Of Washington

Our remote correspondent is checking in from Washington to apologize to any dedicated readers who have been ceaselessly looking for their regular Holla fix of late. After the epic posts on recent exploits, much of the staff has been enjoying some much deserved R-and-R in America. Were the editorial board around, they would surely have corrected that to read "much needed training in Washington, DC," but the skeleton crew currently available is letting it slide. Full details to follow on the joys of Thai food, beer with flavor, and the peculiar sensation of feeling like one can let one's guard down for a couple weeks by going to the murder capital of the United States.

Of our triumphant return to Lago Atitlan

Extra! Extra! Special mid-day edition of the Holla as I sit at home running through Kleenex like it was going out of style. The Sudafed I took was supposedly "non-drowsy," so I may even stay awake through the production of another epic missive. Readers are advised to find their own solution for staying awake while reading it.

Originally, we had planned to take our first visitors (of those who were not obliged by blood relation to visit) to Costa Rica, in search of cloud forests and resplendent quetzals. But for the cost of a ninety-minute flight in Central America, you could fly from DC to San Francisco back home. And why were we in such a hurry to get these people out of the Land of Eternal Spring, anyway? Through the highly recommended power of Skype, we agreed with our guests that Lake Atitlan would be a just fine destination for a few days of Guatemala-centric fun.

We stayed at the Casa del Mundo, or "House of the World," which might not live up to it's billing, but not for lack of effort. It was built by a guy from Alaska, of all places, and his Guatemalan wife. Accomodations are a series of cabins sprinkled through gardens and paths up the steep slopes surrounding the lake. Climbing to the towering heights of Cabin 12 was a serious workout a few times a day. Connecting back to the hippie burnout tradition of Lake Atitlan, dinners at Casa del Mundo are served family-style at one big table, and one of the primary attactions is a wood-fired hot tub that, much to our disappointment, does not actually feature a giant bonfire underneath a cauldron-shaped tub, but rather a little watertight, rectangular wood-burning stove in the center of a 12-person tub.

Other than hanging out by the lake, which is nothing to sniff at, and kayaking, which we forced upon our unwary guests, there's not a whole lot to do at Casa del Mundo, since it isn't attached to a town. On Sunday we took a series of lanchas (Spanish for "Dangerously overcrowded motorboats") to get to Santiago Atitlan. This gave us a chance to get to know some of the adoptive locals, a bunch of hippie characters who came to Atitlan to get in touch with the earth or something in 1972 and never left, and apparently have to shuttle back to the main town to get pot every once in a while. At least we weren't paddling home-made canoes, as the local fishermen do. Sunday is market day in Atitlan, which is not quite a Chichicastenango-style regional event, but still offered plenty of opportunities to buy veggies, plastic toys, native crafts, and, of course, ice cream. At one point, we contributed to the local economy by paying an opportunistic vendor more to take a picture of her goods than it would have cost to buy them outright, take them home, and then take pictures of them there. We quickly quit asking before snapping pictures of inanimate objects.

While several of its neighbors around the lake have been completely transformed by the change that lake-loving tourists bring, Santiago Atitlan has held on to some elements of tradition. While indigenous women all over continue to wear their traditional traje, in Santiago, one still spots many men wearing their traditional white, striped, and sometimes embroidered, pants.

The town suffered many tragedies during the civil war, and a memorial in the beautiful and simple church commemorates a massacre of locals (and of an American priest who had harbored them in his church) by the Guatemalan Army that some see as a turning point in public perceptions of the Army's activities. I don't have the details to write intelligently at length about the events there, but it was powerful to see such a forceful reminder of how the Church has actually been a force for good every now and again.

In a slightly different role for the Catholic Church in Guatemala, many places in the highlands have mixed Catholic and indigenous religious traditions with some level of impunity. I'm sure the Church is not thrilled to know that many highlanders still pray to Maximón, an idol representing a blend of Christian saints, Judas, and indigenous Mayan gods, depending on the source; many present conflicting stories on his origin. What is known with certainty is that Maximón loves cigars, and he loves liquor: A religious figure we can all aspire to emulate. After some agressive bargaining with the pre-pubescent touts who were merciless in their pestering when we arrived in Santiago, but who were more interested in playing soccer when we were actually looking for a guide, we paid a local boy Q5 to show us to Maximón's current home. The secret location is not listed in guidebooks because the honor of hosting him rotates annually between members of the Board of Directors of Maximón Industries, LLC, in what is assumed to be some sort of decades-old power-sharing agreement. The current home is decked out in streamers and the floor covered with candle wax. We walked in on two guys kneeling on woven mats before Maximón, praying in a mix of Spanish and Tzutujil, one of at least 23 Mayan languages still spoken in Guatemala. The other gringo in the room offered Maximón some cigars. Your correspondent felt bad that we had neglected to bring either smokes or rotgut, so he simply paid something like three times the suggested offering. Your correspondent felt a slightly less bad once he saw "Maximón" enjoying shots of the offerings of cheap rum through the body of his guards/priests/representatives in the room, who in some cases looked to have served as vessels for Maximón's vice-loving spirit for a good portion of the day.

On the way back to Guatemala City, we swung through Antigua, strolling the cobblestone streets and visiting the Church of San Francisco, where pilgrims ask for assistance from Hermano Pedro de Betancourt, lighting candles and leaving plaques in gratitude. Inside was another tribute to another slain Catholic Priest who had been a little too helpful with the poor people for the Guatemalan Army's taste back in the 1980's. Still feeling a little moved, we bought some candles outside and lit one on the table outside, which was technically Hermano Pedro's table, but being a Saint and all, I'm sure he'll share.

