Hope this reads well

The other day, I realized I´ve been using this blog to give my half-baked thoughts on everything here in Guatemala and sharing rumors. I´m sure you, dear reader, have been enthralled with my thoughts of various depth. But I figured I´d try something else.

So, here you go. Tuesday -- Oct. 24 -- I decided to take notes on my day. It was a usual one, full of Spanish and walking. Here´s my account of it. Hope it doesn´t bore you.

8:05 a.m.

I arrived at my Spanish school five minutes late, which is pretty close to on time in Guatemala. It´s not that the pace of life is relaxed here -- people drive like maniacs and rush on their way to anywhere. But nothing gets done fast, and little gets started on time.

I got out of bed about an hour ago. I´m staying in a three-bedroom home with a middle class Guatemalan family made up entirely of women, I think. When I started school three weeks ago, there were three women living in the house --Lydia, her daughtgranddaughteraughter. But relatives keep piling in.This morning there were the original three, plus another granddaughter and two grandnieces (I think) living in the three bedroom house. Each morning I wake at about 6:30 a.m. to the sound of loud, quick Spanish. Then I snooze until my alarm rings. It´s heaven.

Breakfast is usually scrambled eggs, boiled beans and tortillas. It sounds boring, but I like it. But this morning it wabanana bannana crepes, that are just delicious. I´m lucky. Most of the students get this cream-o-wheat concoction called mosh. It´s often unflatteringly compared with snott.

It takes me about ten minutes to walk to school. A long ten minutes. My walk is along a major thoroughfare -- 19 ave. -- packed with smoke-belching buses and taxis. Impeccably dressed men in suits pass me by. They ride motorscooters that look like they should have been retired in the 80´s.

At one intersection, two ambulances were stuck shriekingns shreaking. Not a car moves for them.I pass a long yellow wall. Concrete chunks have fallen off in piles on the street. It used to protect a military installation during the war, but the base was closed with the peace accords. No one has figured out what to do with it, and the monuments to the soldiers who once were housed there have been destroyed.

Not that the soldiers are gone. I walk -- a bit briskly -- by a gacamouflagehe camoflage clad men. They´re climbing into the back of a pickup, off to go look heavily armed and disinterested somewhere else.

A man repacks small bags of potato chips into larger, pink bags. I walk by him every day. It´s unclear what he´s doing, but he apparently needs the protection of the man with a shotgun.

When I arrive at school, I find Isolde checking e-mail at the computer lab. After a good morning kiss, I do the same.

Then it´s Spanish time.

11:00 a.m.

We´re on break. Class ran from 8-ish to 10:30 on the dot. It does everyday. We´re never late to break.

I spent the morning learning with Byron, my instructor for the past three weeks. Byron is a 28-year-old father of two. He´s studying at the university at night. During the day he puts up with me.

We´ve been covering verb tenses. All Spanish, it seems, is verb tenses. Today, I learn the Spanish word for have -- as in ¨I have done¨not ¨I have to pee.¨It´s slightly different than the word for had, but the difference is not as slight as the difference in English. Spanish is verb tenses, and nuance. Lots of nuance.

We´re in an old bedroom of the massive, second-floor apartment that serves as the school house. A steady stream of buses and cars rolls by outside our window. Most of the cars are from thtotaled, where they were totalled and sold for scrap. Byron buys the wrecks every now and then, then fixes and resells them to make money on the side. He has to act as his own collections agent, which is on his mind this morning. Seems the guy who bought a Hyundai -- pronounced Junday -- from him hasn´t made his payments.

The bigger buses shake the place when they pass, but it´s not too distracting.

Isolde and I get together on the break. We hang out on the roof,viewch gives a pretty grand veiw of the city. She tells me her instructor has spent the morning talking about Bill Clinton and Monika. All very fun.

She´s still not used to the coffee down here. Most of it is NesCafe, which is to say it´s water and brown.

We stroll to the Mennonite bakery, about three blocks from school. They might be a bit weird, but the Mennonites make a mean doughnut. Isolde likes the yogurt. And the cookies. We run into a gaggle of Europeans from our school. They seem to find the Mennonite food wonderfully exotic.

