Elections and random things for your imagining

Here I sit in a lovely cafe called Bagel Barn in Antigua using free wireless internet on my friend's laptop sipping a gigantic cappucino. I feel so at home, like I'm in Seattle. We're writing some final reports of our training activities and coming down the home stretch on this part of the Peace Corps adventure. Yesterday was a lazy Sunday hanging out around Alotenango...enjoying life among three volcanoes for the last week. I went around and got more music for my ipod from my friends and am now loaded up with 2500 songs and a ton of reggaeton to get me through. I started the painful process of organizing all my papers, books, and STUFF in preparation for packing. I'm going to try to take as much of my stuff as I can when I go visit my site for the first time on Wednesday.

It was election day, but people were pretty apathetic and didn't really want either candidate. My family told me it was like choosing between cancer and AIDS. Turns out that a fellow by the name of Alvaro Colom won over Otto Perez Molina. The hottest issue was security, which is bad here. You can check out the NY Times take on things at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/world/americas/05guatemala.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

A few funny images for your imagining...

In this country people like to advertise things over loadspeakers blasting from vans or trucks. Any product really, cell phones, fresh fruit, you name it. So one day while Kelly and I were running, a van with a loudspeaker past us and called out things like "Way to keep up your figure. Let's go ladies!" It was quite hilarious.

There are lots of sounds to be heard from my bedroom; this country is never really quiet. For example, I fall asleep and wake up to dogs barking, roosters crowing, conversations heard completely clearly from the street, firecrackers, church bells, pick ups screeching, wind blowing through election propaganda banners, tuk tuk honking, camioneta breaks and honking and aydantes yelling "Antigua!"

Speaking of camionetas, I've decided that a good personal safety strategy is to never get on a bus that has posted in the front "Yo manejo, Dios me guia" (I drive, God guides me). Essentially, there is a sense of fatalism here where people think that their lives are more guided by outside influences and God rather than their own actions. When this comes to bus drivers, they think that the driving responsibility is God's, not theirs, which obviously poses various safety risks. There is this one spot on the road from Antigua to Alotenango where the driver always turns off the lights inside the bus when its night time. Its a surreal experience to be speeding down the highway, packed in, listening to blasting ranchero music, and not being able to see a damn thing. Those are moments where you do a reality check and think about "huh....I'm really in Guatemala".

I find young couples with the girls dressed in traditional woven Mayan clothing and the boys sporting modern Abercrombie shirts very interesting. Traditional clothing is much less common in males due to the persecution of the indigenous people during the war. It is still quite common for females, which results in an image that seems to clash. Every time I see one of this couples hugging or making out in the street I just stare for a moment and think about it.

The other night Kelly and I had an incredible experience doing yoga at night on her terrace. I spread out my Barbie beach towel and under the clear night sky full of stars we did yoga. In the upside down poses you could see upside down volcanoes silhouetted against the night sky. It was a bit windy and almost knocked you out of the balancing poses. Wow. I've never enjoyed a yoga session that much. Magical.

You have to be careful wherever you go for the little things like tripping and hitting your head on ill-placed window sills. There are random holes in the sidewalk that people in the states would sue you over. I cant tell you how many times I've come close to whapping my head on the windows, poles, and other randomness hanging around when you're not paying super close attention to where you're walking, not to mention the little street dog presents scattered about.

On the sides of the highway, men cut the shrubs and grass by hand with machetes, not lawn mowers. Very large swaths of land, with machetes.