Found food, found a job (sort of)

So, this entry is a couple days past due thanks to recurrent power outages in San Pedro…we got booted from a café by an outage yesterday, didn{t even try Sunday because the whole town´s power was out, etc.  This was revised for Monday evening, but not again for today…

First off, I just heard the seven-year old kids who live across the street rocking out at the top of their lungs to Ramstein’s Du Hast.  Definitely in the running for my top highlight in San Pedro thus far.

Second, this past week I landed a volunteer opportunity.  So I’ll be working for free again, which I swore I would never do.  Dear god I hope this is better than interning on the Hill.

Today (Monday), I started working for FEDEPMA (Federación de los Pueblos Mayas), a local community development organization and collective of farmers and artisans.  The coalition works in a wide variety of areas, including textiles, coffee, honey, fertilizer production, and carpentry by providing loans and technical assistance to its members; running an organic farm; processing raw agricultural goods and preparing them for sale and export; and managing several retail locations for its members products.

El horno.

I’m working at the FEDEPMA center just a few hundred yards from our house, helping out the head empresaria, Loida Margarita, with roasting coffee.  I’m pretty jazzed, despite my reluctance to write with exclamation points.  Today we sorted roasted beans for resale: 1^st grade whole bean, 1^st grade ground, and second grade.  Other days we’ll be roasting the beans and packaging product, and hopefully once the harvest comes in, processing the coffee cherries as well.  It’s going to be an awesome learning experience, Loida is an incredibly nice and funny woman, and hopefully working in the coffee roasting plant also affords the opportunity to gain some insight into FEDEPMA’s other work, too.  Because I love coffee, but while it’s been a while, when I was still in school I also used to geek out about microfinance and Latin American economic development. Nerd.

Sorting the beans.

Now I just need to find something that pays…

Anyways, the main focus of this blog entry is supposed to be the food we’re eating here in Guatemala, which in two words, is great and cheap.  And despite a tiny bit of momentary discomfort here and there, the food has yet to provide any days-on-end, life-altering, bowel-shattering experiences.  Hooray, both for hyphens and a lack of dysentery.

A couple of conditions on the great and cheap.  It’s great as long as you’re willing to try new things, and can deal with a random bit of gristle or bone every once in a while.  You’re not getting all white meat.  Deal with it.  And it’s always pretty cheap, but in San Pedro it’s cheaper when you stay closer to the market and further from the touristy section near the docks.  Still, there’s good stuff to be had in Gringolandia: two entrees and two great cocktails for about US $12 at Café la Puerta ain’t bad.

But eating in town is a totally different experience.  When we get breakfast at the market, it’s typically a tostada or roll topped with guacamole, beans, hardboiled egg, and a variety of pickled vegetables and salsas; plus atól: a thick, warm, milk-based drink flavored with arroz con leche, arroz con chocolate, elote, or platano.  Both for 4 Quetzales per person, roughly $0.50.  Guatemala > the dollar menu (in terms of value, the opposite being true for price).

The snack staple so far has been chuchitos, basically slightly smaller and slightly more solid than a tamale.  So a corn husk-wrapped ball of cooked cornmeal with a little piece of seasoned meat inside.  See below, 1 Q, $0.12.

Chuchito, in various stages of unwrapping

That being said, we try to eat most breakfasts and dinners at home, until today slightly hindered by a decidedly bush-league stove, and we pick up almost all the ingredients at either the market or one of the countless little bodegas that families run out of the front of their houses.

We’ve been eating a lot of pancakes, eggs, sautéed vegetables, rice, pasta, and fried plantains so far, with one failed attempt at beans under our belt.  Buying raw meat in the market is a bit intimidating, particularly without a fridge to store it in, so we haven’t brought much home yet, but eventually…

The preparation station

Typical meal of tortillas, huevos y platanos.

I can´t eat fried rice without looking like a moron.

Jesus- have I already been here a month? It’s hard for me to believe, given that I haven’t necessarily adapted into any kind of routine yet. Most days begin with sun and by about 2 or 3pm the clouds have rolled in bringing the rain and the already familiar damp chill. Thus, we have been starting our days muy temprano. The dishes from the night before usually have to be washed before breakfast (to stave off bugs or because we need them to eat the next meal). As I was writing this, our landlord, Shino, arrived with a new stove! We just installed it, and it’s beautiful. Now we have four functioning stove-top eyes, and hopefully will be able to actually simmer los frijoles negros when we’re ready for the second attempt. Pretty exciting.

