Goodbye Suriname

It's my last day here. Stephen left this morning for a 36-hour journey to Trinidad, New York City, and Seattle. I leave tomorrow for an 18-hour trip of Trinidad, Miami, and Chicago. One measure of Suriname's position at the edge of the world is its airport schedule. All flights from Amsterdam and Trinidad (where you catch a flight to anywhere else besides Amsterdam) arrive after midnight; all flights to Trinidad and Amsterdam leave at 6:30 am, which means waking up at 3:45 to arrive at the airport by 4:45 or 5:00 am.

Today after dropping Stephen off, Kevin & I went to Bergendahl, "an ecological and cultural resort" on the Suriname River. We paid to be walk-ins (as opposed to registered guests) and had the breakfast buffet while sitting next to the river. Then we went off to Lake Brokopondo, created by a hydropower dam that powers the bauxite/aluminum industry, and then visited Caroline, a Maarten Luther Kerk member who is Amerindian. We sat in her family's compound eating cassava bread and meeting the Peace Corps volunteers who are staying in their community for 3 months to learn to speak Sranan Tongo before going to assignments in Amerindian communities.

As Stephen pointed out some time ago, the nice thing about Amerindians is they smile. The heavy Dutch emphasis here -- or perhaps the seriously oppressive past of this country -- means almost no one else does smile. They are worse than Swedes.

But here are some links you can see before I leave. Click here for an interesting video of Paramaribo, shot from a car. It has good music, too.

Here's a video on Kevin's house. It's embedded in his Facebook site and I hope you can see it without being his friend.

And finally, a video that asks the question, did the Dutch get a good deal when they graded Manhattan for Suriname? After I posted this on Facebook, a Palestinian friend replied, "I don't know whether to laugh or be offended." Let's just say, it's borderline, but I think it's funny.

By Wednesday I should be in Chicago, reunited with my own computer. How wonderful! I'll keep posting photos, and then the Viajes de Anita will continue in the U.S. Thanks for reading the last few months, forgive my many lapses, and I look forward to seeing you all.

A couple of photos after all

Swimming in a waterfall in Guyana--the water is "tea colored" because of the leaves and bark of the trees nearby. It made us look red!
The ferry from Suriname to Guyana. It's about a 30-minute trip, but it takes all day to line up, handle papers, go through immigration and customs, and then repeat everything on the other side.
A political rally we passed in Coronie, Suriname, for the VHP "elephant" party. More later!

Still here, still posting

On Facebook, Joel M. asked, will you be posting anymore?

Sorry. I should at least reassure you that I wasn't in the small plane that crashed the other day in Suriname, killing all aboard. Nope. I've spent lots of time in cars and on motorboats, but haven't seen a plane for some time.

Suriname holds its elections next Tuesday, the day I leave. There are 30 parties here, mostly aligned along ethnic lines. The orange party with the elephant symbol has mostly Hindustani adherents. The red and white flag is the Indonesian party. Etcetera. Flags are everywhere, and so are motorcades of cars slathered in flags and blasting music and speeches from giant speakers.

Actually, the giant speaker is a species I have encountered everywhere on this trip, from the Mexican birthday party back in March when the walls and floors were throbbing to the giant speakers that are just part of the porch furniture for some families here.

Did I mention in my last post that in Suriname, the main synagogue and the main mosqure stand right next to one another? I have to take a tour of these facilities this week, as well as the main n Hindu temple that stands around the corner from the mosque and synagogue. But mosques and Hindu gods and temples are everywhere in this amazingly ethnically mixed country. Just take a peek at Kevin's neighbors:

• behind him, a Javanese man who is head of customs at the post office; behind and to the right, a Hindu family that seems to own a bus company
  
• next door, an African-Surinamese family that sells sausages on the street and have the most falling-down house on the street. I see some of the residents brushing their teeth and washing their hair outside in the mornings
• across the street, Brazilians, the most recent immigrant group to Suriname and Guyana. They are all gold miners. All day long, cars pull up and honk to visit people. (Because everyone has a fence or gate in front of their home, you have to honk to let people know you are outside. If you are walking, you shout a little or rap your keys on the gate)
  
• next to the Brazilians, what Kevin calls "a combination family" of several ethnic strands
• next door on the other side, five women, all African-Surinamese, and a passel of dogs who sometimes sing together at night (that's what their howling sounds like. They are quickly shushed.)
  
• and beyond them, English speakers; a Guyanese husband and Surinamese wife
• and Kevin, from Wisconsin, and Stephen and Anne
  

It's hard to judge, as an outsider, just how deep this diversity goes--whether everyone is truly included in society, whether there are higher classes and lower classes--but to the outsider, it is very impressive!

I read "The Free Negress Elizabeth: Prisoner of Color" by Cynthia McLeod, Suriname's most famous novelist. It tells the story of Elizabeth Samson, the first black woman to be born free (in about 1717), who became one of the richest women in Suriname in the 18th century, owning plantations and slaves, but was spurned by her white peers and couldn't legally marry the man she loved. (You could marry if you were a mulatto, and there were many, very quickly, but not if you were black.) McLeod couldn't research Elizabeth's story until her husband became ambassador to Belgium, because all of the historical archives of pre-independence Suriname are in Holland. When your history is in somebody else's country, you are definitely a colony.

I've also been reading the history of the Lutheran Church of Suriname, and how it morphed from a church of plantation and slave owners to the multiethnic church it is today. Yesterday, visiting an old plantation, and I recognized its owner as the person who contributed the first organ to the Maarten Luther Kerk.

Tonight I'm going to begin reading McLeod's other novel, "The Cost of Sugar," which recaps (says the jacket copy) "the intriguing history of those rabid times (1765-1779) through the eyes of two Jewish step sisters, Elza and Sarith, descendants of the settlers of the 'new Jerusalem of the River,' known today as Jodensavanne, the oldest Jewish settlement in Suriname, which boasts the first synagogue in the Western Hemisphere."

That's the synagogue I hope to visit. This book I'm bringing home, so some of you can read it, too! I am not sure it is available on Amazon.

Despite living in a house with two laptops, I'll wait until I am reunited with my computer next week to start putting up photos. Then you'll see the wonderful trip Stephen and I took to a Guyana rainforest, and all the animals that wander around on the roads in Guyana, and rice drying on the pavement, and mosques where (in Guyana, but not in Suriname) they sing the call to prayer at 4:30 am (audible from the Lutheran camp down the street), and then pictures of typical Caribbean houses, of Paramaribo's downtown wooden buildings, of the song birds people keep as pets here, and of those election flags, and Hindu gods by the freeway, and more.

I leave a week from tomorrow. This week I'm focused on finishing projects for Kevin (writing, organizing, pulling together a conference) and seeing what I haven't seen yet. I'm also trying to arrange a half-day tour of Port of Spain, Trinidad, where I have a 7-hour layover next Tuesday, and organizing my time in Chicago and New York. I'll probably post once or twice more before I leave. Watch for those photos, though. They're gonna be good.

Tagging Along

I started my trip by making all my arrangements myself. I am ending it by tagging along.

Want to tour the port of Paramaribo? Sure. Want to join us on a trip to Guyana? Sure. This week in Suriname, other people have made suggestions, and all I have done is comply or refuse.

