After a happily uneventful bus trip, I´ve arrived in Antigua.
Antigua, about an hour out of Guatemala City, is the Guatemalan equivalent of Bangkok´s Khao San Road–which is to say, it’s paved in tourists, loud dance music, and people selling completely random stuff at overinflated prices. I think the gringos must outnumber the local people.
And what, [...]
Just a quick note to say that my fever has FINALLY broken, and I’m no longer waking up in the middle of the night with chills, groping for the extra blanket and acetominephen. It is SO nice not to have to pop pills every few hours to stay coherent. And I have more energy, which [...]
Today I got up early and went off to the San Francisco El Alto market with Carlos the English speaking guide. The San Francisco El Alto market is the biggest Sunday market in Guatemala, and is particularly known for its stock sales–it’s the biggest animal market in Central America.
(Hallelujah!! I have finally found the apostrophe [...]
Totonicapan: the capital of Totonicapan province. Not a particularly impressive town, but then very few towns in Guatemala are–the biggest city is Guatemala City at 300,000, and the next down is Xela (Quetzaltenango), where I´m staying. Xela has 150,000 people, and doesn´t really “feel” like a city to me. The winding alleys are nubbly with [...]
Found my English-speaking guide today! and got half of the textiles tour I wanted. Going to San Francisco el Alto market tomorrow, it´s the biggest market in Guatemala. Sunday I go back out into the village to talk to more artisans (with a trilingual guide!).
Thrilled with everything, but I´m fighting off flu, and the Internet [...]
Just a quick note to say that Spanish school is enormous fun and I would LOVE to come back for a full eight-week immersion course…I just finished my first five hours of class and I´m already at the point of being able to carry on a conversation, albeit a highly selective one, in Spanish. I [...]
One of the nice things about traveling solo is that you can take a day off whenever you feel like it. Sometimes you want a little down time to sit and reflect, or just laze about. If you´re running around on a tour, there isn´t much opportunity for that, but if you´re traveling on your [...]
Well, I´ve got the next three days planned out: fifteen or so hours of Spanish language class, a textiles tour with Carlos Molina, who runs some kind of Mayan weavers´project in a nearby city; a visit to the San Francisco El Alto market, which is one of the two biggest in Guatemala, and a couple [...]
I got an email from Openwave today asking me to please fill out and send them a bunch of forms ASAP. I said, “Umm, I´m in Guatemala.” If it turns out they need it earlier, I think I´ll express-mail it from Guatemala. THAT would be funny.
LOL
More later,
Tien
The Traveling Tigress is extremely smug this morning, having spent two hours laboriously working through two phrasebooks and my book on Mayan culture (which is, helpfully, written in both English and Spanish and can be used, admittedly with great effort, as a weaving phrasebook) to produce three sentences in Spanish identifying myself as a weaver [...]