Que chílero

In Cobán, a surprisingly nice little town. Been dealing with lots of administrative baloney with med schools, so any town with good internet connections seems nice to me. Ryan and his funny british friend Dan (ever met a brit who wasn´t funny?) are coming to meet us tomorrow, so we can go on to Semuc Champey, do some swimming in the stepped pools there, as well as hopefully a candlelit cave tour, where you have to swim through underwater tunnels from one pool to the next (yeah, I´m not sure either how that works with the candle). I say hopefully because Mariam has flat out refused to go on anything that requires holding your breath just for mere survival, and Ryan has recently seen a movie about a group of people that got sealed into a cave long enough ago to have since evolved into whiskered, eyeless, albino freaks who are constanly hungry for human flesh, so he´s a bit iffy on the idea. And I would have been fine on my own, until effing Ryan told me about this effing movie. After Semuc Champey, we´ll head up to Tikal, where Ryan has promised as his wedding present to put us up at the nice hotel. After that, we´ve changed our tickets to come home so we can have a little time in Lexington before potentially moving across the country to Sacremento for UC Davis, which starts July 30th.
This Dan character is quite funny (I find myself using British mannerisms myself after hanging out with him for a bit). He´s a 3rd year med student (med school takes 6 years in Britain, but you don´t have to go to undergrad first). One story he had involved waking up, the morning after going out big. He woke up in that strange way that you do, after really tying one on, very early but ravished by hunger and unable to sleep anymore because of it. He set out into the streets to see what there was to eat, and found one of the ubiquitous orange juice stands. There was even a little grill out in front of it, smoking as the charcoal came to life. So when he was asked if he´d like his orange juice with an egg, he quite fancied the idea- fresh squeezed juice with a nice little fried egg to answer his stomach´s craving for something a bit greasy. Of course, he wouldn´t have told the story, and I wouldn´t retell it, if that was what they meant. He was handed a tall glass of juice with a raw egg cracked on top. I like to think that he´s watching them squeeze the juice, pour it in to one of those ice cream sundae glasses that they use, while all the while Dan is kind of watching with one eye and dreaming about all the fun things he´s going to do for the rest of the day. He watches disinterestedly as they lift a fresh egg, probably stolen from under the chicken only an hour ago at most, with its little bits of turd and straw still clinging. He doesn´t see a pan or anything, but he´s still not worried, these people are professionals. As they go to crack the egg on the rim of the glass, Dan´s hungover med-student brain perks up a bit, and he lifts his arm in a motion to stop them, searching among the eight words of spanish that he knows for the silver bullet that will keep the edge of the glass salmonella free. Then horror stops him in his tracks as they plop that egg right into his nice, fresh, juice. Now his hand raised in protest looks like it is reaching to take the drink that he did, after all, order. The way he explained it, he maintained complete composure, nonchalance, even James Dean cool, as he poured the whole thing down his throat without a blink.
He said nothing has ever set him so right, for a hangover. He swears by it now. He´s even out at the stand, imbibing his drink of choice, on off days.
The other drink story I have is as follows. Conchi, my old Casa Xelaju teacher, explained to me the tried and true method of producing tons of breast milk. I mean gobs, heaps, unrestrainable floods of the stuff. Actually, she can tell which mothers have used this recipe by the height of their children as they grow. What you do is, the day after you give birth, you cook up a Moza, which is the national dark beer here, with cinnamon, on the stove. You have to use cinnamon stick, not powder, and you have to drink it when it is as hot as you can possibly manage. You do this before bed for the first 6 days after birth, and then you will have more milk than sexteentuplets could drink. I thought, hmm, that´s nice, maybe we´ll see what Mariam thinks about that some day, and I just went right on about my life. It turns out, that everyone in Guatemala knows this, to the point that if you are seen drinking a Moza, it means you´re working on your milk res. Moza happens to be my new favorite beer, because everything else is piss. Now I know what all that sniggering has been about at the bars...
Remember how Delta is the bane of my existence? How I failed math my senior year in high school because of them, and it´s been all downhill since? They´ve managed another twist of the knife. I called up to change my return flight, and after being on hold for the better part of a Sox game, I was told that in Guatemala you can´t change your flight over the phone. You have to go to Guatemala effing City to do it in person at the Delta office there. Are you kidding me? We´re, like, a few Google employees kids away from being able to beam ourselves to the moon, and Delta can´t even change a ticket over the phone? No. So we cancelled our trip to Mexico, which was mostly just to leave Guatemala and reenter 3 days later in order to get a new visa, and instead head to Guate City where we could go to the Immigration office for a new stamp, which is reported to be a horrid, miserable epic of line-waiting that often takes three days in itself and people who have done it say it´s worth just leaving the country, really, worth about anything, to avoid. And we could change our tickets at the stupid Delta office. We woke at 3am to get the 4am bus, and were in Guatemala by noon. When we finally found the Immigration office, which had moved, in the craziness that is Guate City, the lady told us that the stamp we got when we reentered from Honduras was valid, even though there is supposed to be some new law that says Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua and Guate were all on the same visa. We didn´t argue, though. And we managed to get screwed by Delta into having separate flights a day apart, on the 25th and 26th of June. So we´ll see you then.