I was met at the airport late, late, late Sunday night by Kevin J., friend and former boss who lives here in Suriname and is pastor at the church, Mary C., friend and ELCA colleague I've visited 8 countries with (including Cuba, back in February), and Stephen D., from Holden. Mary was here with another ELCA person on an official delegation trip to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Suriname (ELKS), so the first round of activities I tagged along with was theirs. The port. A little church in the town of Lelydorp. A Roman Catholic mission in Moengo, in eastern Suriname, where the church might have a youth retreat next fall. A small village of Maroons, or what they call in Dutch "bush negros"--descendants of slaves who escaped and hid in the jungle a couple centuries ago, and are still there.

The trip to Guyana starts in an hour and a half. The Lutheran Church in Guyana is having its annual convention. Kevin and two other people from ELKS are attending. Stephen and I will attend for one day and then go off by boat and bus for a trip to Marshall Falls. Guyana and Suriname are in a large delta. There are many rivers to cross, so to speak. It will be hot, buggy, but beautiful, we hope, and next Tuesday we rejoin our colleagues for a ride back to Suriname.

To get to Guyana, we will drive to the town of Niewe Nykerie and stay in an orphanage. Tomorrow we take the ferry to Guyana. There is only one a day. Then we go to Georgetown. Then our trip to the interior. Then back to Georgetown and Skeldon, where there is a Lutheran retreat center, for a night, and then back on the ferry to Suriname.

This week has been lots of rushing around; next week I'll start settling in here. But some initial impressions:

Suriname was fought over by the Dutch and English for a long time. To resolve the dispute, they swapped two colonial possessions. Holland took Suriname; the British took Manhattan. Suriname is independent today, but they still speak Dutch. Just today I took my miniature Spanish dictionary out of my backpack. I'm unlikely to need it this month.

People here are Indian, black, European. Hindu temples, Muslim mosques, and Christian churches are everywhere. On one street, the Jewish synagogue stands next to a mosque. These are very elaborate buildings. I'll post photos next week.

So far I've eaten Indonesian food, Chinese food, and Surinamese food, and even cooked my own dish of curried eggplant with peanuts. All delicious. The beer is good, and the juice. We mix tamarind concentrate with water, ice, and freshly squeezed lime. Yummy!

Kevin has to remember to drive on the left side of the road, but he did that for many years in Papua New Guinea, so that's no problem. I'm glad I'm not driving.

And it's extremely hot, and rains several times a day.

More next week, when I get back from Guyana. Meanwhile, click HERE for a map of Guyana and Suriname, two countries tucked into the "lost coast" of South America.

A $95 stomachache and a 50-cent bus ride

Greetings from Isla Mujeres, finally!

Somewhere along the road from Guatemala to Mexico I got, for the first time in my 2 months on the road, a terrible bug. Food? Everything I ate was in packages, including the delicious fruit paleta in Belize. Germs from some surface, like a bathroom? Could be. Anyhow, about halfway through our long journey across two borders (Guatemala-Belize and Belize-Mexico) I knew I was in trouble, and when we arrived in Chetumal, Mexico, at 6:00 pm, I knew I couldn't make it to Tulum. Having done little research on Chetumal, the only hotel I knew of was a Holiday Inn. After weeks of home stays and the occasional $10 a night hospedaje, my encounter with US prices was shocking. But $95 bought me 12 hours of sleep and access to clean water and a bathroom, which was pretty much all I needed. Those soft sheets and extra pillows felt wonderful.

Since I couldn't figure out what caused this, I tossed out all the crackers I had been carrying, plus my water bottle, and even my toothbrush. Yesterday morning I bought water, juice and a new toothbrush from stores around the hotel before catching the bus to Cancun. Mexican buses are very big and comfortable and my last six hours passed more easily than the 10 hours on the direct but rudimentary shuttle...and I didn't have to drag my stuff across any borders.

Arriving at Cancun at 4:30, I put my experience with Mexican living to work by ignoring the taxi line and crossing Avenida Tulum to where the local buses called rutas stop. I found the one that said "Puerto Juarez" and paid 5 and a half pesos to take it to the boat dock that takes you to Isla Mujeres. By 5:30 I was on the island and settled into my little room at Steve Broin's Casa Sirena, where my main objective is to swim and relax and rest up for Sunday, when I fly from Cancun to Miami to Trinidad and Tobago to Paramaribo, Suriname, arriving a little after midnight. After all my activities in Guatemala--visiting dozens of churches, climbing temples and a volcano, cruising up rivers and across lakes, sharing little microbuses with Guatemalans and tourbuses with internationals--I need to do nothing, in a lovely place!

The wacko on the third floor

My lovely hospedaje in Panajachel last weekend had one odd resident: a man in his 60s from Canada, a self-published author with all the usual chips on his self-published shoulder about why no academic or mainstream publisher would take his book, why the UBC library wouldn't buy it, why credentials shouldn't matter when you're brilliant, etc. While I was cavorting around Lago Atitlàn, he was watching tv all day in his room, emerging at night to confide his self-published woes as I drank beer on the sofa, or to search the Vancouver Craig`s list for a room to rent when he got home. Whenever that would be. I think the owners of Hospedaje El Viajero were torn between asking him to leave and praying his indecision would tide them over the bajòn or low season.

Today the oddball watching tv in her room was me, at the Posada Tayazal in Flores, Guatemala, way up in the northern jungles. (Click here for a google map.) I did go out for breakfast and the internet this morning, and emerged for an ice cream around 2:00 pm, but otherwise watched Guatemalan tv and weird US movies until supper time. Travelers have to pay even when they feel like doing nothing, and I felt like doing nothing today, in a charming town. (Just for the record, I watched the very fascinating Spanish-produced but English-language political movie Land of the Blind with Donald Sutherland, who I cannot resist, and You Kill Me with Ben Kingsley and Owen Wilson's brother Luke, which I would like to see again. And since, you remember from my last post, the only other gringo in Santa Cruz de Quichè was a young Mormon missionary, you won't be surprised to find out that the BYU network is right there among the evangelical stations.)

I needed to rest, after my strenuous weekend on the group tour to Tikal. There were 21 of us, mostly very young Germans, plus a Canadian, a Scot, a Brit, a Quebeçois, and four Americans, including one St. Olaf grad who knows Micah M, Alex. During my ELCA staff years I assisted with several delegations of middleaged Lutherans visiting Central and Latin America so I know what a task it is to balance everyone's needs and desires. Victor, our host and a teacher at Tecùn Umàn, my Spanish school in Antigua, made a heroic effort.

A blow-by-blow account would bore you to tears, but of the many kilometers we covered between Friday at 4:00 am and Sunday at 2:30 when I left the group, the jungle ruins of the Mayan city of Tikal were the best. (Click here for images that don't begin to convey the grandeur I saw and felt.) Starting at 6:15 am, when the animals are still active and the intense heat and humidity of the Petèn hasn't kicked in yet, we wandered through jungle and had a picnic breakfast among the ruins and climbed temples as our bilingual guide Walter explained the significance of what we were seeing. The ruins at Tikal are used for the kinds of Mayan rituals I witnessed last weekend in Chichicastenango (chickens, incense, and coca cola, you remember) and overheard on Thursday morning at Utatlàn in the Quichè (chanting, and all the remaining buildings and caves there are blackened with smoke from rituals), so the big temples have large and active circular altars at their feet. I think it was the way the temples poke out from the canopy that was so affecting, plus the cumulative effect of learning so much about Mayan culture through visits to Tikal, Monte Alban near Oaxaca (on a mesa rather than in a jungle) and Chichen Itza (not as mysterious and powerful or remote as Tikal).

