To market to market...

Took a little sunday wander over to the market today planning to take home nothing but photos, and somehow came away with a bag full of small, perfectly ripe mangos, a bag of peanuts, three giant beautiful avocados, and some bananas.

Produce stands line the street up to the edge of the mercado

Considering I only spent about US $3, I figure no harm no foul. Also no fowl - I walked past several people selling chicken so fresh it was still alive, stuffed into net-covered baskets:

This girl selling the chickens plainly found it hilarious that I wanted to take their picture.

The market is like some kind of escher drawing where the space between the stalls branches into narrower and narrower little alleyways until there is just barely enough space to squeeze two people past each other moving in opposite directions.  The pictures above are from the very edge, located on a street with plenty of space (and traffic zooming by), but around where the chickens appear you turn into alleys just wide enough to squeeze a delivery truck through, and that's only when the people are flattened up against the edges trying not to get run over:

From there, occasional dark spaces open up between two stalls that lead into even tighter corridors - I didn't even realize these existed the first few times I went to the market years ago, until I noticed enough people coming in and out of them.  There, out of the sun, are cramped hallways lined with stalls selling shoes, clothes, dried goods, fish, meat, cloth, random household items, whatever your heart and home desire that is cheap and easily carried.

Disclaimer: I took this picture in 2009, and didn't actually go into the corridors today.  It was too hot.

After picking up the unexpected fruit and a few pictures, I hopped into a tuk tuk to go over to "Maxi Bodega," the large, clean, well-lit, relatively expensive mega grocery store owned by Walmart.  It's hard to imagine a greater contrast to the grungy little mercado, which I would almost always prefer if it weren't impossible to find a few precious items there.  Decent yogurt, for example, or the sneaky bottle of french pinot noir I found hidden down on a bottom shelf between boxes of horrid looking sweet grapey booze.  The Guatemalan's aren't big wine drinkers, but hey, more for me!

I didn't take any pictures of the Maxi, because I figure you've all seen a supermarket before, but I did snap this shot of a couple of families riding motorcycles back in Santa Elena.  Not the greatest picture, but in it are two people with tiny kids balanced on front of them on their bikes.  If you look closely (or click on the picture to enlarge it) you'll see another little set of legs behind each adult.  At least those kids in back are big enough to know to hold on.  I hope.

Safety first, kids!

A plague of flies

Today my delightful little apartamento has made me feel a bit like I'm going mad. Partially, perhaps, because I've spent the day lost in the book Room, but mostly because of the sudden appearance (...and disappearance ...and reappearance) of a swarm of buzzy black houseflies.

OK, perhaps "swarm" is overdoing it a bit... it was only three flies. But after a delightful two weeks with nothing but a few spindly spiders in the bathroom and occasional ants so microscopic I can barely tell I'm being invaded, three flies - all at once, and all out of the blue, mind you - is quite an intrusion.

They appeared earlier this afternoon, just as I was finishing up a lunch of some quesadillas and green mango with chili-salt. Three flies, making a terrible racket, not pausing on the walls or windows like regular old insects, oh no, but flying constantly and erratically around the room, zapping up against the ceiling, just generally being horrid. I tried rolling up a magazine and swatting at them, which was not only ineffective but seemed to make them angrier. I tried opening up the door to my room to shoo them out somehow, saw one pass through the door into the cooler air outside, and then was met by a quiet no-fly-zone just as suddenly as they had arrived. I stood by the door for a moment more, peering around the room to see if they had just paused momentarily, but it seemed that they had all somehow indeed disappeared completely.

Fine, I thought. I don't much care where they went, as long as they're not driving me crazy.

I spent the next few hours reading - basically all I've done today, despite mild work guilt. But hey, I don't actually have a space in the office where I'll be working until Monday, so while I have some projects I can be working on, it doesn't matter whether I do them now or later tonight or Saturday... or so goes the rationalization. Also it's a very engrossing book.

I did manage, eventually, to take a shower.