No Logo

The tension between the photo editor and the features editor here on the sixth floor of the Holla offices occasionally threatens to bring the whole enterprise crashing down. The photo department wants the staff writers to add sentences solely to link to favorite photos, to which the features editor points out that the text is bloated and filled with run-on sentences as it is. Rather than add a paragraph about gas stations in the previous post, the senior editor decided to add this tack-on entry.



The photo department thinks this is the best picture the staff photographer took in Nicaragua. Its masterful composition and evocative lighting aside, the subject matter is kind of mundane at first, until you realize that there is absolutely no advertising anywhere at this gas station. Or at least, that's what the photo editor claims. Maybe the petroleum-industry chemical engineers in the crowd are looking at which model of petrol-delivery technology they use on remote Nicaraguan islands.

A little country that starts with an "N" and ends with and "a" and in the middle is "icaragu"

Gazing back into the mists of time... it's been fully two weeks since we went to Nicaragua. But this newspaper feels a civic duty to document these final few steps as Katherine closes in on every traveler's goal of visiting as many countries as she has spent years on the planet. (If we collect all seven Central American countries by the time we leave, she'll have it with one to spare. Nicaragua is number four of the seven. Once she hits 30 countries during her 30th year, she wins a free liter of the local watery lager at the flea-ridden Hostel International of her choice (Offer not valid in CA).)

We wound up going to Nicaragua mostly because Copa Airlines was running a big fare sale for New Year's, but the flights to Costa Rica and Panama were booked. We went ahead and bought tickets first, then checked the guidebook to see if there is actually anything to do in Nicaragua. Thankfully, there is.

Throwing around our American dollars as time was the more precious resource, we took a taxi from the Managua airport all the way to Granada. Not to be confused with the tiny island we liberated in 1983, Granada is Nicaragua's take on the "charming colonial town near scenic volcanos" genre which Antigua Guatemala has perfected. No shame in second place for Granada, though: It's got beautiful old convents and churches, a great main plaza for strolling in, a local delicacy made of spiced cabbage and pork rinds served on a banana leaf, and if that wasn't enough, it adds a lake the size of El Salvador to the mix.

We had two main tasks there: First on the slate was kayaking around the small islands that resulted from some long-ago volcanic eruption. Lake Nicaragua is big enough to develop some serious waves (and to support freshwater sharks!), but in the still water of the many inlets, a swamp -- almost a charicature of a swamp -- has developed. The water is completely covered in small floating plant life; the sensation was of kayaking across a carpet rather than a lake. There were gnarled trees shooting off roots and branches in every direction, creatively formatted flowers, and tiny jumping fish that one could catch just by putting a hand at the surface of the water and waiting for one to jump on. On slightly less protected islands, we saw an agressive spider monkey who made your faithful correspondant wish his rabies shots were up-to-date, more birds, and a fort that was built back when French pirates would sail up the river, into the lake, and sack Granada. Avast, ye lubbers!

The second adventure took us to Ometepe, the volcanic island in the middle of the lake. After dutifully avoiding them in Guatemala for months due to safety concerns, we took the "chicken bus" to San Jorge, where we could catch the ferry to the island. "Chicken bus" is the term used for the school buses that American school districts have deemed unsafe, which are then auctioned off, driven to Central America, repainted in gaudy colors, and then put in service on inter-city routes at far beyond capacity, blaring latin pop songs, leaving a wake of detritus and debris as people throw the trash from snacks sold on board out the windows, packed to bursting with people, market goods, and every now and again, the namesake chickens. To complete the experience, we each had a bottle of soda served in a plastic sandwich bag with a straw. (The seller can't give away the bottle with the soda, or they would lose the deposit.) I admit it: taking a "When in Rome" attitude, I threw my plastic baggie out the window. I'm not proud of it. I just got swept up in the latin flavor. On behalf of America, I apologize.

After the bus and another taxi ride, we took the ferry to Moyogalpa, the town on Ometepe island, and with Jesus's help, arrived safely. New Year's Eve was deciedly low key, as we sat in a near-empty bar enjoying the floor show of five-year-olds enraptured by sparklers and the musical accompaniment of max-volume American music videos on DVD, which transitioned over the course of the evening from the gangsta rap of Jay-Z and 50 Cent to the epic rock of Guns 'n' Roses' "November Rain" to several songs of 80's pop like A-Ha and the Bangles, and eventually, inexplicably, to 110 decibels of easy-listening AM Gold, like that one song that goes "Loving you/Is easy 'cause you're beautiful / Doo do do do doooo, oooh AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!" We were in bed by ten.

While that may have been an adventure in itself, the Official Adventure was climbing Volcan Concepcion, which juts out of the middle of the lake and rises to 1610 meters (almost exactly one mile) in altitude. In a venerable tradition that those accustomed to hiking in US National Parks may find peculiar, the "trail" went basically straight up the side of the mountain, with no apparent course-setting -- it was a deer path that enough people had walked up, or enough rain had run down, to clear a line through the jungle. About halfway up, the jungle suddenly ended, and we scrambled up jagged volcanic rock and diabolically placed scree. Once we got out of the jungle, we experienced the climate zones of fog, mist, cloud, rain inside of misty cloud, and innumerable others. Our guide, a typically lean young Nicaraguan, and the other tourist climbers that day, two surfer dudes from California, more or less ran up the mountain, periodically waiting for us to huff along a few minutes behind them. After four hours of climbing with nary a switchback, the guide declared it too dangerous to go any further. We felt a little cheated, until the guide explained that the top was really only 20 meters away and that you couldn't see anything there anyway, because the prevailing climate zone there was "dense cloud with fog and mist," and that the muddy ash at the very top was truly too slippery to climb. We weren't going to tempt any kind of "Into Thin Air" situation; we declared victory, snapped a photo of us sopping wet at the summit (of which all copies have been destroyed at Katherine's request and the Holla photo editor's enthusiastic assent), and began to pick our way down the scree fields. All injuries sustained were minor.