Also great: the tour, picnic, and hot sulphur baths along the beautiful Rio Dulce, the charming town of Flores, and the time I spent dining and hanging out with my little cadre of minivan companions. Most disappointing: the surprisingly seedy coastal town of Livingston, Guatemala, where the Afro-Caribbean Garifùna population live. Had I gone to any effort to visit it on my own, I would have burst into tears of disappointment upon arrival.

Most dangerous: the high-speed nighttime trip UP the Rio Dulce in two launches with no proper running lights, in which Victor stood in the prow of my lancha shining his flashlight from bank to bank so the captain could find the channel. To get us through that 45-minute journey, I alternated between saying prayers, saying goodbye to all of you, and trying to visualize being safely in bed. Even the most secular of my companions later said, "Yes, I was praying, too." This was the first time that Mexico and Guatemala's laissez-faire, we're-counting-on-you-not-to-fall-off-this-70-meter-tall-ancient-temple approach to tourism was too laissez-faire for me.

When the group left Rio Dulce to drive back to Antigua, I got a first-class bus back to Flores for two nights. Very rich people fly into Flores for the day to visit Tikal (the flights leave at 4:30 am so that they can enjoy the early-morning jungle, too). Everyone else has traveled hundreds of kilometers by bus or car. Most of them are very young. Some of the kids I saw in the Internet café today WERE children. Where are their parents? One was gushing, on Skype, about her inspiring meeting with a young Israeli girl who is hitchhiking around Central America selling her jewelry. Where are HER parents?? Me, I was upstairs watching movies and updating my journal. Now I am listening to a young American man talk to his parents ("Hi, I'm in Guatemala, in Flores... just because I wanted to...I took a van...five hours...it was cool, check it out on the internet when you get a chance...I called the bank and they haven't fixed my credit, so I am out of money until I get to Belize...can you help?")

After two months, I really have run out of energy. Fortunately this day of mindless rest is preparing me for tomorrow's final push in a shuttle across Belize to Chetumal. (Guatemala has a whole alternate transportation for tourists. It's uncomfortably like the Israeli-only system of highways in Palestine.) Then I will switch to a Mexican bus to Tulum, where I will spend one night and do my best to swim in a cenote. (Click here to find out what that is.) And then Wednesday I arrive in Isla Mujeres and dedicate myself to resting up with host Steve Broin before I get the plane to Suriname! Expect my next post to sound like Margaritaville. Meanwhile, I am sure I can watch another movie before I leave at 7:30 am tomorrow morning.

From the Mayan highlands to the Mayan jungle

Just a note to say I have returned to Antigua from Santa Cruz de Quichè and tonight at 4:00 am will be picked up by a tour group leaving for a 3-day visit to the Tikal ruins in the jungle of the Petèn and then the Caribbean community of Livingston, home to Guatemala's black population, called the Garafuna.

After arranging so much of my travel myself, and worrying about how to get from community A to community B on a microbus (no chicken buses, because they go too fast and fall off cliffs, but microbuses are exciting in a different kind of way, picking up and dropping off passengers every few hundred yards and occasionally getting 27 people into a space we might use for 8 or 9), I am thrilled that my only responsibility is to show up for the next few days. Places I am going between now and Sunday include:

• the ruins at Quirigia
• Lago de Izabel and an old pirate castle
• Tikal, massive Mayan ruins in the jungle
• the Petèn town of Flores
• the town of Rio Dulce
• a 2 or 3-hour journey up the Rio Dulce to...
• Livingston, where I think they actually speak English, on the Caribbean coast, opposite Belice

It's funny to go from a community in which the only other gringo I saw was a Mormon missionary to a tour group with 18 other multinational tourists.

Tonight I am staying in a hostel, in a coed dorm room in which I am sure to be the oldest person, but it's already 7:20 and I will be gone by 4:00 am, so I am sure my middle-aged vibe will not disturb anyone too much. Why pay a lot for less than a whole night of sleep?

I saw and learned a little more about Mayan rituals in the Quichè and look forward to really immersing myself in this culture in Tikal. I asked Santos, Gloria Kanu's Ki'che husband, whether Mayans are making as much as westerners are of 12/2010, when the 5,125-year cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar comes to an end. "Well, they don't say much, and they don't think that the world will end that day, but yes, they believe something significant will happen," he told me.

Perfectly Happy in Panajachel

Greetings from Lago Atitlàn. My spirits lifted almost as soon as I left Antigua Saturday morning. I had interesting companions on my journey to Panajachel, the village that is the ¨doorway¨to the Lake, and ended up spending the day with them. After checking my luggage in my little hospedaje, where I have a lovely room for $10 a day (my first hotel on this trip, after 40-plus days of family stays and church dormitories), I joined them for a trip to San Juan La Laguna, a small Mayan town on the west end of the lake.

Like Crater Lake or Lake Chelan, Lago Atitlàn is in arid country, surrounded by volcanoes and hills that plunge steeply down to the shoreline. (Click here for a bunch of photos taken by other people.) You can pay a lot for a tour to several communities in a big boat (I'll do that tomorrow) or pay less and join the locals in a invigorating, speedy, spray-filled trip in a lancha (click here for a photo) to a particular village. Which we did, to arrive at a quiet, peaceful, hillside community where my new friends took a room in a little blue-and-white hotel and we enjoyed ice cream and licuadas, (fruit and water, stirred up in a blender) before I took the lancha back to "Pana".

Today I went to Chichicastenango, home of the biggest indigenous market in Guatemala. But instead of shopping, I explored Chichi's Mayan-Catholic churches and rituals. 18 steps lead up to San Tomas, the so-called ¨Church of Life,¨ one for each month in the Mayan solar calendar. At the top of the steps half a dozen men were swinging containers of incense around them. The guide I hired explained that they were Mayan shamans (is the plural shamans, or shamen?) purifying themselves to enter the church and lead prayers and rituals. (No, I can't post my photos yet; click here for an image from someone else's blog.)

Inside the church, where photos are not allowed, the area behind the altar rail and along the side walls is devoted to Catholic ritual. Down the center aisle on the floor are square wooden altars about 6 inches high on which candles are guttering and next to which the shamans kneel. In order, I encountered altars for curing children, cuiring infertility or influencing the gender of your next child, six altars for the harvest (three for corn, one for fruit, and one for beans), an altar for relationships (marriages and courtships), and, closest to the main Catholic altar, one for giving thanks to the god of man, the sun, and the god of women, the moon.

In the Catholic section, you can light your own candle or say your own prayer, but down this middle aisle, you need a shaman. The wooden altars around the church where paintings of saints once appeared were black with smoke and incense, and the church was thronged. Some children were being baptized, but more important, said the guide, is to take them to the shaman to find out their destiny (farmer? business person? shaman?) and then by the age of 10, apprentice them to someone who can help them reach their destiny.