Back at the school, I check the news from home. I learn the Seattle School District will lose it´s superintendent. Who can blame the guy.

Then it´s back to learning.

5:15 p.m.

Isolde arrives at the school. It´s become our routine to meet forneitherening at the school, since niether of the homes we´re occupying are much good for time passing.

We´d finished our classes hours earlier. Byron, my instructor, and I talked about verbs -- I learned to say has and had in Spanish, which is much harder than it sounds -- and about mines in Guatemala. Environmental problems plaguedysenteryntry. People get sick with disentery and typhoid because the water is undrinkable. No one takes away the trash, and people get sicker. And then there´s the weather.

Byron tells me a village of 12 houses was crushed yesterday in a mudslide. The people had been told that the hill above wasn´t stable and that they should leave the trees there alone. But they cut them for to feed their cooking fires. And, in the rains last night, the hill came down.

People die like this all the time here, caught in some foreseeable and theoretically avoidable accident. Buses go off the road and kill 80 people. They´re still digging people out of last year´s landslides. It´s a country of little disasters.

So Byron and I get talking about the Seattle schools change, and he starts telling me how things are in the states and here. All the teachers do this. None believe there are poor people in the U.S. Most of the Americans they meet here are extremely wealthy -- aside from the doctors and nurses (and Southerners), most of the folks here went to pricey universities. But the whole Americans-do-nothing-but-count-their-money routine starts to wear after a while.

Byron gives me verb homework from an out of date third-year Spanish text. All the examples involve Spain, or going to Spain. I wander across the street to a print shop, the same one I go to most days to make ¨fotocopias¨ of the homework. The guy who runs it is making copies on a hand-crank press, so one of his sons -- who can´t be more than 12 and is always in the shop -- violated copyright for me.

I head home, walking down the same busy street. This time the clowns are out. Three kids with painted faces do handstands and juggle for drivers who are stucksaddestaffic. They are, unintentionally, the sadest clowns in the world.

Back at the house, Lydia makes me two tiny steaks, avocado and thick, little tortillas. It´s delicious. Then it´s nap time.

A few hours later, I finish my homework and head to school.

11:13 p.m.

Bedtime.

After meeting out at the school, Isolde and I wander down to a little taco joint for tortas. I could eat my weight in the little Mexican sandwiches. Unlike the rest of the Guatemalan food, the things actually have a bit of a kick. The little meal loses a bit of its fun when Isolde spots a roach. What are you going to do?

Our next stop is a hot chocolate joint. They may not have much for cofee here, but the hot chocolate is to die for. We meet two other students at the café, and order a round of chocolate goodness. It´s hot cocoa for grown-ups. It tastes a bit bitter, somewhere between Quik and crude oil. Great stuff.

From there, we´re off to a lecuture from a torture victim. This is tourism in Guatemala. Speaking to a crowd of about 30 foriegners, the guy recounts being abducted and beaten by the Civil Self Defense Patrol Services. It was essentially a supersized Neighborhood Watch program gone horribly wrong. People had to join it or be accused of fighting the government, then killed.

The guy talked about the ¨historia de fantasia¨being told to people now. No one, he says, cares about the war or the peace accords that ended it a decade ago. He says the war will return if nothing else changes here. A lot of people are saying that.

Our little group of four leaves the lecture and, passing through Xela´s central park, makes our way toward our respective homes. There´s a garish Greek forum in the center of the park -- a product of a former dictator who liked to call Guatemala ¨the Latin American Athens.¨ He was lain to rest in Xela. Somebody left a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of run in his tomb.

I walk Isolde to her house -- down another dusty street, next to a hospital -- then head back to mine. It´s a 20 minute walk, and a bit scary. I don´t worry about muggers. I´m bigger than most people here, and no one has ever bothered me in the least. But last night I passed a platoon of soldiers. They worry me. But they´d taken their little gun circus somewhere else for the night.

I´m home and I´m sleepy.