Eventually, the clouds parted briefly, presenting some disorienting views. Being on the very evenly sloped side of the mountain, then suddenly seeing farmland straight ahead surrounded by lake water the same flat gray as the sky, making the shore line look like a horizon line, can make one's head spin for just a moment. [As can run-on sentences with too many commas, which we hope to limit in the future. -ed.] Much to our guide's frustration, we stopped and enjoyed the only good views of the day before descending the rest of the way.

In an unusual twist, one of the surfer dudes was wearing fashionably low-cut socks, and could barely walk by the time he got down to the bottom; the backs of his ankles were rubbed completely raw. At which point we were informed that the bus that would take us the three miles back to the village wouldn't be running that day. Yet surfer dude was resistant to pay a couple bucks to get a ride in the back of a pickup. Ah, the budget-savvy backpacking world! We laughed and laughed. By that evening, our quads were so sore that we couldn't walk for three days, and this correspondent had to shuffle his way around the office even slower than is normally dictated by his role as a government bureaucrat, while the guy with the anklet socks was probably already out Surfing Nicaragua with some band-aids on his ankles.

Lo Llevo Dentro (I carry it inside)

I am not so snobby that I'll claim I don't eat fast food. I am snobby enough to say I only eat at McDonald's or Burger King under unusual circumstances, but I don't pretend that take-out chinese is way better just because the local hole-in-the-wall isn't part of a big heartless multi-national corporation. But since going to fast-food restaurants is not part of our general routine, we have managed to miss out on one of the great success stories of Guatemalan capitalism.

This past week, though, our efforts to truly understand the spirit of the Guatemalan people, and to show our guests the heart of Guatemala, we made our first visit to Pollo Campero ("Country Chicken"). Much to the embarrassment of The Lovely Katherine, who prefers a more incognito form of sociological research, even in the most ridiculous of establisments, the staff photographer for the Holla went along to document the experience.

By lore, there are something like nine families that own 99% of Guatemala. Perhaps seven of these families accept this burden with some humility. For the other two, a little more self-promotion is in order. The Castillo family owns Gallo, the beer monopoly, and has rented ad space on every other flat surface in the country. The Gutierrez family owns Pollo Campero, which demands less advertising space because there is always an actual Campero restaurant in sight at any location in Guatemala. This chain of fried-chicken restaurants is a source of national pride in Guatemala, as it has conquered much of Central America, and is even making inroads in heavily Latino markets in the U.S. Stories abound of flights to America that smell like chicken because every Guatemalan in L.A. asks relatives to bring a bucket of Campero when they visit.

This is kind of baffling to an outsider and fried-chicken dilettante such as your correspondent, who could not tell Campero from KFC if his life depended on it. The verdict? Campero is tasty, as is any food that primarily consists of hot grease. (How tasty it might be after the five-hour flight from Guatemala to Los Angeles remains a topic for further research.) While the food may not transcend American standards, and the decor is decidedly utilitarian, the service is clearly be the selling point here. The restaurant we went to featured table service, including a waitress who was thoroughly baffled by our incompetence, as demonstrated by ordering a la carte even though the combo meals are much more economical. While McDonald's employees will always ask if you want to SuperSize your meal, I have never seen one who seemed concerned for the well-being of any customer who declined. Campero also kindly served our sodas free of parasite-laden ice without even being asked to, despite the common knowledge that the profit margin is much higher if you fill the cup with ice first. (It remains unclear if this is standard or if it was a special favor because they could tell we were influential gringos. We may have to ask the Holla restaurant reviewer to start dining in disguise.)

In all, it was certainly a worthwhile cultural experience, but at a price -- the digestive effort it demanded limited our further explorations for the day to a little stroll around the central park. We tried to get the health-food Yin to the fast-food Yang later that day by going to a place that bills itself (in English) as a "Ambia -- A New Age Restaurant." But it turns out they mostly serve paninis and tortilla soup, which won't be winning the Weight-Watchers seal of approval, either. Exactly what was "New Age" about a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich remains unknown, but it is clear that prospects of Ambia expanding into Houston and Chicago are dim for now.

From Guatemala to Guatepeor

First and foremost, the editorial board would like to apologize for the lack of recent content. Other priorities have been getting in the way of our production schedule: Holidays, travel, guests, the usual suspects.

So this post has dual purposes. First, clear your schedule next week for updates on trips to Nicaragua, our return to Atitlan, and further delving into Guatemalan culture.

Second, mostly as a means to expand this beyond the scope of a mere promise of things to come, a work-related note... An applicant for a visa to visit the United States today told me that he really wanted to go to the US to visit Greeley, Colorado. That is not a typo. He had a brother that lives there, and wanted to visit him and get to know his nephews. I asked this poor, sad man who for some reason wanted to escape Guatemala only to show up in Greeley, if his brother had described Greeley for him. He declined to answer, which was probably wise, because an honest opinion would have only led to more questions about his motive for travel. I might have even approved the visa on sentimental grounds, if the guy hadn't been previously deported, by the Denver office of DHS, implying that maybe he already knew Greeley and actually wanted to go back, leading to questions about his sanity.