Across the plaza and part of the market (the market takes over the whole town) was El Calvario, the church of death, where more floor altars receive prayers and rituals for dead men, women, and children. Prayers for children are to deliver them to their ancestors, who the children will serve. Likewise women go to serve their ancestors. 13 steps led up to this church, the number of months in the Mayan lunar calendar. In a side altar, shamans performed rituals for protection and safety, like on a bus trip to Guatemala City.

Then the guide led me up the hill to Pascual Abaj, where shamans work outdoors. My photos are WAY BETTER but click here to visualize what I am about to tell you. Two shamans were at work, a man and a woman, around a hillside charred with old fires (some not so old; you had to watch where you stepped, just like on that volcano last week!) and new fires, into which they threw things. As I arrived, the woman shaman was blessing the man with a live chicken, passing it around all the parts of his body. Passing the chicken around his legs would ensure safety while walking. Passing it around his head and mouth would help him concentrate better on his tasks and give him words for interpretation. Then the chicken's head was cut off, and its blood squeezed into the fire. And then, just like the saying goes, the chicken ran all around with its head cut off. My guide said that's a sign of good luck and many journeys. Beware the chicken that falls over and dies immediately! No journeys, or maybe journeys with robbers and flat tires.

In the center of the circle, in front of the altar, stood a bottle of coke and a bottle of beer. The coke was for the corazon del cielo, the heart of the sky. The beer was for the corazon del tierra, the heart of the earth. Why might this be? My guide asked. My lame guess was, because the coke is carbonated and the bubbles are going up?? No. The sky gods don't get liquor because because they are saints (Catholic influence here). The earth gets beer cuz it will placate (or reject) the bad spirits below.

On the altar stood a Mayan cross (the Mayans had a cross before the Spanish got there, but it had arms of equal lengths), a Christian cross, and the large stone symboling Pascual Abaj. Radiating from the central point of the circle (remember the beer and the coke) were four outer places to send prayers to the four arrows or directions.

I have pictures of all of this. The Popol Vuh, the Mayan holy book, also confirms it. That this amazing syncretism of religions happened is due to Fr. Francisco Jimenez, who was interested, about 400 years ago, in the creation stories of the Maya, and ¨discovered¨and read the Popol Vuh to learn more, thus gaining the respect of the local community, which moved its gods back to the church.

"Discovered" is in quotes because I read recently that no one can really ¨discover¨a new place or culture. Columbus, Cortez, and the rest of the conquistadores did not discover but rather invented America. They interpreted what they saw through their own lens and, not understanding it, made up some awfully tall tales about what they were seeing.

That happens every day of my journey! I see something or hear a word or phrase I don't know, and invent an explanation. Later, when someone explains, I can see just how far off I am. Every gringo I meet here is completely inventing explanations for the government, the culture, and the society. The humble ones admit this up front; the rest are "experts."

Tomorrow I get my gringo tour of the lake, meet my new friends from Saturday for supper, and then on Monday I take a chicken bus to Santa Cruz de Quichè, where I will be visiting Gloria Kanu and an organization called Acciòn Cultural Guatemala for a couple days. Those of you who attend Holden Village's Abriendos know Gloria's parents, Don Virgilio and Doña Isabel Canu. I hope to learn (or invent??) more of the story of Guatemala's indigenous people, who have suffered terribly ever since the Spanish got here. I won't be online much during those days. It may be next weekend before I post again. But you can never tell. Internet cafes are everywhere.

I gave the shaman 10 quetzales and he said he and the lady shaman would split a coke in my honor. Not a beer, a coke. Guess I'm a saint, not a bad spirit. Here's hoping that coke will be as effective as passing a live chicken around me when it comes to ensuring the safety of the next steps of my journey.

Sorry, no photos of Antigua Holy Week

More complaining, Alex! In two hours online, I have succeded in uploading exactly one photo to Picasa and one more to this blog. So much for my beautiful photos and clever captions about the week behind me. This photo is just to tease you, then. It shows an alfombra or carpet made of cerezo, vegetables and bread inside a church. I have hundreds of photos of carpets and processions through the streets that you can't see.

I confess I'm a little bored and lonely now in Guatemala, the first place that has happened. School is good, but there is little community, and it's all gringos, and the family I am staying with is a little edgy, and .... oh well. I keep occupied with grammar, reading the newspaper, visiting ruins (which I can see better, now that the half million people who were here last week haved departed, leaving Antigua's usual 40,000 residents and languge students) and going to lectures and movies. When lonely, take dance lessons, seek culture, distract yourself. So I am off to a fre Guatemalan movie now. I wish I could have a drink with someone!

Easter in Antigua

I just finished walking a few blocks behind the "anda" or float, carried by humans, of Jesus Resurrected, in one of the processions bringing Holy Week in Antigua to an end. I have hundreds of photographs to edit and post, but for now, two links you can check out to see what happens here:

First, for a little essay on Holy Week in Antigua, click here.

For images of the city, the floats, and the alfombras or carpets made of flowers or sawdust, click here.

It has been a busy week. Thursday, I signed up for my next Spanish School and watched two processions, featuring Peter denying Christ and other events following the Last Supper. On Good Friday, I got up at 4:00 am with my host Tomas to witness the Roman soldiers arriving on horseback and Christ going to his crucifixion. And I stayed up until 1:45 am cuz one of the processions of Christ in his tomb was going to pass my hosts' home, and we started building our alfombra at about 10:00 pm, then rested until we heard the music, and got up again to watch the procession pass over and ruin our alfombra.

On Saturday I skipped the processions to climb the Volcano Pacaya with a busload of young adventure travelers. Wandering across lava beds with a staff, having my sweaty shirt dried by heat from the lava, and descending the mountain without a flashlight turned out to be a pretty good way to celebrate Holy Saturday. Arriving in Antigua about 10:00 pm, the streets were blocked once again for the procession of the Virgin, which I watched before I walked home to bed.

And today, I watched the float of Christ resurrected leave the church and offices of Obras Sociales de Hermano Pedro, greeted by shouting, gigantic fireworks, bells, and confetti tossed off the bell tower. I asked for a plastic flag and joined the folks walking and waving flags and flowers behind the float as it made its way toward the plaza.

In Mexico and Central America, everyone has Holy Week off. Today they are driving or taking buses home and back to work. Also departing are the thousands of European and North American tourists who have been here. Tomorrow, my hosts say, I will see what a sleepy town this really is. Except I have to be at school at 8:00 am!

RIP Sir Barks a Lot

My beloved dog, named "Sir Barks a Lot" by Alex when he was 7, back in 1995, died in his sleep last night at my sister-in-law Carol Limanowski's house in Chicago.

Tapachula to Antigua

I'm in Antigua, after a 24-hour, two-bus, one-taxi trip.

You read the story of part one in yesterday's post from Tapachula. It took 7 hours to travel the 119 miles from Tapachula to Guatemala City in the giant, two-story luxury TransGalgosInter bus. Just 15 minutes after leaving Tapachula, we arrived at the border and had to get off the bus. I've been in 33 countries, if you count changing airplanes in Bolivia (where they did stamp my passport) and Norway, and 35, if you throw in Vatican City and the handful of blocks in Italy that make up the Republic of San Marino, but yesterday was the first time I ever walked across a border.

First we lined up at the Mexican immigration office to have our passports stamped for the exit. Then we walked the gantlet of money changers holding fists of quetzals and pesos. Having no idea of the exchange rate, I was ripped off immediately. It's tough to beat a bunch of guys shouting and waving bills and calculators in your face. My 170 pesos should have gotten me about 80 quetzales, but I only got 65. I lost about $4, but felt foolish.