I’m taking Spanish classes from a private instructor who has been teaching for about six years. He’s patient and inquisitive and corrects me when I’m wrong. He also likes discovering new words in English so we enjoy sharing silly expressions with each other. The class is three hours a day all week, and is a bargain for the service. Our neighbor is a yoga instructor in Gringolandia, and when I expressed an interest in coming to her class she told me they needed another teacher. I’m seriously considering this opportunity and hope that I can find the confidence and obtain the techniques to share with others what has been such a staple for my sanity for so many years. The pay of teaching at this studio is good, given that students show up. As this is the slower season, it’s almost impossible to predict that it would bring steady income, if at all.

I am so proud (and even a little jealous) of Kevin for getting to roast coffee at FEDEPMA. I think it will be a great experience, and it’s exactly the kind of homegrown organization that we dreamed of working with before we arrived. There are still other hypothetical opportunities for both of us that we have yet to address. All in good time, right? I like to think that timing is everything, but it’s meaning and restraints are so different in different cultures. Some people here are incredibly punctual, and but there are plenty of businesses that simply don’t have a set horario and seem to open or close whenever they feel like it.

Our cabin is beginning to feel more and more like home, and like Kevin said, our love for food hasn’t changed much J Although I do miss spinach, Honey Nut Cheerios + cold milk and basically anything else you could think of that needs to be refrigerated, the fruits and vegetables that grow abundantly here are beautiful and delicious.

This is güisquil. [insert photo] It’s incredibly cheap and there are a lot of varieties that grow around town. You boil it like a potato with the skin on, until it feels tender. After it is peeled and cut, you can eat it or season and sauté it. I have big plans for mashed güisquil someday soon. Stay tuned.

Güisquil...body part comparisons are natural. Also platanos, bananitos, and green oranges.

I’ve also acquired a fairly unhealthy obsession with pan dulce, which is exactly what it sounds like: sweet bread. It’s super cheap (some panaderías and tiendas sell one bread roll for .50 centavos!) The breads here are freshest in the afternoon, because they bake them in the morning (late morning-not 3 or 4am like bakeries in the states). Most Guatemalan families buy a bag of ten pan dulces for breakfast the next morning because nothing pairs better with coffee. Yum! Sadly, I’m going to have to cut back this week. Kevin and I made a tentative budget last night, and I labeled pan dulce as a splurge so I don’t turn into a Pillsbury Dough Girl.

Apart from volunteering and classes, our other projects this week are food-related. My friend Ingrid has a liquadora (blender and food processor), and we have aspirations of making our own peanut butter and other tasty spreads. She was sick over the weekend so the production has been postponed, but rest assured that when it happens it will be well documented. Additionally, we are going to spend Saturday shopping, preparing and eating with a Guatemalan family to learn how they cook la comida típica. Not sure what’s on the menu yet, but it will be neat to see how food is cooked with a wood fire and such.

On an unrelated note, we finally got a mailing address to share with you folks. If anyone is interested in sending things, please use the following:

Jose Antonio _________

Kevin & Stacy

1a Calle 546

San Pedro La Laguna, Sololá

GUATEMALA

There’s really no telling how long mail will take to get here, so if you send something other than a letter, probably best that it’s not perishable (hmm… like Twizzlers, for example. I know first-hand that they are excellent travelers) We’d love to hear from you! 

Llegando al país, llegando a San Pedro

Basically I’m a pain in the ass to travel with, at least with a bike. Getting to baggage claim after landing I had to figure out a way to stack a bike box and two bags on a luggage cart, Leaning-Tower-of-Pisa style, while everyone looked at me like I was a huge idiot. So my first experience in Guatemala was feeling like a jerk, because clearly no single person needs to carry that much crap.

But once I actually got on the shuttle to Antigua I got that nostalgic feeling of being back in Latin America. Kind of like Lima, the Guatemala City pollution burns the nostrils immediately. And pasando hacia las afueras de la ciudad, there was that distinctive Latin American architecture and terrible business signage. Concrete box, brightly painted buildings, plastered with signs, rarely displaying the name of the business, but always a list of the services or products offered, and typically a Gallo beer logo or five. You know, those cheap plastic banners that fade from sky blue to white, with neon bubble letters and Clipart pictures of roast chickens or generic looking, vaguely Latin models. Awesome.

Fifteen minutes in Guatemala City was the jolting, but strangely pleasant reminder that I was back in Latin America. Ascending into the mountains and then down into Antigua was the turning point. I started to feel really excited about being here. Speaking Spanish, cheap and good food taken with a chaser of Immodium, and mountains.

After a few laps around downtown Antigua, passing the alley where the hotel was located at least 2 or 3 times, the shuttle driver and I arrived at Hotel la Casa de Don Ishmael. Stacy was waiting outside and I felt the happiest that I’d been for at least two weeks.