(Special note to the people of Greeley: Sorry. I kid because I care.)

Filler

Hello. Sorry, but I felt it wise to remove this post, which once featured short descriptions of one consular case that was a rewarding experience, and one case where the law was clear but not able to solve everyone's problems. My goal was never to participate in any kind of policy debate here. That toothpaste may be out of the tube already, but I guess it's a better move to take it down than to leave it in its original form for context's sake.

I Feel a Long Way From the Hills of San Salvador

It was no Windsor, not even an Acton, but now that we're married and all, we decided we could officially be considered to be passing the Yuletide with family regardless of our location. Being the rational agents we are, the obvious course of action was to while away the three-day weekend sunning ourselves and drinking beer marginally better than that available in Guatemala. A hasty trip to the beach in El Salvador was clearly in order.

It seems like we were following a noble winter tradition and heading South, but we were in fact heading East as much as anything. You can look on a map if you want. I was surprised, too.

Our shoddy sense of continental geography aside, we found our way to Sunzal beach, home to what are rumored to be "gnarly" surf breaks and "a big crazy shaped rock" (additional illustration above, click to see it way big). The place was dead during daylight on Christmas Eve, which is the big family-gathering holiday in Central America, except for the young gentlemen ogling my lovely wife as she sat on the beach in her not-really-that-provocative swimwear. (Which ogling in fact grew all the more concerted when the beach grew more crowded the next day. I grew up in Colorado, and thus may not be the most well versed in beach etiquette, but even at the topless beaches that I have been lucky enough to patronize, it seems that a certain level of tact, if not outright guile, is required in the ogling department; the beaches of El Salvador are free of such boundaries of circumspection.)

Then, at sunset, the fireworks started. (Rest assured, I'm no longer talking about the inter-gender discourse on the beach, but rather literal pyrotechnics.) Really, fireworks have been visible from our balcony in Guatemala City just about every night for the last month -- and not just sparklers and bottle rockets but Greeley Independence Stampede Fourth-of-July Spectacular-caliber fireworks, which apparently anybody who's anybody in Guatemala City buys for their own personal backyard amusement. Or at least those who think their kids have too many fingers do. Sadly, the fireworks on the beach were not up to that level, but they were a constant background presence for hours and hours, both on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. As was the reggaeton smash "Gasolina," which the surf-bum hangout next door played at high volume on constant loop by night, which was in turn not unlike their treatment of Bob Marley's "Legend" by day.

(Alas, it's more entertaining to nitpick about minutiae than to make general sweeping statements like "the beach was beautiful and relaxing, and the water was perfect swimming temperature," but that doesn't make the latter any less true. Really, the beach in El Salvador was fantastic. I hope to return.)

Wrapping up our Salvadoran adventure on our way out of town Monday, we made two stops: The standard Central American market in the nearby port town and the "Mayan Pompeii" of Joya del Cerén, where typical Mayan dwellings have been preserved in volcanic ash. The market was a fun diversion, with the jerry-rigged gear of the local fishermen and the ready availability of sipping coconuts and vodka bottles filled with shark oil, which many claim has curative effects for all manner of household maladies and masculine failures. We bought a coconut; we passed on the Aceite de Tiburon.

The Mayan Pompeii, it turns out, is closed on Mondays.

Of the "hash"

When bidding on which exotic port of call I would be spending this two years, one invaluable resource was "Tales from a Small Planet." Among a bunch of other less valuable stuff, the site offers "Real Post Reports," which provide a refreshing alternative to the stuffy State Department dossiers on each post. The RPP's are a little more candid, and answer questions like "What's morale like at post?" or "What would you ship from home if you could?" or "What kind of social activities are available?" One key was that you could recognize the true pits when the answer to this last question is, "Well, there's always the Hash."

Just about every country that has foreign embassies has a chapter of the Hash House Harriers. This is a group that gets together on weekends to go for a run and then have a beer. They universally refer to themselves as "A drinking club with a running problem." Whether one thinks that little malapropism is hilarious or not is probably a fairly reliable indicator of how much one would appreciate the Hash.

The run is not just a pleasant bit of exercise, but involves a course laid out in advance, marked out Hansel-and-Gretel style with bits of flour left behind and hopefully not licked up by stray dogs. At various spots the trail of flour spots will fork, and one or more forks will be a false trail that one must follow until it runs out to discover it's false. This leads to a lot of standing around and waiting for someone else to figure out which trail is real. It also leads to most people on the course having no idea where they're going until they get there.