But there were hundreds of people along the road, changing money, selling things. At this point, since I looked a little lost--and the only blonde there--a family on its way from St. Louis to Honduras took charge of me. We walked through the crowds, across a bridge, and into the Guatemalan immigration office, and then past more vendors and money changers and over to where our bus was parked. It was a relief to get back on. My seatmate, a young college student from Mexico city visiting Guatemala with her family, said that they had decided to take the bus instead of drive because it was a "more secure" way to cross the border. And for me, she said, this was definitely more dangerous. (Later, my taxi driver said "yes, the border is puro ladrones, pure thieves.) I was so shaken that I forgot to take pictures of the chaos!

Just a note on the nice family that took care of me: this family of 4 was traveling on 3 different kinds of passports. The husband's was Honduran, the wife's was Mexican, and the children's were American. It's pretty typical for members of the same Hispanic family living in the U.S. to have different immigration statuses--some citizens, some green cards, some not legal at all. Which is why so many families are vulnerable to deportation, and why so many families in Mexico also have mixed immigration status. In Oaxaca, an American told me that the U.S. embassy has NO IDEA how many children in Mexico--children in families that have chosen to come back, children in families that were deported--have U.S. passports and are officially their concern. The Mexican census takes place this spring. I wonder if one of the questions is, "does anyone in your household have a U.S. passport?"

The next 6 hours were spent very, very slowly driving the last 100 miles or so to Guatemala City. Since this was a "luxury" bus, we got ham and cheese sandwiches and soda for lunch, and much later in the day, coffee or juice and cookies. We stopped a few times to let people off. At one intersection, the driver flagged down one of those beautifully painted chicken buses, and put two people on it. Their luggage was thrown to the top, where a man sat with it. All of those attractive buses were thronged with people who looked a little longingly at our amazing bus--the tallest bus I have ever been on, I am sure. Later, we pulled into a Texaco station to wait for another blue TransGalgosInter bus on its way to San Salvador, El Salvador. More people got off there.

Besides buses, I saw sugar cane fields, a volcano, women washing clothes in rivers, a boy sleepign on top of a truckload of melons, and dozens of pentecostal churches--the fruit of a U.S. strategy of the 1980s, when to combat the increasingly liberal liberation-theology-influenced Catholic church, the CIA and various Central America bad guys called on Pat Robertson and others on the Christian right to help start small, conservative, pentecostal churches that would undercut the Catholic church's authority. It worked. I didn't see one Catholic chruch until we got to Guatemala City--only a parade of storefronts called "Iglesia de Dios Fuente de Milagros" (Church of God Font of Miracles), "Iglesia de Dios Lluvia de Bendiciones" (Church of God Rain of Blessings", Mision Evangelica Luz y Verdad" (Evangelical Mission Light and Truth). (Because of this experience, Cuban party officials see these kinds of churches as CIA fronts, and they probably are!)

The last 45 minutes took us through Guatemala City, which has about 14 million residents, and it was 6:30 when we got there. To get to Antigua, I would have to change bus stations and buses, so the azafata or stewardess recommended I get a taxi. From the ranks of taxis at the station she chose Hugo, a man she knew, to get me the rest of the way. We had a good hour ride to Antigua, where he took me to the ATM, and then we prowled the streets asking people how to find the Calle Candelaria, where Alex's friend's Luis's grandmother Dona Ruth lived. I got out my flashlight so we could see the numbers and signs on the buildings. After many inquiries we found her, and she got in the taxi with us to get me to the home where I am staying, the family of Tomas Ixtamalic, at about 9:00 pm, 24 hours after I left Oaxaca.

When I leave, I think I'll fly!

A ranchera from the border

Greetings from Tapachula, Mexico, a place you will probably never visit.

I feel like I'm in a country-western song, except this is Mexico, so to pass the time I will write a ranchera about this leg of my trip:


March was wrapping up the morning that I got here
From the window I could see another land.
Things were greener, like the jungle was beginning
and the sun was broiling down to beat the band.

Sleeping on the bus is never easy
I toss and turn and sweat some and then freeze
"Pirates of the Caribbean" on the small screen
and snores of men the only midnight breeze.

But stumbling off the bus into the morning
brought even bigger questions to the fore:
was there a bus that went to Guatemala
or was I doomed to spend two days upon this floor?

Bad news and good were both on hand to greet me
Indeed a bus existed, later on,
but the schedule on the web was only fiction
and they wouldn't sell a ticket, not a one.

"Pues frente hay agencia que se venden"
so across the street I walked with all my cash
Tres cientos pesos later I had my own ticket
and three hours to wait until I left at last.

To fill me up I had a yummy desayuno
watching news from every corner of this pais
then opened up my gmail to discover
that my beloved Barks might soon decease.

Sad day! A dog I've loved for 15 años,
companion on Balmoral whom I grieve,
lymphoma means he's tired and not eating
I won't be there to hold him when he leaves.

Here comes a man with terrible glaucoma
in between the taxis, buses, horns and thieves,
collecting pesos for a mission franciscano
I gave, although his story's hard to believe.

It's almost ten, so there's another 90 minutes
before the border I can ever hope to see
Tonight I'm planning to arrive into old Antigua
where Luis's grandmother will greet me at her door.

Then I'll shower, sleep and think about my canine
and hope his end is peaceful, not a chore
in his last minutes may he smile and think of fondly
the life we shared in what's now my before.


National Poetry Month starts tomorrow, along with my two or possibly three weeks in Guatemala. Thanks for helping me get it off to a good start! If you know any country-western artists looking for some good material, rights to my song "Part-time girlfriend with a full-time heart" are available. Sounds like a grammy winner, doesn't it????

Oaxaca

It's Palm Sunday in Oaxaca, and the zócalo next to this telephone center/Internet Cafe is teeming with musicians, pedestrians, and vendors of balloons and candy and trinkets. (Click here to see what the balloons look like.) This is the best zócalo I've been to--compact, friendly, busy. The cathedral stands in the middle of it, and since yesterday the steps have been filled with indigenous people selling palms braided into amazing crosses, crosses with Jesus, crosses with Jesus and flowers, crosses with Jesus and flowers and glitter. I bought quite a few sparkly Jesuses on the cross!

Several hundred people processed across the plaza into the cathedral at the beginning of the noon service. I went in, too, and now I know what it is like to be a peon. Remember, from your visits to Europe or Mexico, just how much floor space and how few pews there are in a 500-year-old cathedral? While the nobility sat, everyone else stood. And stood. And stood. As did I, trying my best to listen, comprehend, and not faint. I sang when I knew the words or the melody, tried to follow the passion story, passed the peace with everyone, but missed the offering and communion, because when the place is that packed, neither the offering box nor the wine and bread get around to everyone.

Just when I was sure the final benediction had been given, a male voice began to drone on and on and on again. A woman near me asked in Spanish if I were from North America. I said yes, and she introduced me to her husband, and we talked about California, and then I asked her, "what's with this second homily?" and she said, "oh, now they are blessing the palms." That she was more interested in chatting than listening to the homily was a clue that I could leave, so I did.

