How to cross a road in Guatemala
Trip Start
Aug 01, 2007
1
8
39
Trip End
Sep 16, 2007
Quezaltenango,
Guatemala
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Everytime i cross the street, i feel that it is a life experience. You sometimes can not see to well because of the heavy pollutants from the exhaust pipes on he cars and trucks and thus need to squit your eyes. This in of itself, makes it difficult to cross a street.
During class, my teacher and I took a walk to the Bake Shop
Host Grandfather
. It is a bakery run by a group of Mennonites that moved to the Guatemalan mountains several years ago. The bakery has traditional items that you would find in the USA like donuts, muffins, crossiants and, of course, lots of bread and cookies. The bakery is only open two days a week (Tuesday and Thursday) because the Mennonite community is several villages away and it takes awhile to travel to Xela. The little walk to the bakery was an lesson in food names.. me gusta. We each got a donut. (In case anyone was wondering, my allergies have gone out the door. I would pretty much starve if i stuck to eatting the foods i am allergic to. I would rather deal with a bad stomach ache, than starvation).Once class was done, I returned home for luch. The way lunch works down here, is that everybody tends to go home for lunch around 1 PM. Lunch is he biggest meal of the day. Today´s lunch included vegtables! I do not think I have actually eatten vegtables since I got down here. A few of the vegtables were native to Guatemala and I didn´t recognize them. Tomorrow morning I will probably be going to a nearby village that is known for their vegtable market with my teacher. (Take the lesson outside and into the real world). The village is known as a big exporter of vegtables all over central america and to parts of the southern part of the united states. The market is suppose to be one of the most chaotic experiences...should be fun.
I took a self guided walking town through another part of the city today and went inside a mini-mall. It looked alike a stripmall with two floors. It has a few clothings stores, an electroic and appliance store, a few shoes stores and a supermarket. Lo and behold the supermarket is owned by Wal-Mart. While, the word Wal-Mart is not plastered everywhere, several of the items were Equate (the wal-mart brand). The store had a little pharmacy and hygine section, a clothing section with some basics, a bakery and dairy section, and some juices and cereals. It was the most modern looking store I have seen since being in this country.
