1 Down, 9 To Go

As of today I have been in guatemala for exactly one month.The last three weeks I have been trying to wrap my mind around the spanish language in Xela. I am studying at the spanish school La Paz (peace in spanish). But in comparison to my week of hippiness in San Marcos it really hasn´t been all that peaceful (as some of you gentlemen already know). In three weeks I´ve had three different spanish teachers and next week I have maestra number four. My first teacher, Nereida, was fired because the coordinator of the school believes she stole another student´s camera. Gabby was my teacher for the second week. But in week three we started with only two students so Gabby got the boot because of seniority. A French/Thai girl started classes on tuesday, so now Gabby is back but she is not my teacher. My teacher for this week is Angelica, but next week her former student returns. Which means next week I will have my fourth teacher in four weeks. However, none of this bothers me because I was blessed with the best host family possible. We live above their restaurant (I use the term restaurant loosely, because for most patrons the food is only an appetizer for the booze). Mi Madre, Laura, sees drunks stumble in and out of our cantina every day and is therefore extremely lenient. I asked what time she wanted me home in the evenings and she just laughed at me. My older sisters, Delila(25) and Imelda(27), are very good natured and enjoy talking with me more or less. Delila´s boyfriend, Miguel, is on a soccer team called Los Chiguilles (spanish slang for the drunks) and we watch their games at night. Yesterday, I played 20 games of Futio (fusball) with my younger brother, Jonatan(13). He spends most of his time with me explaining all the bad words he knows in English. And then there is Lester(16) who is a friend of the family, but lives in our house. He plays soccer on my team against one of the other spanish schools nearby.

Now for some stories-

1. Last thursday we had a party at our school for Jim (american) and Rafael (swiss) because it was their last day. At one point Rafael thought it would be a good idea to start dancing on the tables - needless to say we didn´t learn a lot of spanish that day. I could go into more details about the party, but my mother is on this list and I don´t want to be disowned (just kidding mom, I´m being very responsible while down here). Anyways...after the party I walked back to my house. There was a soccer tournament going on across the street and there were a lot of drunks out and about. I didn´t think anything of it at the time and I went inside. However, I didn´t know that they had riled up our dog Oso (which means bear in spanish) and as I was walking past Oso he bit me right on the buttocks (I feel like I should make a Forest Gump reference here, but I won´t). I can´t remember if I´ve had my rabbies vaccine or not, but its been a week and I´m still alive. Actually, Oso has bitten two other people and they didn´t get rabbies so I figured I was ok. By the way...I didn´t know this when I first moved in, but I live in a Zoo. We have two dogs (Oso and Rex), somewhere between 4 and 17 birds, a cat (sally) who just had two kittens, and on the roof a gallo (rooster) that likes to make an ear piercing sound every five minutes from 3 am to 8 am.

2. Here in guatemala they don´t really celebrate Halloween, but there is a big celebration on November 1st for the day of the dead. For the day of the dead I decided to go to a drunken horse race in Todos Santos which is about 5 hours from Xela. I worked it out with my teacher that I would miss class on Wednesday and have a make up class on saturday so that I could go. So tuesday after class I left for Todos Santos. After about two and half hours I reached the half way point in Huehuetenango, but I had just missed the last bus to Todos Santos. Then I met a girl from the Peace Corps who knew of a minibus that would take us half way there to Tres Caminos and we could find another bus from there to Todos Santos. I expected Tres Caminos to be a town, but when we arrived it was only a fork in the road with two buildings and no light. So we had to hail down a pick up truck and ride in the back with four other guatemaltecos the rest of the way. It wasn´t exactly warm, so I spent the next hour huddled underneath a plastic tarp. When I arrived I found my swiss friend rafael and the other people that had left my spanish school in Xela. We went to the Peace Corps party where I thought I would find a lot of extremely interestng people, but they were fairly clickish and rather dull. So instead we found a fiesta with the horse riders that would be in the race the next morning. They had been preparing for the race by drinking for the last 72 hours. Seeing it was difficult for them to stand on their own, it was even more difficult for me to understand the spanish they were slurring (and spitting) in my ear. So I returned to the spanish school where of course there weren´t any more beds and I spent the night sleeping on a wooden bench fighting off hypothermia.

But the next morning the day of the race had arrived. ---First some background info on the race--- Originally the spanish conquistadors had considered the mayan people to be an inferior race and unable to ride horses. So in response the Mayans said that not only could they ride the spanish horses, but they could do it after drinking for three days straight. So it isn´t a battle between the riders, but a battle between horse and man (with a middle finger to the Spanish). Essentially, they spend from an hour to the whole day (depending on how drunk and how hard core they are) riding back and forth about a 100 meters trying to master a horse they´ve never riden. The race itself is pretty funny, but the riders that pass out while on the horse and fall straight to the ground is when I completely lost it (just look at the photos).

After the race I had to get back to Xela. However, because of the celebration there were no buses and everybody told me I had to wait an extra day. But what they didn´t know is 1. Never tell me what I can and can´t do and 2. I told my teacher I would be there for class on thursday.... So while hitch hiking I met a spaniard named fernando and he gave me a ride back to tres caminos. From there I caught another pickup that luckily was going all the way to Xela. I spent the next five hours getting sunburned in the bed of a pickup with five other guatemaltecos and oddly enough the same girl from the peace corps. But eventually I reached Xela in time for class the next day.

I didn´t mean to go on for quite so long, but in a nutshell that´s my life. I hope all is well.

Cristobal - the man formerly known as Lake Walker