Oaxaca is a very beautiful town. Its most outstanding feature is the Iglesia de Santo Domingo (click here to get to a google page with images) and its former convent, now a very interesting museum on pre-Columbian and colonial Mexico. I learned that the first Spanish priests here used a cross but NOT the image of the crucified Christ because it was too similar to the human sacrifices that dominated the previous two thousand years.

Saturday, after the "Irreverent Church Tour" of the cathedral and two smaller churches, I had lunch with a Californian who took up residence here after being let go from her library job in San Francisco. Like me (and this is why we were introduced), she sold nearly everything she had and lives on rent from her two houses in Mill Valley. From the patio of her studio apartment, we could see most of the churches here as we ate guacamole, salad, and drank cold mint tea and beer. I got the inside scoop on being an ex-pat, and it doesn't sound half bad. In her case, how much more positive to start a new life in Mexico than apply for unemployment insurance and jobs in San Francisco.

I´m staying with another grandmother, a woman who once hosted a fellow student from Cuernavaca. My room is once again on top of the house, and has a terrace overlooking an empty lot and beyond it, a youth hostel. As in Cuernavaca, three generations live in or often visit this house, and there are also parrots and dogs. For me, traveling alone, it's nice to check in with a family for a meal three times a day, and speak Spanish. Travelers exploring churches and museums get to say little more than "how late are you open?" and "how much for this postcard?" Better to sit around a table watching telenovelas and listening to family members talk about their neighbors.

Tomorrow I take a tour to Monte Alban, the most significant ruins in this part of the country. Tomorrow night begins my pilgrimage to Guatemala, where another grandmother awaits me. It's an all-night bus ride (first-class, mom) to Tapachula, Mexico, on the border. In Tapachula, at 8:00 am Tuesday morning, I get a cab to the TransGalgosInter station and hope to get the 9:30 bus to Guatemala City. It's Holy Week, and everyone is on vacation, so I am a little worried about getting a seat on that bus. If my next post is from Tapachula instead of Antigua, you'll know I'm still cooling my heels in a bus station.

Living la vida chilanga

Early on in my Spanish classes at the Instituto Cervantes, I learned the word atropellar, which means "to be hit by a car." This word was never particularly useful until now, for it describes the possible outcome of every attempt to cross the street in Mexico City. But I am growing fond of dashing across 6 lanes of traffic with my coffee and churros (those long, skinny Mexican donuts--mmmm!!!), although I usually tag along after someone else, presuming that person has a better grasp of the odds or can at least serve as a sort of human shield.

Mexico City is awesome. (I sound like Alex, but it is.) What a good thing I started my trip in Cuernavaca. Compared to this city, it's small, and was an excellent place to begin to learn Mexican ways. This is the big league of rutas (buses), subways, museums, street food, and street theater. I've seen men rolling in glass, swallowing fire, and performing Aztec purification rites in the middle of traffic to earn money. I've eaten fabulous tacos and churros from street stands. Although most museums were closed yesterday, I still saw the Diego Rivera murals in the Palacio Nacional and other intense murals on the subject of justice at the Supreme Court, and today I visited Diego Rivera's and Frida Kahlo's twin houses and studios as well as Frida's Casa Azul. Get this, Chicagoans--a subway ride of miles and miles and miles costs 36 cents. The economy of scale in action! And instead of 24 or so rutas, as there were in Cuernavaca, there are hundreds, all unnumbered. You just study the list of destinations, or ask the driver if he is going where you need to go.

I just got off a ruta that took me from the Frida Kahlo museum over to Avenida Revoluciòn, near the Lutheran Center, where I'm staying. A little boy on board was playing with a direction sign, and I figured out that this was the driver's son. Then I realized that the woman behind the driver was the boy's mother, and the driver's wife. Then I saw the infant carrier tucked in behind the driver's seat and the tiny head sticking out of it. And THEN I saw the tufts of hair of a third child sleeping on the seat. The driver's whole family was accompanying him on his evening of work. Life is amazing.

Briefly, I got here Saturday, driving up from Cuernavaca with Andrea and Luke, two colleagues from the ELCA. (I still fly under this flag though I no longer work there.) We picked up two more colleagues and had supper that night with David, who teaches at the Seminary here, and Alicia, his wife--all of us either current or previous employees of the ELCA Global Mission Unit. We got lost several times along the way and I began to grasp the scale of the city.

Sunday, Andrea & Luke & I went to Buen Pastor, the Lutheran church where the ELCA supplies interns and has a relationship with staff and members. After, I was taken out for lunch and an afternoon by Celic A., a very poised young lady who participated in the ELCA International Guest Program for the last two ELCA Youth Gatherings. (In 2006 and 2009 I was a counselor-leader-chaperone for 40 to 70 international teens, including Celic, at the big youth events that gather 25,000 - 40,000 teens and chaperones.) Celic and her boyfriend Santiago took me for a walking tour of the UNAM campus (the most famous university in Mexico) and then for a stroll and lunch in Coyoacàn, a lovely part of the southern part of Mexico City.

Sunday night I prowled the streets and taco stands with John B., a young man from Wenatchee who is volunteering at the Lutheran Center. We know each other from Holden Village, of course. Monday morning he and I got our breakfast on the street (serving number one of churros) and then took a ruta and the metro to the Zòcalo (the giant main square of Mexico City, used for celebrations and protests) to sightsee. The murals were terrific, but the best part of the day for me (after John had left for his Spanish classes) was climbing the bell tower of the cathedral. For 15 pesos, I climbed up an ancient stone staircase with 10 other people and a guide who told us the history of the bells and how they are rung. Then we got to clamber around the roof of the cathedral, admiring the view and taking pictures a couple hundred feet over the zòcalo. Unlike in the states, where insurance would prohibit this kind of adventure, in Mexico you are trusted not to do something stupid like lean too far over a parapet, or drop your camera on a tourist below. I didn't do anything stupid, and the photos are great.

Today I took the metro and a bus (coffee and churros in hand) and a cab to the Guatemalan embassy, where I found out that I don't need any visa or card to enter Guatemala. It was not a waste of time, because everything I do in Mexico teaches me something, and it's all Mexico. Then off to Frida and Diego land. This only scratches the surfaces of museums here. I hope to spend more time some day seeing more, but tomorrow I take the bus back to Cuernavaca to participate, with my host family Angeles and Fernando, in an event commemorating the 30th anniversary of the assasination of Bishop Oscar Romero. Thursday morning I get the bus to Oaxaca, where I'll be until next Monday.

"Chilangos" are residents of the D.F. (the Distrito Federal), aka Mexico City. I've gotten to be one for four nights, and hope to come back. Really, never mind the drug lords, the swine flu, the bad rap Mexico gets in the news--you should all come here, and soon, whether you are Lutheran or not!

Pictures of my first 30 days

Hi folks. Thanks to ELCA colleagues Andrea and Luke Roske-Metcalfe, I have a comfortable bed, a laptop and a wireless connection, and a ride to Mexico City this weekend. I just spent the last three hours uploading photos to a new album called "The First 30 Days." Click here to see all 60 photos of Cuba and Mexico! The one above was taken at the Colony Hotel on the Isla de la Juventud, Cuba.

For the next couple weeks I'll be posting words only as I am on the road in Mexico City and then to Oaxaca for four days, then take a long bus trip to the border town of Tapachula, Mexico, where I hope to get a bus to Antigua, Guatemala. Antigua, where I'll be for a couple weeks, will be my next picture opportunity. But you'll be hearing from me!