My time in Antigua before Kevin is a bit of a blur. I had nearly two full days to wait and it was difficult to suppress my anxiousness and muster the curiosity and patience to explore the city on my own. And when I say explore, I mean to be lost inside the maze that is the picturesque colonial town of Antigua. Most who know me know how impeccable my sense of direction is…. Right?? And of course, I refuse to carry around a book, map or guide. So most of my time was spent walking the skinny sidewalks of unmarked streets while straining my neck to glance inside each open door I noticed. Most of the signs for business or services are flat against the buildings, thus it is impossible to know what you’re walking toward until you’ve basically passed right by it. Every meal I had in Antigua was fantastic, although most of them were shared with a book. I don’t remember a more restless night’s sleep than that before Kevin arrived.

A church in Antigua.

Seeing his head peaking out of the shuttle bus window in the Thursday afternoon sunshine was the pinnacle of the trip- mos def. We walked through the remains of the biggest market day either of us had ever seen, and then visited a legitimately decent espresso bar that I’d discovered during my meanderings. The two employees at Fat Cat Coffee House were super friendly, and I was grateful for their patience as I practiced my barely comprehendible Spanish. I can’t quite explain the nostalgia I felt when I was presented with a rosetta in my cappuccino in Antigua. Even though I’ve only worked with espresso for a year, it was like seeing an old friend in an otherwise unfamiliar place- so comforting. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time there. On Saturday before we left, Fat Cat happened to be hosting their first latte art competition. I think it was possibly even the first competition in Antigua. There were only six or seven baristas competing, but it was so neat to be there. Before everyone showed up, Gerson let Kevin and I pull some shots on the machine. We were rusty, but it was really great to be behind a bar again, if only for a minute. Unfortunately, because they started about an hour and a half behind schedule (Guatemalan time, as Ingrid would say), we had to catch a bus before the winner was announced. But we got some great pictures. [see below]

Gerson, pouring pretty things.

Nery from Fat Cat Espresso

The only excursion we managed to fit in two days was also coffee related. We took a two-hour coffee tour of the prominent Antigueno Finca Filadefia. Although the grounds, the estate and the machinery were impressive, the tour (experienced in both English and Spanish) was lackluster. Ironically, one of our fellow tourists happen to graft fruits and flowering plants for a living and seemed to know as much, if not more about the coffee growing process than the guide. Unfortunately, he was from Israel and his English was as good as my Hebrew. It was interesting to see first-hand, the process in total- from seedling to packaging. However, the farm is not organic. They use two ounces of pesticide for each coffee bush per season. Apart from growing, harvesting and roasting coffee, Finca Filadelfia also brings in hundreds of thousands of quetzales with its Canopy Tours (hang-gliding, I think), horse-back riding excursions and two fancy-schmancy restaurants where they host large events and private parties. While trying to concentrate on what the guide was saying about the sun-drying process, I was blind-sided by how much wealth the farm had and how each family outside its gates may never see a portion of that wealth throughout several generations. Kevin and I agreed that the entrance fee was barely worth it, but we learned a lot nonetheless.

Inside Filadelfia´s processing plant, sorting  the beans according to their weight

Now we’re back (for me, at least) in San Pedro, and it’s starting to feel a little like home.

So, we’re in San Pedro, but getting here was a hassle, thanks in part due to the general pains of travel in Latin America, but mostly attributable to yours truly and my insistence on bringing a mountain bike. When the shuttle driver saw the bike box and two suitcases, he almost didn’t let us on…but he did, and after five hours of tailbone bruising potholes, dropped us off with the other 9 passengers at the Panajachel dock in San Pedro, which was conveniently another 3 miles or so from our house.

The highlight of the journey (non-sarcastic amazing vistas excluded) is a toss-up between two moments. One: seeing a guy urinating on the right front tire of a chicken bus while we were stopped in traffic. The urinator just so happened to be the ticket collector for said bus, so I guess that makes it okay. Two: witnessing/hearing the moment when the 20-something female backpacker in front of us realized that her new British boyfriend, who she met in Belize a week or two prior, had graduated from university the same year that she graduated from – check it – fifth grade. This gentleman might just be the UK version of Bill Sirl, though, since he’s traveling through Guatemala, hopefully without the same dietary restrictions.

Back to San Pedro, after getting off the shuttle, with way too much luggage, we mass of gringos were met by a mass of travel agents, etc. hawking hotels and trying to get us to take overpriced shuttles. We opted for a Tuk-Tuk. SAT review time. Bicycle : Adult Tricycle as Moped : Tuk-Tuk. After 15 minutes traveling with Stacy crammed into the back seat, me sharing the front seat with the driver, and the bike box hanging off the side by about two feet, we made it to our house. Unfortunately, the food we were planning on making for dinner stayed in the Tuk-Tuk.