One more quick story about chicken buses and their ayudantes. These are the people that manage the crowds, that live by the axiom that ´there is always more room,´ collect money, and deal with baggage (which as often as not is alive- we saw a flock of turkeys on the roof of the bus in front of us on the way to Guate the other day, waddles flapping in the wind). They also have the life expectancy of veal. Their preferred seat is hanging on by a pinkie out the door, but they can also be seen crowd surfing through the bus to collect fares, climbing up the back ladders with cattle resting on their shoulders, doing amazingly complicated sums in their heads instantaneously, and sprinting after the bus then leaping in impossible arcs right through the front door, coming to a perfect rest with their pinkie back on the survival bar bolted above the doorway. On one particularly crowded bus, aftering fighting his way to the back to collect the fares while the bus snaked along a winding mountain road, the ayudante didn´t feel like fighting back through the way he had come. So he snapped open the back door and disappeared, just as the bus started pulling 10 g´s around a hairpin turn. I thought he was a goner for sure, with the emergency door just flapping back and forth, but, I kid you not, his foot appeared in the window at the front of the 75 ft. converted schoolbus 3 seconds later, and he popped in through the front door like a gymnast dismounting from the uneven bars. I tried to figure out the physics of this for the rest of the trip. As far as I could tell, there was no way he could have gone from back to front in such a short time, at least on foot. I think he may have timed it so that as the bus approached the hairpin turn, he leaped from the top of the bus, and as the bus rounded the corner, he landed again, perfectly, in the front door (you may have to draw yourself a little force vector diagram to picture this). Frigging bus ninjas. Adios.

We can't seem to ditch this place. Not that we would want to, since Xela has everything we're looking for. Except for vacant apartments that aren't made of particle board and plastic bags. We arrived yesterday, from the Mountain School, and after meeting up with Ryan (an amazingly smooth procedure- he emailed where he was staying, we emailed him a time to meet, and then we stuck to the plan. Harder than if we had cellphones and cars, I guess, but much easier than smoke signals or pony express), we searched out our favorite watering hole(s). Fun having a "favorite" anything in a city 10,000 miles and two international borders away from home. Today we've been looking around for more of a permanent place to stay here, with no good luck so far. Yoga House and Sabor de India are full, as are the other gringo haunts. However, we have run in to about a jillion acquaintences and friends, on the streets, everywhere, including a group of Kansan catholic college girls who miraculously found themselves at the Mountain School this past week. Just for some background, this is a school founded in an area formerly dominated by Marxist guerrillas and currently dominated by people either slowly starving to death working in miserable conditions for slave wages on plantations owned by the rich, or barely not starving to death by organizing themselves into various cooperatives and communes. Everybody remembers scores of people from their towns or families that were disappeared during the civil war for being accused of supporting the guerrillas, or simply for walking home from work too late at night. In short, a school in an area of fairly progressive political leanings. In roll the Kansans, with their huge wheeled suitcases full of fancy clothes and grooming products. Overhearing one conversation about local news, they mentioned "we don't think about politics back home, why should we think about it here?" They were most captivated by the beauty pageants reported in the papers (every Sunday paper is full of models in bikinis- this way the evangelical men can get some girly pictures in the guise of "news"). They complained about everything, all week, including the food they were served and the spanish instruction they were receiving, and left early Friday before graduation. They weren't horrible people, just exhausting, and now they have positioned themselves at strategic intervals all over Xela so that it is impossible to walk more than a block without running in to one of them and having a strained conversation through a fake smile. That is the general trend here- it is becoming more and more gringofied the closer we get to the summer season.
The Mountain School finished up awesomely. We had a few more adventurous pickop rides to Colomba, through the most incredible mountain scenery, including one ride in the rain where Nana and I were hanging on to the outside bar in back, standing on the slippery round back bumper, me feetsies clad in my new Brasil flip flops (I had to throw the last pair out after buying them at the Chichi market- awesome leather flops with colorful patterns woven into the footstrap- after we discovered in Antigua, with the sisters, that none of us had stepped in shit, it was just the way my flops always smelled), as the truck caromed down the winding, pot-holey mountain road. The bed of the truck was filled with campesinos coming home from work, standing like sardines huddled under the tarp that was keeping off the pouring rain. By the end my hands had clawed up around the bar so that one of the guys had to pry my fingers off for me. Mariam also had a watery adventure when they lost the path on the way back from a remote waterfall they had hiked to. Luckily Jorge had his machete and blazed a new trail down the steep mountainside until they popped out on the highway.
We're now planning our visa-renewal trip to Mexico, after which I think we're going to meet Ryan in Coban, check out the cool stepped river their before heading to Tikal, and maybe returning by way of Lago Izabal (we missed the north side of this lake on our last trip east). There is also a six day trek from Nabaj to Todos Santos in a few weeks, and Todos Santos might be a nice place to hang out for our last few weeks doing some last minute volunteering.
Miss you all. I'm admitted to UC Davis, which really just confuses things, so we'll have to find out a few more specifics before we know where we'll be living when we get back.