I hate to admit it, but I CAN'T MAKE TORTILLAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I love to cook, and I was all excited that Christy taught us how to make tortillas in Antigua. So, armed with all good intentions, I went to my local grocery store and bought that bag of masa flour that I've never had the guts to buy before this day, me and all my newfound knowledge. The end result: masa on the floor, on my upper arms, all over my kitchen counter, a sad looking ball in my sink (the second such mishap; I called the 10 second rule to the earlier diver and threw it disgustedly onto the hot griddle with its other malformed cousins). Bound and determined to make the DAMNED THINGS, I decided that the next trip is to the local tienda to get a, gasp, _tortilla_press_. The horrors of admitting failure...


Roadkill looks tastier than this...They taste ok. Chewy because they're way too thick. Definitely not round. It's like the incident that we don't speak of, from childhood, with the blueberry pancakes...don't ask...I also made some sort of improvised chicken/green pepper/onion/salsa casera thingy and frijoles, for old time's sake. I dedicate this hastily-thrown together meal to Christy. ¡Buen provecho!, mi amiga...
I'll guess I'll just close my eyes and pretend that I'm back in Antigua again.

Back home. Disoriented. Bit of culture shock. Don't really want to talk about the trip right now, so please don't expect me to be all bubbly. Or wordy. It's not happening. I took 700 pictures because I'm mostly visual. So if you want to know what happened, look at the pictures. It really doesn't do justice in any language to talk about this amazing experience with words. "It was amazing." (that's an understatement). "It was a great learning experience." (another understatement) If you want to see the flickr link to all the pictures, you'll have to ask me for the link. Won't be doing that for another few days or so. Difficult to choose which pics to show you right now... It was a huge honor for Chad to carry the torch for PROBIGUA. Pretty emotional stuff. So we were walking down the street behind this baby and her mama and Chad said to me, "Oh, you're going to take a picture, aren't you?" Well, if you know me, you know that I HAD to. Probably gonna blow it up to poster size and put it on my living room wall. If you look at me right now I sort of look like her. A final pic of us with our maestras. The card catalog from the Antigua Public Library.

pic of the day


from the 15 septiembre independence day parade, La Antigua, Guatemala.

practicing numbers, basic conversation, learning how to take the chicken bus-public bus, bargaining (verb is regatear), and not getting hit by traffic in the streets...dateline 18 septiembre 2006

Ayer, viajamos a San Antonio aguas calientes y fuimos de compras. Este pueblo es 15 minutos sur de antigua. regateo y practico uso frases como ¨cuanto cuesta¨ y ¨no tengo mucho dinero¨ y ¨no me gusta esto, quisiera cosas muy pequenas¨ (i don´t like that, i´d like smaller things) es dificil para mi recordar numeros grande, pues hablo y regateo muy, muy despacio. por ejemplo, una vendedora dijo, ¨veinte cinco para una¨ dije, ¨veinte para..........dos...¨ y dijo, ¨esta bien.¨ compre una tela grande y cosas pequenas. tome muchos fotos, por supuesto. los buses condujeron muy rapido por todas las calles. yo tengo panico cuando veo un bus o coche conduciendo muy rapido. regresamos a antigua con memorias nuevas y cosas buenas.

¨There ain´t no surer way to find out whether you like people
or hate them than to travel with them.¨ Mark Twain

Two of my pics...from the back of the bibliobus and a mother and child in San Antonio, last week.

Today, we visited Santa Maria Cauque, another pueblo. The kids swarmed the bus immediately and we had a lot of fun trying to find the types of books that they needed for homework (human sexuality for the older kids or colonial Guatemala pics that the younger students used to draw pics from the drawings...the younger students wanted Winnie the Pooh books, but there werent any on the bus...) Chad entertained a large group of kids with the one magic coin trick that he knows. I gave away Highlights magazine stickers to the kids (thanks manang bev) and we traded for the ones that they favored the most. I had 12 young ones swarmed around me trying to get more than the 3 each that I gave initially...if I didn´t know the spanish name for a sticker (tortear is turtle, i forgot) they helped me out. Of course I found the local bakery and bought 8 cookies for our teachers and fellow PROBIGUA students. I took a pic of the machine that local women were using in a tienda, they bring bowls of husked corn and it grinds into meal for making tortillas.

