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 [...]
I wound up taking a first-class bus to Quetzaltenango, a very nice Pullman bus with air conditioning, music, and even an in-flight movie. I´m not sure what the movie was, but it was highly amusing. It mostly involved two guys running around the jungle, getting caught in all sorts of outlandish traps, fighting some rather [...]
I´m stringing the next few episodes in chronological order, as if I´d written them at the time, rather than all at once. I´ll try to get the dates right.
So: Monday, April 25.
Got up this morning and went down to the Ixchel Museum, which is renowned for its textile displays, in hopes that they could find [...]
that I am not quite as naive as you might think. I´m pretty good at evaluating risks (it helps that I´m a decent reader of body language), and I´m also a pretty paranoid traveler when it come to petty theft et al. I keep my bags and daypacks locked, I lock my bag to the [...]
Got here at just past 9pm tonight, just after the last shuttle to my hotel. (I´m staying in El Aeropuerto Guest House–I leave it to you to figure out how it got its name ) So I went to grab a cab, and immediately got accosted by a guy who offered to take me [...]
I’m starting to get the pre-travel jitters…half of me is saying, “Oh my God, what am I DOING?? I’m taking off into a foreign country armed with nothing but an ATM card and a guidebook, and I don’t even speak the language…”
The other half is saying, “Good gods, don’t be such a wimp. You went [...]
I’ve been doing a trial run, packing my backpack today–it’s essential to do that the day before, so you can find all the things you’ve left out. I’ve been adding “buy this” items as I go.
My pack is a standard backpacker’s back, large but not a frame pack. I’ve got everything organized with Eagle [...]
Well, first, a few words on why I’m going to Guatemala…
As some of you know, I got laid off in 2002, in the middle of the great Silicon Valley Crash. My boyfriend dumped me three weeks later, leaving me free to take off for Southeast Asia. So I went for six months–the best six months [...]