Yesterday, in my inaugural run, we ran down into one of the ravines that cuts into the city. It was alternately gorgeous and disgusting. Once down along the stream in the bottom of the ravine, it was hard to believe we were still so close to the crowded city. The walls of the ravine were pure green, with only occasional swathes in the bottom wide enough to support a patch of beans or corn. Of course, the Guatemalans have somewhat lower hygenic standards for waste disposal than those to which most Americans are accustomed. Mostly this meant frequent signs of discarded plastic containers, clothing, toys, tricycles, and so much more. At the frequent criss-crossings of the stream, it involved a higher danger element in slipping into the river due to the certain presence of what one might politely call organic waste. The final straw came as we climbed the tiny steps carved out of rock on the side of the ravine to get back to civilization. The terrain began to flatten out slightly near the top, where one could admire truly gorgeous views across the ravine behind. And it was advisable to look behind, because aparently the lip of a ravine near a city of two million people without regular trash service is too tantalizing a disposal site to resist. Of course, if you just dumped all your trash there, it would pile up and block your view and get smelly, so even the most slow-witted of readers will recognize that the only solution is to light the trash on fire. So, we finished our "run" gingerly stepping through the smoldering ashes of yesterday's tabloids, banana peels, and various dyed plastics that were surely engineered for safe incineration and inhalition, with the flames still roaring on today's trash a few yards away. On the bright side, it was a valuable, up-close look at the lifestyle the vast majority of the people in Guatemala have no alternative but to endure. On the down side, I walked through a burning trash dump.

Once safely back at home, the hash group sings a bunch of goofy songs and while drinking beer, in a format that punishes those who don't participate in the forced making of merry by making them drink more beer, a trade-off I'm willing to bear every time. I've been promised that your typical hash run involves a lot less standing around and near-zero levels of walking through smoldering refuse; we'll see if that's enough incentive to endure the goofy songs next time.

In which I make my triumphant return to the airwaves

What with the runaway success of my publishing career, as evidenced by the fact that you are reading these words, the time seemed right to solidify my push to become a multi-media sensation. As such, I scheduled another appointment on the radio to take my message straight to the people of Guatemala.

Fortunately, this time I didn't have to look up the word for "cranberry sauce," because I was a guest on a show with the thrilling topic of "How to apply for an American visa." For reasons that the market research department is still trying to pin down, there was slightly more public interest in my tips on how to punch your ticket to the land of baseball, apple pie, and plentiful jobs working construction than my tips on how to cook a turkey. This one was a 90-minute call-in show that was almost entirely filled with actual calls from actual Guatemalans, apparently mumbling questions through several handkercheifs while steadfastly refusing to turn their radios down while they were speaking on the air.

Most of the questions did not require the level of sophisticated knowledge of the Immigration and Nationality Act with which we Vice Consul and Third Secretaries are equipped. Really, they didn't even require the level of sophisticated knowledge of immigration policy that you could get by reading a cover story in USA Today. But I guess that's standard for radio, as even on NPR they host distinguished professors of political science to answer questions from the shut-ins and conspiracy theorists who have time to call talk radio in the middle of a work day.

Usually this kind of session would be rife with questions in the vein of, "My parents and two brothers have lived in the US for years, and I'm unemployed so I don't even have to ask for time off to visit them, yet I was denied a visa. Why? It seems totally unfair." Luckily these questions were either screened out or randomly unable to get through to the hosts. So, my fellow Vice Consul and Third Secretary and I mostly fielded questions along the lines of, "I've had a visa for twenty years and it just expired. Do I really have to come wait in line to renew my visa?" (Answer: Yes, Really.) We also got a few questions of the form, "This company said if I pay them $500 they would get me a work visa without an interview. What is the procedure for these kinds of cases?" (Answer: The procedure is you give them $500 and then you never see them again.)

Anyway, I have not yet been able to crack the Gutemalan television industry, which seem to focus less on the opinions of Vice Consul and Third Secretaries and more on the close-ups of dancing girls (again not so different from back home), but it's only a matter of time.

Everywhere with Helicopter

Every once in a while the guy upstairs throws us a bone. (I.e. the Ambassador, who literally is on the third floor of the embassy, whereas the Consular section is on the first floor. Just wound up that way by random chance, I'm sure.)

This time, the Ambassador was going out to inspect our facilities at El Pino and there happened to be an extra seat on the helicopter, and I was lucky enough to go. The first, and perhaps most important, order of business is to note that the word for "helicopter" is "helicoptero," as if it was translated by a junior-high student guessing on a Spanish exam. "El helicopter-o flies-o dentro los cloud-o's."

With that settled, it is my further duty to report that riding in a helicopter is really cool. I know that some small percentage of the devoted readership of this newspaper have surely been in helicopters before, whether circling Niagra Falls for kicks, or under government orders on less pleasant errands. For those who haven't, it's sort of like riding on a chairlift or the Sky Ride at Elitch's, except that every once in a while the Guatemalan gale-force winds push it around and suddenly it feels like you're fishtailing on black ice. We cruised over the city -- I hadn't realized how close we are to a giant barranca, or ravine, one of many that jut into the city.

Where exactly were we going? The El Pino Medfly Program Mass Rearing Facility! It's basically a big factory that makes literally billions of irradiated sterile male fruit flies, which are then dropped off in California, Florida, or along the border between Guatemala and Mexico. Then when your wild female fruit fly is looking for love, she finds it with a male who is now impotent, thanks to our friend Cesium-137, and you have one less litter of fruit fly babies. It's a smelly business, but that's what we does best.

Chichicastenango!

If that's not one of the funnest place names in the world, I don't know what is. Chichicastenango! Say it out loud -- if you can!

As you might guess, we went there this weekend. The whole idea was to visit what everyone says is one of the best Sunday markets in Guatemala and get our Christmas shopping done. We bought a lot of nice stuff. For ourselves. So if you were really hoping to get a fine hand-woven huipil like those crafted by the indigenous Guatemalans for centuries, or the masks used in the traditional holiday story play at the local church/Mayan temple, or even a turkey, you're out of luck this year.