Cuernavaca photos!

Lucky you. I'm spending my last two nights in Cuernavaca with friends who have TWO laptop computers and wireless access. Watch for many new photos and posts! Meanwhile click here to see my little album called "Getting to School in Cuernavaca."

Three-Day Weekend

Today is the holiday celebrating the birthday of Benito Juarez. I misled you in my last post; it's Emilio Zapata who is from Morelos, not Juarez. Juarez is from Oaxaca and was Mexico's only indigenous president.

Tepoztlán
Saturday I took a local bus to the town of Tepoztlán, about 20 miles and 40 minutes away. In this charming town there is an old Aztec temple called El Tepozteco that is dedicated to Ometochtli Tepoztécal, a tepozteco god of corn, good harvests, fertility, and good times. To reach the temple means climbing thousands of steps up a steep, steep bluff. It was exhausting and hot, and a challenge for everyone else on the trail. Safety precautions are not common in Mexico, but then neither are lawsuits. It's up to you, not the government, to take care of yourself. However, at the beginning of THIS trail was a sign that said, roughly, if you have had a heart attack or are prone to them, please don't take this trail.

I could see why. I was surrounded by children from a school in the state in Guerrero, and not all of them were happy to be working so hard. Their teacher kept yelling encouraging things like "Sí, se puede!" (yes, you can) and "Somos de guerreros, somos guerreros!" (We are from the state of guerreros, and we are warriors! because "guerrero" means warrior) They all made it, and so did I, after 45 minutes of climbing, resting, climbing, resting climbing. At the very top was a black cross commemorating someone who either had that heart attack upon reaching the summit, or chose that moment to fall off the narrow stone steps into a chasm. Oh well.

The view was outstanding. You could look straight down at Tepoztlán, or back across the valley at Cuernavaca, or up at the surrounding bluffs. The temple itself is quite small and most of its decorative stone has been removed, but it's a popular climb for people all over Mexico. Hundreds, in various states of fitness, were climbing, including some in running clothes who were obviously training for some ungodly event.

I had a lovely lunch with a woman from another language school in Cuernavaca, one that is apparently quite posh and caters to Mormons. We had beer and guacamole on a lovely terrace in a lush garden before walking back into town, where I went to the cathedral and the ex-convent. The gate features an intricate mosaic of corn and seeds, a la the Corn Palace. The convent is one of 11 in the state of Morelos that are UNESCO World Heritage sites, all built between 1523 and 1550 or so to house friars who came to convert the locals, who also had to buidl these structures and their accompanying cathedrals. One interesting feature is that many, like the cathedral in Cuernavaca, have outdoor chapels, because the new indigenous Christians weren't used to holding ceremonies indoors.

The highlight of the trip was ice cream at Tepoznieves, perhaps the most beautiful ice cream store I've ever been in. Turns out that the priests up at Tepozteco included in their rituals "nieve" or snow from the volcano Pococatéptel and flavored with maguey and other plants and fruits. This eventually became many flavors of ice cream and sherbet and this chain of ice cream is all over it. Click here to visit their site and see a picture of the temple.

Birthday and Baptism Party
Following my outing I showered, changed and went to a party down the street from my Mexican family's home. The hosts are the other grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins of Angeles and Fernando's son's children. I was seated at a table and served a plate of meat, rice, beans and tortillas and a beer. There was Corona everywhere, and old people, young people, children in costumes (the party had a Peter Pan theme, and the baptized baby was wearing a Tinkerbell outfit), and babies being passed from one person to another. When I arrived at 7:45, the DJ was just getting to work. Outside on the terrace, speakers were stacked about 10 feet high and accompanied by ranks of colored flashing lights and a smoke machine. Once the dj got to work, the noise level was squared, or cubed, or increased by some large mathematical amount, so the walls and the floor truly were shaking. Cake was served. New, unopened bottles of tequila were distributed to each table. My "parents" Angeles and Fernando arrived and started eating. More people kept arriving. More food was consumed, all of it I think cooked back in the kitchen, because I could see enormous stainless steel pots lined up there.

When we left about 9:45, things were just getting going. Back up at our house, it was still loud, and across the barranca or ravine, another house was having a big party. Everyone was having a good time on this Saturday night in the Buena Vista section of Cuernavaca, but I kept worrying about those mariachis I saw the other day, sitting along the plaza waiting for work. Are DJs replacing them? Angeles and Fernando assured me that they have plenty of work, and are quite expensive. I guess you might have the mariachis for an hour or so, and then switch to the DJ.

Járdin Borda
Sunday morning I went downtown to this lovely 18th century garden, built for the man who owned all the silver mines in Taxco and eventually taken over by the French emperor Maximilian and his wife Carlotta as a vacation home. It's a lovely spot and on Sundays it is free, so many locals and visitors were present. (Lots of people from Mexico City come to Cuernavaca on the weekends.) In the rose garden was a really cool installation of paintings and sculptures representing the Virgin of Guadalupe. I took lots of photos and will post them soon. This was a lovely quiet morning after the excesses of Saturday night. Click here for a couple photos of the ponds and rowboats in the garden.

Bus tickets and Internet
Which brings us to Monday. Many things are closed but the woman at the travel agency that works with my school said she would be there after 11 or so. I´m trying to buy a bus ticket from Puebla to Oaxaca, where I will stay for a few days, and then from Oaxaca to Tapachula, on the Mexico-Guatemala border, and then I hope the TicaBus (run by "Ticas" or Costa Ricans) from the border to Guatemala City, where I can take a shuttle to Antigua, my next long stay. But this is my second attempt at buying the ticket, cuz she wasn't around last week. Otherwise I am staying home today ( after this interlude at the Internet cafe) and studying, studying, studying.

I have one week left in Cuernavaca. It has been a good stay, although my Spanish has been taking 2 steps back as I focus intently on some of my thorniest grammatical problems. Okay, more later. I have to go try to buy that ticket now!

Why you should never use a web translation program

My hosts in Cuba sent me a perfectly lovely thank you note in Spanish...and then used a web program to try to translate the letter into English, with these unfortunate results:

Lover and dear Anne, above all receive the whole affection that you wins of each one of us. He/she was waiting to that arrived to their home to write him and to know as it was him the return trip.
We are well, we return to the Island on Thursday 25 and we are already preparing again trip for the Havana where we will participate of the General Assembly of the Council of Churches of Cuba, in this opportunity there will be general elections.
We will be so soon in contact it arrives from the Havana; I leave tomorrow March 2 and return March 6. When he/she returns I will begin sending him historical information and biografica.La he/she wants and it estimates.

Is the moral clear?

Obeying a mandate from Alex

Alex sent me this note the other day:

Mom,

Don't get too frustrated with technology. Just show us what Mexico is like in words! Your camera will come around....Plus, if you're having a great time but all we at the blog hear is how bad a time you are having with blogging, you're misrepresenting your trip!

Just write about it,
Alex

I'm struggling with technology, but I'm not having a bad time. Today I will just write about it.

Today I'm sitting at an Internet cafe just off the zócalo or main square of Cuernavaca. Across the street, along the perimeter of the square, two dozen mariachis are lounging in full dress, smoking, texting, strumming their guitars. It's Friday evening on the corner where you come to hire a mariachi for a party or a wedding!

