I finished my last Spanish class on Friday! In total, I spent 4 1/2 months taking classes. And sometime in that period I learned a new language and became pretty proficient at using it. How amazing is that?! That said, I'm definitely not fluent. That word means different things for a lot of people, so this is how I'm defining it: speaking a language quickly, with very little difficulty, and with few grammatical errors. I associate this level with, say, being certified as a medical translator. For me to get to that point would take another six months of Spanish immersion, I would guess. But honestly I am happy with where I am at right now: depending on the speaker I understand 75-100% of what they are saying, and I can speak well enough that conversing with patients in a medical setting goes pretty well.
I will still be in the clinic on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, and also will be working on finishing up the medical program orientation manual that I and a couple other folk are making, but without my afternoons taken up by Spanish class I have a feeling this week will be a welcome respite from the business of the previous months. I plan on spending my free time watching movies in Spanish, baking, wandering around the city, chatting with the other Guatemalans in my apartment building, and planning the two weeks of travel I'll be doing with Caleb between the 20th and the 6th. All in all, a pretty tranquilo week :)
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
Week 19: México y no mucho más
Being a passport-carrying gringo from the United States automatically gives me a 90-day visa in Guatemala. However the last time I left Guatemala was when I visited Caleb in Canada, which was surprisingly almost 90 days ago. Since trying to leave Guatemala with an expired visa is bad news bears, I went to Mexico last week. The objective: to renew my visa, set to expire on the 26th of December. The mission: visa run to Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, four hours away from Quetzaltenango.
Technically, renewing your visa means leaving the country for at least 72 hours, and upon reentering the country you get a new 90-day visa. Fortunately, the 72-hour rule is mostly disregarded, allowing you to do your visa run in a day if you'd like, thus not having to pay for two nights in a hostel/hotel. Unfortunately, most of the countries surrounding Guatemala (El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras) are in this CA-4 pact, where a visa acquired in one of countries is valid in all of the others. It is a nice idea, but it also means you can't renew your visa by crossing any of their borders. So that left me with the options of traveling to Mexico (cheap), Belize (expensive), or something really far away (really expensive). Since I have very little money, the choice was an easy one.
I essentially did this trip in a day. I got up at 4:30 to walk over to the Minerva bus terminal where all the camionetas line up. There I found a direct bus to Tecún Umán, the town on the Guatemalan side of the border. I paid $3 for the trip, and four hours sitting four-to-a-school-bus-seat later, I was en la frontera. For $1.25 a guy on a tricycle-rikshaw thingie pedaled me from the bus terminal to the border proper, where I got an exit stamp from a friendly female customs officer for $1.25. Then I walked across the bridge into Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, spent a couple hours frittering away my time in an internet cafe ($1), got bored, ate a couple empanadas ($0.50) walked back across the bridge, got an entry stamp from the same customs officer ($1.25), traveled via rickshaw ($1.25) and bus ($3) in reverse order back to Xela, getting back to the Minerva bus terminal at about 7:00pm. Sweaty, exhausted, and with a stress+dehyrdation headache (it is /not/ a good idea to be hydrated during camioneta bus trips, since they never stop for pee breaks), I collapsed in bed at 8pm, waking up sometime around 9:30am the next day.
My time in Mexico was short lived (about two hours), but I did learn some things, namely:
-Mexican men, surprisingly, are much more prone to cat calling than Guatemalan men.
-It is hot and miserable in Ciudad Hidalgo, but that means they make really awesome ice cold fruit punches.
-The randomly selected empanadas that I ate for lunch in Mexico were by far better than any empanada I've eaten in Guatemala, lending more credence to the theory that Guatemalan food is sadly fairly bland.
So now I have a renewed visa, good until well after I leave Guatemala to head back to the states! And heading back to the states is approaching very quickly - Caleb is going to be in Xela in less than two weeks. Wow.
Technically, renewing your visa means leaving the country for at least 72 hours, and upon reentering the country you get a new 90-day visa. Fortunately, the 72-hour rule is mostly disregarded, allowing you to do your visa run in a day if you'd like, thus not having to pay for two nights in a hostel/hotel. Unfortunately, most of the countries surrounding Guatemala (El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras) are in this CA-4 pact, where a visa acquired in one of countries is valid in all of the others. It is a nice idea, but it also means you can't renew your visa by crossing any of their borders. So that left me with the options of traveling to Mexico (cheap), Belize (expensive), or something really far away (really expensive). Since I have very little money, the choice was an easy one.
I essentially did this trip in a day. I got up at 4:30 to walk over to the Minerva bus terminal where all the camionetas line up. There I found a direct bus to Tecún Umán, the town on the Guatemalan side of the border. I paid $3 for the trip, and four hours sitting four-to-a-school-bus-seat later, I was en la frontera. For $1.25 a guy on a tricycle-rikshaw thingie pedaled me from the bus terminal to the border proper, where I got an exit stamp from a friendly female customs officer for $1.25. Then I walked across the bridge into Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, spent a couple hours frittering away my time in an internet cafe ($1), got bored, ate a couple empanadas ($0.50) walked back across the bridge, got an entry stamp from the same customs officer ($1.25), traveled via rickshaw ($1.25) and bus ($3) in reverse order back to Xela, getting back to the Minerva bus terminal at about 7:00pm. Sweaty, exhausted, and with a stress+dehyrdation headache (it is /not/ a good idea to be hydrated during camioneta bus trips, since they never stop for pee breaks), I collapsed in bed at 8pm, waking up sometime around 9:30am the next day.
My time in Mexico was short lived (about two hours), but I did learn some things, namely:
-Mexican men, surprisingly, are much more prone to cat calling than Guatemalan men.
-It is hot and miserable in Ciudad Hidalgo, but that means they make really awesome ice cold fruit punches.
-The randomly selected empanadas that I ate for lunch in Mexico were by far better than any empanada I've eaten in Guatemala, lending more credence to the theory that Guatemalan food is sadly fairly bland.
So now I have a renewed visa, good until well after I leave Guatemala to head back to the states! And heading back to the states is approaching very quickly - Caleb is going to be in Xela in less than two weeks. Wow.
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