Luckily Stacy’s friend Ingrid invited us over, and she’s been a huge help so far with adjusting to the town, meeting people, and generally getting ourselves situated. We’ve been here together for a few days, and while Stacy’s been in class I’ve been walking around, going to market, and trying to find a work/volunteer opportunity with one of several local development and coffee production efforts. No success so far, but inroads. We’ve also had the chance to visit neighboring San Juan, but there may be more to come on that in a later entry.

Morning view from the bedroom window.

Our house is great, and for me I mean that without sincerely, even though it’s basically a glorified cement block with a pseudo-loft for a bedroom (and a shower, electricity, and gas stove!). The view from the bedroom window is amazing at almost any time of day.

The house was definitely part of a hippy commune though. It’s one of four identical cabins, some with Communist symbols painted on the doorframes, all facing each other, and check out this awesome painting on the inside of our door:

Maybe all this hippy stuff will rub off on me. By the time I come back stateside, I’ll probably constantly smell like patchouli and about-face to that brief period in high school when I thought that wearing a Ché shirt made me look cool.

Anyways, I don’t feel like writing anymore, so that’s it for now…except some photos.

 We also happened to see a guy with a Nelly´s T-shirt in San Pedro. Apparently once you´ve worked at the Bike Rack, you can never really leave the Bike Rack.

San Pedro, with Volcan San Pedro in the background.

Window view again, around 6:30 pm

The rest of the cabaña,s first floor.

Front of the house.

Front of the commune.

Pulling them shots.

Pulling them shots.

The Sunniest Day (September 10)

i could not wear pants today. it is that hot. i got ingrid out of the house today and we walked over to the 'gringolandia' part of san pedro. i´m so glad that i´ve spent two weeks here already without seeing it. exactly as the books say- the shops, restaurants, bars and cafes are completely hippiesque. everything is more expensive over there, but it was good to see that there are actually tourists here this time of year. after spending time only on the local side of the hill, i was beginning to think i was one of very few.

next week is independence day, and all the store fronts are decorating with flags and balloons. there will be a parade, probably wednesday or thursday. but i´m going to try to avoid the traffic and spend the holiday in antigua so i can meet kevin when he arrives. i am very much looking forward to next week :) the expression here is 'tengo ansias.' literally- i have anxious... but meaning an anxiety of a positive nature.

i learned many other expressions during my first week of classes, but i may look for another school or even try out some teachers that give private lessons beginning on the 20th. there are so many spanish schools here to choose from and it´s important to feel that you are getting what you`re paying for.

i have some cleaning to do this weekend, but if the weather is good ingrid and i may try to hike near volcàn san pedro. next week i´ll remember to bring my camera cord to upload some photos. although most days feel the same, i´m feeling more and more comfortable as i recognize faces in the streets. i can definitely understand how a person can visit this place and never want to leave...

Day 5 in Guatemala (Sept. 3)

it´s been raining since 6am today, but life here does not stop. the market is still open. construction on buildings continues, but with this weather it´s obvious why some buildings are on their third year of construction and not even half finished. today is the perfect day for writing.

ingrid is not feeling well today so i came to town to pick up some supper to bring back. we´ve been reading a lot. she´s enjoying "the girl with the dragon tatoo." i have been eating so well here, much better than i ever did at home. so ironic. and no sickness has affected me. whether luck or health, i´ll take it. ingrid has no running water in her house, but she keeps a rain barrel outside. we get all the water for washing from the rain barrel. however, i brush my teeth with filtered water from a tank. she said "you`re having a real guatemalan experience today," when i began heating up water for my shower. you have to fill a plastic tub mostly full of rain water and then add heated water to it, however much you need for warmth. it worked out fine. not ideal, but nothing i can´t get used to... and anything is worth it when you need a shower. when most of your surroundings are dirty, there´s nothing like being clean.

after that we ate an omelet with the filling of yesterday´s ratatouille inside and bread with mashed avocado and fried plantains. i´m keeping a close eye on her ways in the kitchen so i can cook with kevin in our own house when he comes next week. i´m getting used to the pace of life here... and it helps that i don´t have much to do. but the days seem so much longer because they start early, but everything is done in an order. preparation, action, cleaning, resting, and so on. tomorrow i hope that we can do some hiking. today´s plans were interrupted by the rain, which i think is coming from the tail end of a tropical storm that is headed toward florida today. there´s a coffee house that ingrid wants to take me to in the next town, and she likes to walk there even though it´s a big hike. hopefully i´ll have some photos to share of that trip when it comes. i´m preparing for my language class, which starts on monday morning. there is a banana farm behind the school and a big garden. my goals have extended to learning how to grow my own food. i think it may be a skill as useful as learning the language.

even without doing much each day, i´m giving myself time to take everything in. i´m looking forward to holding everything like a sponge... and for what i can´t hold in my mind, i´ll share with you here.