by the by, this past martes (tue) kristi, the cook at the hotel, taught fran and i how to make tortillas. there´s actually an infinitive for it, tortear. to make tortillas. so it was fun and funny to see the two americans mess up making something that young children can do...of course pictures were taken. we ate them afterwards, hot, with queso fresco. darned good.

in the evenings, chad always stays and chats with kristi and now we´re teaching her a bit of english. i almost typed ingles...yes, i´m immersed...it´s really helped me improve conversationally, because i can practice what i learned during the day. of course you know that i love to cook and to eat, so much of my conversation is what is that vegetable, how do you make chicken pepian or mole or whatever...that´s how we got the tortilla lesson...it´s so wonderful to stay in a place where you feel like part of a family or a friend instead of just a random tourist renting a room for a short time.

this family has a son who is a lawyer, in his young 30´s. he lives in the part of the house that we stay in and he delights in talking to us during dinner and afterwards, engaging in conversation, spanish only of course, and he´s funny and he especially loves hanging out and talking w chad.

Chad on the the terrace at Casa Ovalle in Antigua.

Buenos dias, mi amigos.

I walked to school this morning by myself so that I could walk at my own pace (we´ve been leaving casa ovalle with 5 or 10 minutes to spare...i hate walking to school with a sense of panic) and so that I could log on quickly and write to ya´all.

We traveled to Volcan Pacaya on Saturday. Hell of a way to remember a birthday. Let´s just say that it was HELLA DIFFICULT for me (Chad loved every minute of it) and I rode a horse most of the way, thanks to 2 new friends from Portland who lent me the 40 quetzales (remember, 1 dollar is 7.5 q) so that i could cling to the poor animal for dear life...I was thinking, the ascent is killing my knees, so I want to ride this horse...but now i´m realizing that riding a HORSE up a 45 degree angle is scarier...at one point i had to get down because it was too steep of an angle...however, all in all, it was pretty amazing and i don´t regret it at all. i didn´t actually go as far up as chad and fran did. (my knees, i had to go to the bathroom, i was wearing my keens...rocks and volcanic dirt in my shoes...i was tired...i´m out of shape...) so i sat at the bottom of the volcano and watched lightening flash from behind the volcano, lighting up the entire sky...watched lava flow down from the right side...looked at the glow of red emenating from the top of the volcano...the lights from the pueblo below, in the valley...and thought about all of you and prayed for my next year and all of my family and friends. that was my birthday trip.

hasta,

geraldina

Dateline: 12 Septiembre 2006


I thought I was walking the streets in fear of being accosted by strangers; now I have to guard my room key from Panchita Loca....

Manana, vamos a otra ciudad, visitar una escuela hablar y leer con los ninos y ninas. (Tomorrow, we're going to another city to visit a school to speak and to read with the boys and girls.)


Chad's teacher told him that tourists get shot if they take pics without asking, so now I'm just taking guerilla pictures of people's backs...or taking them quickly before they see the camera...

This place reminds me of the Philippines. I like it; at some cellular level, it's sort of "like home" even though I was born and raised in Washington State. (I love the brown eyed children.)

For once, I didnt' compose most of this in Babelfish/altavista...I am learning a LOT. I'm behind Panchita and wayyyy behind Chad, but we got to Past and Future this morning (I thought I was going to be stuck in Present Tense all this week. I wanted to say, "are you sure that I'm ready for this now?!?") I have 3 pages of homework for tonight. I'm studying Estar and Ser right now.--supposedly tricky for any level of spanish language students...

Hasta manana,

Geraldina

We've collected money from coworkers at the Library, and thanks to these kind donations, I was able to purchase many books at a great discount. Thanks to Gini, the nice cashier at my local Barnes & Noble.

Thank you SO MUCH for your donations! We're very excited to bring so many books with us. [We're only "required" to bring 1, each.] PROBIGUA provides books to more than 25 libraries in Guatemala. Thank you for helping bring new books to some of these libraries.

Here's a sample of what I bought: Click on the my library link to see all the books that we're bringing.