Anyway, the market was a lot of fun. It was great walking through the peaceful town and the rabbit-warren of stalls in the main square while people were still setting up and the place wasn't overrun with shoppers. By mid-morning the place was a zoo; to some extent fellow gringos, but mostly so many Guatemalans that you could barely push your way through to feel up the roosters to see if they're too scrawny to be worth your time.

The real fun was the night before. First we climbed a nearby hill to the shrine of Pascual Abaj, which is a vaguely (very vaguely) face-shaped rock, flanked by crosses and surrounded by smoldering fires. The spot is one of the best examples of how the native Mayan religions have blended with catholicism -- despite the crosses, some evidence of the ancient art of chicken sacrifice was present. Unfortunately, most of the fires looked to have been untended for some time, so we just had to imagine from the voluminous trash left behind what had transpired before our arrival.

Moving swiftly from the sublime to the ridiculous... we went back to relax after the strenuous twenty-minute hike with a cool beer. We went to a restaurant with a balcony so we could watch the town going by. Before too long we noticed people lining up on the sidewalk. Soon, it was too many people to just be a bus stop. And not much after that, the people in giant cartoon-character costumes started coming through. Apparently as part of their town's annual festival, there is one night of Mickey, Minnie, Cruella DeVille, and thirty other comic-book characters dancing the merengue and salsa. After a few numbers, the crowd broke up, only to reassemble a little while later at the church to salute the people who risked heatstroke by dancing in a giant plastic/fur suit all night. (Just like many a young American visitor to Disneyland, some of the local kids had a hard time resisting the urge to take a whack at the giant puffy entertainers, thus demonstrating the common bonds that unite our two peoples, or at least the universality of eight-year-old boys' violent instincts.) On the drive back today, there was an even tinier town with about twice as many cartoon costumes dancing salsa in a line on the highway. It was never made explicit whether this tradition also dates back to the ancient Mayans or not.

Turkish Delight

The Consular Section christmas party was on Friday -- I guess here in Guatemala, even the US Govvernment doesn't have to call it a "Non-Denominational Holiday Party." Anyway, a fine time was had by all. Especially fine was when I was one of only 15 or 20 people who won a door prize -- in my case, a trinket from the big boss's previous post. It's a Turkish Evil Eye. Actually, the trinket is a charm that keeps the Evil Eye away from you. But, to make it more confusing, it looks like an eye. So I guess it's the Good Eye that keeps an eye on the Evil Eye. But the "Good Eye" just doesn't roll off the tongue, so "Evil Eye" it is.

P.s. Ayca and Ozge: Please don't hate me for mocking the proud and noble traditions of Turkey, a nation I continue to hold in the utmost respect.

Bonus Holla by Request!

Yes, we here at the executive offices of the Guatemala Holla aim to please our loyal reading public, and when the public relations department receives a request, it is quickly forwarded for prompt consideration by the editor-in-cheif. In this case, the people have spoken, and they have demanded an update on the agricultural bounty of our balcony. The staff photographer took a break from taking boring artsy shots and snapped a couple quick photos: As you can, see those who want a delicious thimble of fresh orange juice with their leftover tamales will be well served by our foray into horticulture. Those who prefer something a little more caffeinated with their morning meal may need to take a trip down to the local Cafe Barista. We also had a fleur de lis sighting, but it was quickly buffeted into submission by the gale-force winds of our balcony. The remaining plants are not available for viewing at this time, as they are suffering from exhaustion after surviving an extended drought. Of sorts. The groundskeeping department promises photos will be forthcoming once the plants are feeling a little perkier.

Of Weddings and Hot Tamales

The embassy staff is probably about 70% Guatemalan. The Officers cycle through, and the Guatemalans stick around, providing institutional memory and making the place run. One of the women who works with me got married yesterday, so I ventured off to Mixco to attend the ceremony. Being from Colorado, rather than say, South Boston, I've never had the pleasure of attending a Catholic wedding before. But I take it on the authority of many other guests that the wedding wasn't too different from the Catholic ceremony you'd see in the US, aside from a figure-eight double-rosary thing that bride and groom wore jointly during a chunk of the ceremony and the Our Fathers being en español. It may tell you something about the amount of preaching that was involved that the bride and groom also sat at a table at the front of the church when possible, which was kind of a more official cue for those of us who would generally have no idea when to stand or sit or kneel or whatnot. It's hard enough to pay attention to a sermon and pick up all the cues when it's in your first language.

The only other fun cultural differnce is that the less-developed ornithological sensibilities here still permit the throwing of rice. And being in Guatemala, they also throw dried beans and corn. Also, any time more than five people get together in Guatemala, a guy with an ice-cream cart and a cowbell shows up, a trend that the solemnity of holy matrimony was powerless to deter.

Being in a more typical Guatemalan neighborhood, I thought I'd take advantage -- across the street was a residence with a red balloon on the door and a sign saying "Today Delicious Tamales." Knowing there is nothing like a home-made taste of real local cuisine, I ambled over and paid my $1.85 and picked up four chicken tamales, steaming hot. I got them home, unwrapped one from the entire banana leaf that they use in lieu of a corn husk, and dug in. It turns out that the promised chicken in this tamale was the pointy end of a drumstick. You know, the half that doesn't have any meat on it. I ate the rest and tried another, and while there was more chicken, there were also little bits of chopped up bone mixed in, which was maybe even less desirable than the whole chunk of legbone in the first one. Anyway, there are still two wrapped tamales in the fridge; they'll probably still be there, dear reader, should you ever stop by to visit and want a late-night snack.

