Cuatro de Julio

Upon returning from Tikal, school recommenced as usual. Upon the suggestion of a housemate (Tamoko) who had been in Antigua for months, I had requested Salome as my new teacher. I knew immediately that I would like her when we met. She’s absurdly short (her feet don’t even touch the ground when she’s sitting in a normal chair), has a little girl laugh (tee hee hee), and is unbelievably sweet. She’s also an exceptional teacher (probably the most experienced in the school) and my Spanish has improved markedly under her tutelage. She also happens to be super cute in a maternal kind of way. Check her out.


In addition to teaching me tons of new Spanish, Salome also introduced me to one of the perks of our incredible school. On the grounds are growing lemon trees, orange trees, banana trees, hot pepper trees (I didn’t even know these grew on trees), and avocado trees. One afternoon, in between progressive tenses, Salome proposed grabbing some lemonade. It was hot (mucho calor) so I eagerly assented. I knew something different was happening when, instead of taking a left towards the kitchen, we headed right towards the back of the school. She retrieved a long pole with a hook-like blade on the end and began pulling lemons off the lemon tree (my job was to catch them or retrieve them from where they fell). It was pretty hilarious watching this sub-five-foot Guatemalan lady harvesting lemons and I quickly realized that the entire lemonade-making process required careful documentation…





Suffice it to say, it was delicious and we’ve been drinking lemonade every day for a week and a half. Aside from learning Spanish and drinking lemonade, Salome also told me about her (really overwhelmingly deep) faith and about some kind of freaky local folk medical remedies. Among my favorites were: treating cataracts by putting head-lice into the affected eye to eat them out; treating goiters by rubbing them with the hands of a dead child; and drinking a warm mug of human excrement to treat the fatal bite of a casampulga, which is a type of spider. Mostly though, we studied Spanish and it was great.


Tuesday was Fourth of July and Ryan, Luke, Aileen, Amy (Aileen’s fun college buddy who is here for a while), Chris, Aja, Daryl (a cool Texan from our Spanish school), Ed (the southern lawyer whom we met in Tikal), and Kennedy (a housemate of Ed’s who is a totally excellent girl from London) got together at Los Arcos Reds (of efficient drunkenness fame) to celebrate. While there, we met a cool couple from Iowa City, Monica and Chris, with whom we’ve hung out a few times since. They’re extremely amusing and nice. I’ve been really happy with how cool so many of the people we’ve met down here have been. It’s been a very pleasant surprise. Anyway, 7/4 was unsurprisingly debauched and a lot of fun. When I told Salome in the morning that the dog had eaten my homework (El perro como mi tarea…throw a tilde on the ‘o’), she wittily retorted that el gallo was the real culprit (Gallo being both “rooster” in Spanish and the national cerveza). Fourth of July was tons of fun but was probably most significant for being the first night in a week-long bender during which I didn’t really sleep more than 5 hours a night. It’s been fun but I’m exhausted and hope to get some serious sleep sometime in the near future. Though I don´t have good pics of 7-4 (dead battery), I do have some nice ones from a later night in the week. Meet Chris and Aja in all their glory (and note the totally weird face I´m making in the group picture. Es muy guapo)...







Not much else of significance happened last week that I can really remember. We got a new housemate, Albert, an econ teacher at a Montessori school who’s totally nice and interesting. Oh, additionally, Ryan had a little encounter with some criminal elements outside of our apartment, but he’s fine. They didn’t get anything and the only real result was a good story: they started grabbing at him while he was on the phone with Lexi (his girlfriend; hi, Lexi) and she was totally freaked out by him shouting “No tengo dinero! No tengo dinero! I gotta go, Lexi,” and hanging up. But he was fine and they even gave back the city map that they pulled out of his pocket. I imagine I’m overlooking a bunch of other things but I’ve been pretty busy and out-of-it, to be honest. I’ll update this post as I remember events. In any case, what was to come would overshadow the week most completely. Í'll close with some shots from an average walk home in Antigua...