I will never again complain about having to get my car smogged.

I´m three days in, and already we have covered more grammar than I learned in two years of high school spanish.  I guess it helps that back in high school I was only peripherally interested in actually learning to communicate in Spanish, and now I´m motivated by the immediacy of needing to buy bus tickets and order dinner and all sorts of practical things. Monday we spent reviewing present tense and a lot of vocab, and yesterday we went over el pretèrito, or past tense, which I´d never really figured out before.  It is going to take a while before it is comfortable, but I´ve got the general idea down.  And it is so helpful to know how to say things like "I`ve been travelling for three weeks in Mexico, and I went to several ruins and ate lots of tacos."  Some things just can´t be expressed in present tense.

Today my teacher was mean, and just made me talk all day long.  Grammar wise we only did the por vs. para lecture (if you don´t know, you don´t want to know), but we talked a lot about all my travels and where I´ve lived and just about anything he could think of to ask in the past tense.  It was long.  But it was good. My maestro is named Jorge, laughs a lot, and since I´m a nurse has enjoyed teaching me all sorts of medical terms, including parts of the anatomy that an American teacher might have been embarassed to mention on the first day of class. 

David is also enjoying his teacher, and is also learning much more than he expected to by this point. We aren´t making decisions too far into the future, but we have decided to stay here in Xela for at least another week beyond this one.

Monday after class they showed us a movie (in Spanish but thankfully with English subtitles) about the history of Guatemala.  While I feel very strongly about the political issue of torture in America, it isn´t until you visit a place like this (Cambodia was similar) that you remember how sheltered we are in the US.  The massacres that took place here in the 70s and 80s were horrific, you just can´t understand how the human condition could allow people to be so callous and evil towards another human being.  It makes me realize how grateful I am that, at least in this area, we are more "civilized" in the US, while at the same time redoubles my determination to make sure that we stay that way.

Tuesday after class one of the instructors took David and I out to a village called Salcaja.  We went on another chicken bus (much less colorful this time, although we did get another of the health tonic hawkers), and while they called the place a village to us it seemed more of a suburb, not very far outside of Xela at all.  They had a big colorful market that we walked through, admiring all the gorgeous fabrics.  There are still tons of fruits and vegetables that I can´t identify. 

We then walked over to a smallish but sturdy church, which is the oldest (Christian) church in all of Central America, built sometime in the 1800s.  It is intersting because of all the pagan decoration they included to entice the local Mayan population, with fruits and animals symbolic of the Mayan beliefs much more prominent than the cross.  Inside I was fascinated to see statues of a black-skinned Jesus on the cross, with a very white Virgin Mary opposite.  (Sorry, but I can never bring myself to photograph things inside a church.  Even if it is "allowed", it just seems wrong.  By the same token, I hate taking pictures of locals on the street, even though those are the pictures I want most of all.  It just seems so rude.)

Finally we went into someone´s house where they showed us the loom they use to make the incredible fabrics the indiginous women wear.  Then they tried to sell us some homemade liquor they make out of fruit and who knows what else.  Besides a drink to sample, they also had apples and cherries that had soaked in the stuff.  The drink was very sweet, and VERY strong.  Neither of us cared for the fruit much though, and we declined to buy any.  (Speaking of alcohol, we´ve been amused to see Manichevitz listed on the menu of several of the restaurants we´ve eaten at in town.  There must be a large Jewish population hiding here somewhere.)

The children here are, of course, beautiful.  The indigenous women carry their children, seemingly up to age two or three, wrapped in a shawl on their backs or sometimes down on their side.  On the way home on the bus though, we saw a kid maybe just over a year, riding in a typically colorful shawl on his mother, who was dressed in typically colorful local dress.  The boy though was wearing a black leather baseball cap, with bright blue plastic sunglasses.  It cracked me up.  Even better as we got closer we noticed the kid was also holding a Spiderman action figure.

I´ve been tired a lot here.  Partly it is due to the high mountain elevation, Xela is 7500 feet above sea level.  For comparison, I also got very tired visiting Albuquerque, which is only about 5300 feet.  But the other issue is that I´m fairly certain I am suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning.  The streets here are very narrow, and everytime a car goes by, whether it is in a big puff of black smoke or not, you can taste and smell the exhaust coming out at you.  I want to go hike up the volcano but I´m not sure I´m up for it quite yet, I get tired just walking up the hills in town still.  At least I know my red blood cells will start to compensate, as long as the fumes don´t kill them off first!