I'm loitering, too, waiting for the woman from a recommended travel agency to return so I can purchase my bus ticket from Puebla to Oaxaca and Tapachula, the border town where I'll have to find myself a bus to Antigua, Guatemala. This leg of my journey is two weeks from now, but travelers always have one eye on the future. Next Thursday the 19th, for instance, I move from my host family to the home of Andrea and Luke Roske-Metcalfe, ELCA colleagues who live and work here supervising our young adult volunteer program. How to get my big suitcase from my current home to my new one before school starts and without using the local bus (not built for big suitcases) is one concern. Getting to Mexico City with them a few days later will be a cinch, but how to get back from the D.F. (the Distrito Federal, or Mexico City - like our D.C.) to Cuernavaca on the 24th is another concern (a ride with someone I know? another bus?) and then on the 25th what time to take that long bus ride to Oaxaca...and on and on and on. This continual need to plan ahead, especially in an unfamiliar place and culture, makes it hard to "be here now."

Just to recap my journey so far, I was in Cuba from February 19 to 24, and after one night in Miami arrived in Cuernavaca on February 25 for three weeks of language study. Because all of this had been arranged in advance, I had a nice, soft, logistics-free landing. Those plans expire March 19, leaving almost five weeks to plan until April 21, when I get four nice, be-here-now nights at my friend Steve Broin´s Casa Sirena on Isla Mujeres. (Speaking of mariachis, if you click on the "Casa Sirena" link and then click "guest book" you'll see me being serenaded by mariachis on my 50th birthday.) That's where Mexico City; Oaxaca; Antigua, Guatemala (another language school--anyone have any recommendations?); San Cristobal de las Casas; Merida; and Vallodilad may all play a role. That's what I'm pinning down.

Meanwhile, school is going swimmingly, I love staying with my hosts Angeles and Fernando, and tomorrow I take a practice run at being a solo tourist by visiting Tepóztlan, a charming village with impressive Aztec ruins. It's a three-day weekend in Mexico, this coming Monday being the official holiday celebrating the birth of Benito Juarez, who was from this state, Morelos.

So yes, Alex, I will set aside my struggles with my camera, USB, and Picasa this weekend to post more words, okay? Meanwhile, I'm off to take pictures of mariachis and buy a bus ticket.

Endless frustration and a link to another post

Maybe the USB has a virus. Maybe the camera does. Maybe it's his fault. Maybe it's mine. While the Internet cafe man and I argue in a language I don't know well, I still can't upload photos to this blog or to Picasa.

And all the great posts I write in my head at night have vanished when I get to the computer 20 hours later.

However, I did succeed in meeting my twice-monthly deadline on the ELCA World Hunger blog, Hunger Rumblings, so you can read that reflection on Cuba and simple living here.

It has been quite hot in Cuernavaca. Tomorrow my fellow students and I are going to swim a bit in our school´s pool after our classes and discussions have ended. Of course I've taken a picture of the school and the pool; of course, I can't post it.

Oh well.

Getting around Cuba

These are sort of out of order, but they do give you a sense of how people move around. This blue truck belongs to the Lutheran Church and took our group around Isla de La Juventud for a few days.

The back of the bus has two benches along the outside wall. Church members set up rows of folding chairs down the middle to make room for more people, but as you can see, many people stood. All public transportation on the Isla seemed to be by passenger truck rather than bus, and all of them were crammed with people. Folks standing on rural corners seemed to expect us to pull over and pick them up, but the driver didn't.

Horses and carts were common on the island.

We took an afternoon's journey in a "carreton" or big carriage pulled by a horse. Here's the horse!

In Havana, yes, there were lots of great old cars. Any horses and carriages we saw were purely for tourists, and they do have buses in Havana.

As you can see I have solved my technical difficulties and will now begin to steadily post great pictures of my journey!

From Cuba to México

To come from a country where almost nothing is for sale to a place where everybody is selling something is quite a shock. Instead of tv commercials, Cuba has public service announcements; instead of billboards for casinos or cars or Coke, Cuba has political slogans. On the extremely pastoral Isla de la Juventud, where we spent three nights, bicycles and horse-drawn carriages outnumbered private cars. It was very quiet, in the evening, without the sound of traffic. (You can read the history of the island (formerly called the Isle of Pines) by clicking on the blue link right here or an even more indepth excerpt from a book on google called Cuba´s Island of Dreams: Voices from the Isle of Pines and Youth It will work, I promise, Dad! Click on the highlighted part to get the link.)

Havana was everything the photos promised. Old Havana was beautiful; talented musicians play Buena Vista Social Club-style son in the bars and street corners (paid by the government, so you don't even have to tip them); gorgeous mansions are indeed in states of incredible decay; multi-story portraits of Che and Fidel adorn the government buildings; and many times I saw cars I expected my grandfather to be driving.

Organizing and uploading my Cuba photos from an internet cafe seems problematic but eventually I will succeed. Please be patient.

Meanwhile, I arrived in Cuernavaca last Thursday, settled in with my host family, visited the school, met the other students, and traveled to Taxco with them on Sunday. Today was my first day at CETLALIC language school.

For all its strangeness, Mexico is familiar. The paleta carts, people selling elotes, the old trucks straining under loads of scrap metal, plastic and cardboard that will be sold, the enchiladas and tortillas, even the accent all remind me of....Chicago!

Once I transcribe and digest my 15 pages of notes from Cuba, I´ll venture some opinions on the country and its situation. Finding time to do so will be tough cuz my schedule is busy and yes, I have homework.

Signing off with 300 photos in my camera that you still can't see....
Anita de viaje

Countdown to Cuba

Thursday in Miami, I'll meet the small delegation of Florida Lutherans I'm accompanying on a visit to their companion church, the Lutheran Church in Cuba.

Friday we fly to the Isla de la Juventud (the Isle of Youth) off the southern coast of Cuba. During our visit we will labor on the church farm (planting trees, it sounds like), visit the “Vietnam and Community Colony Hotel” (hmmm), and meet municipal authorities and church people. Then we fly back to the mainland and get to be tourists in Havana.

A constitutional change in 1991 changed Cuba from an atheist state to a secular nation with religious freedom. Relaxed travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans mean that about 35 charter flights to Cuba leave Miami every week. Unless they enter through Cancun, Americans still must get official permission from the U.S. Department of Treasury, which oversees and enforces the embargo. I can’t buy cigars or rum, but I made the official list for this trip!

I'm pretty excited, ready to go. Look for my photos and posts to start about February 26, when I get settled and find an internet cafe in Cuernavaca, Mexico, the next stop on my viajes.

The Road Already Traveled

I've been on a midlife sabbatical since I left my job, sold my house and most of my stuff, and moved what was left into storage in Washington State. Six months into my break, I've covered quite a lot of ground domestically, traveling through and/or visiting 11 states and staying in 32 different places (some of them twice). You can see where I've been and take a little tour of Sacramento in this Picasa album.

Launching a blog at a library in Oakland

Next week I begin a journey to Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, and Suriname. Today I am setting up my blog at the Rockridge branch of the Oakland Public Library. Isn't it great to know that a person with a backpack and a laptop can always find a quiet table, a 3-pronged electrical outlet, and a complimentary wireless signal in a library?