Thanksgiving on the Rio Dulce

We've been all over the place over the last ten days. KO's parents were in town for Turkey Day, and I guess we felt obliged to show them the whole country in that span. After returning from Tikal, they headed up to Antigua, where we joined them on Wednesday. We stayed at the fabulous Meson Panza Verde, which just may be the nicest hotel I've ever been to. I think the sink there was bigger than our bathtub. I'm not sure whether having a really big sink is actually recognized as a mark of opulence, but the Panza Verde did it with such panache that I'm guessing that anything they did, they were doing it right.

From there, we headed off to join a bunch of embassy types having Thanksgiving dinner in Livingston, on the Carribean coast. Which is the opposite direction from Antigua. I managed to show off how well we know Guatemala City by taking a wrong turn on the way back through town and practically driving us into the heart of the Gallito neighborhood, where the local constabulary is afraid to set foot. Fate smiled on us and we popped back out onto the main square, no worse for the wear, ready to haul ass down the mountains to the sweaty Caribbean, to the extent that any ass-hauling is possible down a windy mountain road following trucks in low gear.

We made a brief stop in Livingston where the kind folks at the Posada El Delfin cooked us a Thanksgiving dinner complete with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce (jellied, if you're curious) and green pumpkin pie. The owners are a Guatemalan couple who lived in New York for thirty years, and therefore were steeped in the necessity of thick turkey gravy, but still Guatemalan enough to serve fiambre and Caribbean enough to have hired a Garifuna guy to play reggae-tinged Sinatra on a giant casio keyboard throughout the meal.

On Friday, the Onoratos made their way up the Rio Dulce in a swift boat, while I returned to the lovely town of Puerto Barrios to pick up our car and shuttle it up to the town of Rio Dulce, where the river meets Lago Izabal. If you ask nicely, KO may be willing to share some of the exotic tales of their Conradian journey upriver. I, on the other hand, killed a little time taking pictures of colorful buses and umbrellas and such.

At Rio Dulce town, we got our first taste of that panacea of Central American sustainable development, Ecotourism. We did a kayak trip at dawn to see Howler Monkeys, did one of those nature walks where they've built bridges through the jungle canopy, and abused the long-suffering Nissan with an hour-long drive over crumbling dirt roads to a thermal waterfall/swimming hole. In a more Mr. Rogers vein, we saw where bananas and rubber come from.

Lastly, on the way back to Guatemala City, we stopped at Quirigua, last of the major Mayan sites in the area -- now that we've seen them all, I guess we'll have to start looking at stuff from contemporary Guatemala or something. Quirigua is not much on the pyramids and architecture, but has the biggest and best-preserved stelae of the area, showing ancient kings and with glyphs on the sides reporting of their top 10 beheadings and such.

I think a good time was had by all, although KO's parents might generally prefer the dining options that were available when they visited us in San Francisco to the culinary delights of Cheesy Bread and refried frijoles available in the jungle.

No Time for Love, Doctor Jones

Well, it's been just over three months now, and we've officially exhuasted the tourist potential of Guatemala: We saw the crown jewel of Guatemalan tourism, Tikal.

The fun started at 0-dark-hundred on Saturday, when we headed off to the fabulous Aurora airport to jet to the jungle. The line to check in was painfully slow, as is standard here, as they apparently filled out our boarding passes by hand. The security procedures were not up to international standards -- they just open up each carry-on bag and look in. If you happened to put a gun right on the top of your bag, you'd be totally busted. The flight was well worth it though, as it lasted about 30 minutes, whereas driving would take at least 8 hours through jungle roads reportedly infested with highwaymen and brigands.

The Flores/Tikal "Mundo Maya International Airport" is basically a big corrugated tin warehouse, with a little kiosk for every hotel and tour guide in the area crammed in. We hopped a shuttle with a friendly guide named Noel (prone to jokes about how monkeys like to throw poo at blonde tourists) and headed out to the hotels near the park. The Jungle Lodge was originally the housing for the archaeologists digging the temples out of the overgrown jungle. It is now the premier lodging option in Tikal, which isn't saying too much, but it is right next to the ruins.

Tikal itself is surprisingly different from Copán, which you may recall from a post on this very journal a month ago. I was really surprised at how much the "Tikal is New York, Copán is Paris" analogy seemed to fit, as clunky as it is. Tikal has truly towering pyramids -- up to 200 feet tall, and quite a climb. But for some reason the rain and jungle have been less kind to the art there, and the limestone stela and altars are almost entirely worn away. The coolest thing about Tikal is the I'm-in-an-Indiana Jones-movie feeling you get with the jungle still covering the majority of the temples, with only their straight vertical tops peeking out of the greenery (or maybe the Yavin Base feeling you get, if you're a real dork); and the wildlife that comes with being basically in the middle of nowhere. The highlight for me was seeing a couple big green loros fly by at about twenty yards away when I was all alone on top of one of the pyramids. There are also spider and howler monkeys all over, "ocellated turkeys," and a bunch of weird rat-rabbit-hamster rodents. Hearing all the weird bird calls and hearing that KO's dad saw a couple toucans almost makes me understand the hobby of birdwatching. Almost.

Unfortunately, my lens-work is more apt to photography of mushrooms and other fungi, which move a bit slower than the loros do. I couldn't even take a focused picture of a caterpillar, and they only barely move at all.

We made a quick swing through Flores on the way back, which is a charming little town of gringo bars, travel agents, and tchotchke shops. And one weird bridal shop, I guess. Someone should do the regression analysis on whether towns in Guatemala that are charming attract tourism or if the presence of tourism in a town inspires efforts to increase the charmingness of a town.

