Saturday night, after a bottle of rum, Madeline, Tommy (spelt and pronounced ¨tomy¨here) and I decided to meet Sunday at a reasonable hour (8:30am) and take a bus three hours to Chichicastenango, the market town to rival all market towns (well, considering the markets at Momostanengo, San Francisco del Alto, and even Xela´s Democracia, you might easily rival it).
Sunday, we straggled together, got fresh squeezed OJ in a bag and made it to Minerva station more like 9:30, where the red chicken bus with flames on the side was supposedly leaving by 10am. Tommy promptly disapeared and Madeline, on a quest for something hot, reported that he was stationed at the fried chicken stand, eating chicken, potatoes and rice. Madeline is a pharmacist back in Australia, and has certain standards that we make fun of her about. To her benefit, she is the best disenfected salad chef I have met in Xela. (First step, douse everything with chlorine. Next step, wash the chlorine off with purified water. Next step, repeat. Finally, pat dry). When she brought back two styrofoam cups of something that looked like coffee but tasted like sugar (Guatemalans have an intense case of diabetes. Once you visit, it´s pretty easy to figure out why), she screwed up her face and said she would never eat street chicken, she wasn´t about to get Salmonella. (remember this for later on, when I describe the best meal of my life). She promptly went and bought a hot dog complete with cabbage and hot sauce. Apparantly not all meats are the same.
The bus didn´t leave for another hour, just sat there and an endless stream of vendors came on and off: Fruit in a bag, soda (affectionately called agua), little candies, big candies, prepared sandwiches, tamales, tortillas, peanuts with hot suace, pens that came with a little pen demonstatration, and caramel.
The man with one and a half legs that sat behind me didn´t smell so hot, and he wasn´t improving with age. But as Tommy said, if you have only one and a half legs, you have somewhat of an excuse for not washing. I on the otherhand, he continued, needed to get over my homestay´s constant lack of shower water, (currently the kitchen is a pile of rubble where someone has been digging into the tile and dirt for some long lost bit of plumbing) bite the bullet and pay for the public bath. Or something.
A little old man sitting in front of Madeline wanted caramel. He bought a piece for 1 Q, and tilted his white cowboy hat. Then, looking furtively from side to side, he reached into his mouth and pulled out his dentures and stuck them into the breast pocket of his jacket. Automatically, his whole jaw sunk inward, like a sinkhole. He put the candy into his mouth, and looked out the window, sucking on his cheeks.
Like many chauffers on public transit, when our driver left Minerva he drove like the road was his superhighway, and the rocks that crumbled down and sat in the road from the surrounding cliffs were his personal obstacle course. It was a rough ride. The most exciting part was when, because of roadwork, the road became one lane for two, opposite lanes of traffic. Our speedy bus was passing everybody, trucks, cars, cement carriers, and then an oncoming car would force the driver to throw on the brakes. We flew around, the bus ground down to a slower forty miles an hour, and the oncoming car passed by.
It costs about 25Q to get to Chichi, which is situated northeast of Xela.
When we arrived, the helpful center of tourism helped us find a budget hotel that had a hot shower (I try to wash on weekends), with an owner who saw Tommy and laughed ¨We´ll get in an extra bed for the fatty.¨ Being called fat, or gordo, here is not supposed to be a diss. The man looked at Madeline and I laughing and said, somewhat apologetically, ¨fat like me! fat like me!¨
There is a beautiful old church in Chichicastenango, and on Sundays, there are pilgramages up a local hill where Mayans burn copal and sacrifice roosters. Madeline and I took one look at the wooded bump that at home on the east coast I would be psyched to run up, and said ¨thanks but no thanks.¨ Something about being mugged once doesn´t exactly get you roused up to try for it again.
People selling their crafts at Chichicastenango know tourists. A lot of them know english ¨Hey! I got what you want!¨and, as the woman who sold me a piece of embroidery (and who personally escorted me to the ATM machine because she knows a tourist never comes back) said sort of in jest, ¨Americans like our textiles, but they don´t like our prices.¨
The market is a wooden framed, tarp covered affair, and it begins and ends at the church where there are buckets of flowers, burning incense and old ladies swing tin buckets of smoke around. Here, kids, hell even the women patting tortillas over gas grills, ask for 5Q if you take their photo (wouldn´t you?), and a little kid with a grubby shirt decided he was going to shine Tommy´s shoes, no matter how many times Tommy said no. Tommy was wearing skater sneakers. The kid´s shoe shine kit had stickers on it, like some sixth grader´s social studies binder. Finally he slunk away.
The middle of the market is dedicated to food. We finally settled onto a picnic table deep in the dark belly of the market spread with crafts, vegetables and burned CD´s and had fried chicken, fried papas, rice and tortillas. The tortillas were the fresh kind, sort of crispy on the outside, soft in the inside. The kind you could eat and die right after and feel satisfied with life. Madeline didn´t get chicken, she got a caldo of tough beef with potatoes. And I, after initially spitting out my chicken in a flash of reading-too-much-Lonely-Planet-Panic (¨it´s just fresh,¨ Tommy assured me. He had already ordered another piece. ¨It´s cooked, it´s just so fresh.¨) I forgot about any salmonella worries, and boy was that good. Like you could imagine your mom making if you were from the deep south sometime in the 50´s, and your brother had just wrung a chicken´s neck the hour before, I was licking my fingers.
That meal cost 22 Quetzeles, almost the same as our three hour ride. There are a lot of things that cost inbetween 20-25Q here. (inbetween 2-3 US dollars). I bought shampoo (the smallest baby bottle) that cost 30Q. Sometime back last week I went out to the new gringo bar and paid 20Q for a mojito. And then, on some nights, when it´s somewhat late (anytime after 10pm) and I take a six minute taxi ride from the center of town to my house, that´s 20Q as well.
Pictures to follow. Especially the one where Tommy holds up a Mayan mask over his face. And the whole family of mask vendors does the same.
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