As soon as I turned off the water, the fattest mama fly I've ever seen came hurtling over the top of the shower curtain and buzzed around my head. Zipping back the curtain, it flew away, but then began running wild circles around the apartment, always returning to the bathroom and to what I can only assume was the sweet nectary scent of my freshly washed hair. Waving my arms around my head like a crazy woman, I heard the apartment filled with buzzing again - I roughly dried myself off and ran out to find three bigger, blacker, more relentless flies than before, zooming and bumping on the walls making an incredible racket.

I grabbed a shoe and jumped up on the bed, swatting madly through the air to no avail. I ran and opened the door again - just barely remembering to throw on some clothes first - and stood there watching vigilantly to see them all fly out. I didn't see a single one pass through the door, but again, within about 30 seconds, the room was all quiet.

Next care package request: venus fly trap seeds.

In the meantime, I did see a little gecko running across my walls last night... here's hoping that chirpy little friend takes care of any more intruders!

Address!

Hello! Just a quick post to let you all know that I now know my address, so let the letters and care packages begin!

Yes, it seems strange to be requesting letters when the internet here has improved so much that I'm basically as connected as I was in the US... but who doesn't like mail? I promise real mail will be answered in kind.

Anyways, here it is:

Micha Rahder
c/o Rosa Baños de Gongora
Calle Fraternidad
Avenida 15 de Marzo
A la par del Juzgado de Paz
Flores, Petén, Guatemala

For those of you who can't read Spanish, the address is basically just directions to my landlady's (that's Doña Rosa) house: take Fraternidad street, turn up onto 15th of march avenue, then stop at the house next to the magistrate's office. Small town livin!

Third time's the charm

So, here I am, back again, for my third - and by far my longest - trip to the Petén, Guatemala. Having been here a couple of times before, and gotten to know the place and a few key people in it, this is also by far the easiest trip so far. At least in terms of getting established - ask me again in three months when I'm confused and exhausted and still frustrated with the language barrier...

Despite not haven spoken any Spanish in a year and a half, I've picked it right back up again where I left off - which of course was far from fluent, but at least it's something. I still can't understand everything - especially when people are speaking very quickly, or when they're not speaking directly to me. It's strange, actually, how much more I understand if a person is facing me and speaking to me directly, vs standing right next to me and speaking to somebody else. Apparently I have a linguistic inability to eavesdrop... rather unfortunate, given that part of my job here is to pay attention to the different ways that people speak and the things they talk about in casual situations. Oh well, it'll come.

Other than this minor linguistic barrier, though, things are going quite well. I looked all around the island of Flores for a place to live, and considered looking in a couple of nearby towns as well (cheaper and quieter, but either a little bit less safe or too far across the lake), before eventually settling on a room in the same building where I lived last time I was here. The room has a doesn't have a real kitchen, but has a mini-fridge that I've supplemented with a little one-burner plug-in stove and a crock pot, and I might add a rice cooker to the arsenal if I can find one...



You can see my pseudo-kitchen off to the left in this picture, as well as the fabulous light that my room gets from its two giant windows. There are currently two beds in here, but I'm going to get the owners to take one of them out so I have lots of space to do yoga, or just lie on the cold tile floor when it gets too bloody hot outside :)

Work seems to be off to a good start, too, in terms of the organizations I'll be working with (and studying) being welcoming and eager to have me, as well as to help me get set up in whatever way they can. In fact, everybody I've encountered has been ridiculously welcoming and helpful - one of the heads of the organizations I'll be working with has been helping me set up a way to get my IVIG treatments here without having to travel, my friend America (who also works for the Wildlife Conservation Society, one of the groups I'm studying) helped me find a place to live, and Vinicio, an old friend from Yale, has put me in touch with his extended family, who immediately became incredibly warm, inviting me to stay at their house if necessary, offering to help me with my house hunting, etc.

Like I said, we'll see how I'm feeling in another month or two, but for the moment, it's looking like it's going to be a great year!