprisingly good quality at surprisingly cheap prices. After talking with my teacher about this store I learned that, because a lot of designer clothes in America are made in Guatemalan sweat shops, it is fairly easy for the employees of said sweatshops to work for, say, American Eagle by day, and after work to make the same pants in their homes and then sell them on the streets. If you become successful enough at doing this you can start your own company, say, American Goose, and start selling your product to stores like the one I visited on Saturday. So there were all kinds of hilarious brands at this store: New Navy, Hollistar, Tom Cruise, Fac'q Jeans, Aeropostal, etc. But in my opinion the most appropriate name of all was the name of the store: Carrion.

Unfortunately for me, all of the women's jeans were blinged to kingdom come with sequins and elaborate stitching. If I were to start wearing clear platform heels those jeans might start looking appropriate on me, but since I spend most of my day sitting I imagine all those glued-on gems would be pretty uncomfortable for my bottom. I couldn't find good shoes either. Matt did well, though: he got a pair of soccer shorts, a pair of Inside jeans, and orange and yellow Diadora indoor shoes, all for $40.

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Despite having a dearth of pants and shoes, life is good. The foot fungus is dying and I haven't gotten any new chinche bites, although I was attacked by a flea a few days ago and am still itchy from that. Fleas also happen to be especially common here, perhaps because of the incredible numbers of stray dogs that live in Guatemala. So any family that has dogs or cats is bound to get fleas once in a while. Since my family has both, I make sure neither get into my room. That has worked well, but unfortunately I can't do much about the random flea that is hiding out in a cafe chair.

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Some of you may have heard on the news about the mudslides in Guatemala last weekend. What happened was that we had a tropical depression sitting over Guatemala on Saturday and Sunday and got a /ton/ of rain. Unfortunately this caused multiple mudslides along several sections of the highways in this area. At least 40 people died in the slides, and dozens more are still missing. Sadly, most of the victims so far were volunteers who were trying to pull people from buses buried in mud from an initial highway mudslide, and then were caught in a second, larger collapse. The news stations down here don't do much (read: almost none at all) censoring, so watching the coverage of the disasters has been difficult, to say the least. Luckily the rain has let up a bit, so hopefully the recovery operation can resume again so families can receive a bit of closure.

The roads themselves are in pretty terrible condition because of dozens of smaller landslides that fell onto the highway; new students that arrived today said that the trip from Antigua to Xela, which normally takes 3.5 hours, took them 14 because of road conditions. This weekend I was planning on heading to the mercado at Chichicastenago, which is in the direction of Antigua, but it seems as though that isn't an option at this point.

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Next week should be exciting: it is Guatemala's equivalent of Independence Day, and from what I've heard, Guatemalans may get more crazy about their independence than Americans do. I'm looking forward to it :)

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