I've got the face for it

Well I'm now a bona fide media celebrity here.

Earlier this week the public affairs office found themselves stretched too thin and asked for a volunteer to do a radio interview about Thanksgiving, so Guatemalans could get to know a bit more about our traditions. I volunteered, and got a little more than I bargained for. It turned out to be a live, hour-long show that allowed calls or e-mails from the audience. In Spanish. (In case you've missed some of the key background info from previous posts). You could say I was a little nervous.

I spent a good long while last night learning how to say "Pilgrims" (peregrinos), "jellied cranberry sauce" (salsa de arándano en gelatina), and "biggest shopping day of the year" (el dia de compras mas atareado del año!). The interview was at nine, and when I got to work at eight and found an email waiting for me saying that one of the themes of the show would be "Thanksgiving recipes." It turns out it was a show called "Estilo y Hogar" (Style and Home). I scrambled to find a recipe for stuffing on the internet, which I would have no hope of being able to explain in Spanish anyway, before heading off to the glamorous downtown high-rise that houses the studios of Radio Punto FM 90.5 Guatemala.

The host was a very friendly guy, one of the more metrosexual guys I've met in Guatemala, which I guess shouldn't be a surprise for the host of a show called "Style and Home." It turned out that the first twenty minutes of the show were all him, in this case discussing three important topics:

1. The meaning of the names "Miguel" and "Marcel" (Fun fact: Marcel supposedly comes from a combination of the words "sea" (mar) and "sky" (cielo) in Spanish or Latin or something. Or so claimed our host.)

2. Some things you can do around the house to save money, like not leaving the refrigerator door standing open for too long. He also claimed that the fuller your fridge is, the healthier it is. I either missed the reasoning behind this entirely due to language difficulties or because I was mentally practicing translations of "add a tablespoon of thyme and stir" into Spanish.

3. Freckles: what causes them; their relative merits in the attractiveness of a person; creams, salves, and tonics you might use to avoid/cover them up; etc.

After 20 minutes of that, we got to the special guest: me. He kept saying that we were going to talk about the "gastronomia" of the US, but he did manage to ask me a few of the questions I had been expecting, allowing me to let loose soliloquies that would sound like this, if translated directly:

"There was one the first thanksgiving. In the year 1620 one group of these colonies that some call themselves the Pilgrims would to come from England. They had arrived at a month of December and had arrived to Massachusetts, where snow is. The winter there very bad. The Pilgrims are not knowing how they growed the foods, and there are some indians that are nice. The Indians given the Pilgrims a food. Many the pilgrims died, but some did not. The next summer, and autumn, there is a harvest of good harvest, and so the pilgrims would be happy because this would mean that the pilgrims to survive the winter, which is in Massachusetts very bad. So they had a party for three days, and that was the first thanksgiving. And they invited the indians."

The Guatemalans I talked to afterwards, including the host, were very complimentary about my Spanish, possibly out of charity and/or pity.

He asked me for my favorite recipes for Thanksgiving, but not being up to the quick translation of a recipe that I didn't really know anyway, I just said that my Grandma was the master chef of the family, and I just knew that the Turkey went in the oven for something like six hours. I completely forgot that I had prepared ahead of time a clever answer about "Papallo: Un Pollo dentro de un Pato dentro de un Pavo," which was my own translation of "Turducken: A chicken stuffed in a duck stuffed in a turkey." A moment for cultural exchange lost!

The Guatemalans I work with were most amused by my response to the question "What foods have you tried here in Guatemala that you like?" which caught me totally off guard, so I said the steak was really good here, which was not a lie. I just couldn't call up the names of any of the more elaborate/typical dishes I'd tried. So then the host said, "Well what about beans?" I said that of course the beans here are very tasty, but the tortillas are not as big as the ones in the US. He agreed that the tortillas here are too small to wrap anything in. Other questions that kind of took me aback included: What is the traditional food to eat on New Year's Eve? and What is a real American hamburger like?

The call-in portion of the show was the part I was most nervous about, as telephone communication is always more difficult than face-to-face, and who knows what kind of crazy questions callers might ask? It turns out that I was boring enough that the phones were not ringing off the hook. The only question came in via e-mail, and referred back to the important topic of what kind of creams you might use to cover up freckles. The host kindly did not ask for my input.

Anyway, the woman in the public affairs office seemed happy with my performance, said my Spanish was fine and that I came off as having a friendly rapport with the host, which was a good message for Guatemalan-US relations. If only we could spend less time arresting the head of their drug enforcement agency for smuggling drugs into the US, and more time discussing cranberry sauce.

Sorry, Charlie

You haven't lived until you've eaten a spicy tuna roll made with Chicken of the Sea.

Sound advice, indeed.

Heard this advice on the radio today while dropping KO off at work, since her Guatemalan employer has the audacity to make her work on Veteran's Day:

"A soccer game is 90 minutes. Even the best soccer games, the ones that will be remembered as classics, are 90 minutes. Once those 90 minutes are over, the game is finished. Beating up the fans of the other team doesn't change what happened in that 90 minutes. It doesn't give your team any more time to change the result."

The commentator stopped short of coming right out and stating that it was actually a bad idea to beat up the opposing team's fans. Then they went to a commercial, and when they came back they were playing music. No idea if there was some sort of soccer riot that precipitated this commentary, or if it was just general advice.