Today I have no class because it's the Guatemalan independence day. That's good, as it's finally given me a chance to catch up on writing about my travels. Plus, I need to do my homework. Since I have no class, my teacher thought it would be fun to tell me to write 2 sentences for every -ar verb we went over yesterday, which was probably around 50. Maybe even more.
My teacher is extremely amused by my troubles pronouncing several words, mostly those that either involve a lot of As or RRs (which I can't do). She likes to laugh at me a lot, which is fine with me.
Yesterday, the afternoon activity was a trip to a nearby pueblo where they make pretty much all of the skirts (faltas) for the indigenous Mayan people. We got to see the process, which is crazy. It takes months to prepare the skirt, starting from cleaning the cotton and ending with the weaving of the actual skirt. We watched a couple parts of the process, including a man who showed us his wooden loom, operated by pedals. The same guy also sells this liquor made from fruit, so we tried some of that. I bought a bottle for Q20, which is like $2.50. It was probably half a liter or so. I'm not sure if I'll want to drink it all--it's pretty damn sweet.
After that, I went out with two guys from the school. Last night was the night of all the huge independence parties. The whole park was jam-packed with hundreds and hundreds of people, and there were all these people marching through the streets. Some were bands, with horns and drums; others were more military-like. And girls with batons. And many other really random things. They kept parading, even after midnight.
We started the night at a restaurant called 'El Arabe,' which had about 3 vaguely Arabic-seeming dishes. We ordered a platter of meat, which is something we don't get a ton of in our houses (and one of the guys doesn't get at all, because the other student in his house is vegetarian). And several liters of beer.
Beer in guatemala is interesting. Basically all there is Gallo beer. It's one huge monopoly. Gallo itself is sort of like budweiser, although slightly better. Then there's Cabro, which is slightly darker, and Molta, which is the dark Gallo beer. That's pretty much your choices. Every now and then you'll find a place that has Heinekin or Corona, but I'd rather the Molta to those. A liter of one of those beers is around Q35, or slightly more than $4. It's about 3 beers-worth.
Anyway, a bit after 9, the band started playing, and the place got really crowded. The band was great. They must have been singing Guatemalan pop songs, because the whole restaurant was singing along with them. The restaurant was full of young-ish people (as a rule, people in Guatemala look WAY younger than their age), dressed in American styles. You had the American thug look, the American Jersey Shore look, and the American prep look. The girls mostly just wore very tight skinny jeans with either 6-inch heels or boots (it's the middle of winter) and blouses.
Since I thought (some of) the band was cute, my friend made me take a picture with them after they went on break. (I don't have this photo yet as, on advice of everyone, I did not take my camera or any credit cards or really anything but Q200 and my Guatemalan cell phone with me).
At one point, everyone in the restaurant got up and just started salsa dancing. Talk about amazing dancers. I was mesmerized by the guys' hips.
After that, we watched some of the parade. The marching bands are 100% gender segregated. The girls only play these things that look sort of like xylophones standing upright. The trumpet players were pretty bad (or maybe tired), but the drummers were awesome (particularly the bass drum players, who did this cool spinny thing with their mallets, exactly in sync).
Then it was another bar and lots of Spanglish. One of the guys is a masterspanglish speaker, at least after a few cervezas. I can't remember his best sentence, but i personally enjoyed 'I can't believe you're va-ing there!' They both understand a lot, and speak quite a bit. They claimed my Spanish was better after even one day. Probably mostly from having slightly more confidence and relaxing.
We ended the night by buying cervezas from a guy with a portable cooler in the middle of the parque centro. At that point, we realized we had also run out of money, which was probably a good thing.
Oh, and fireworks. There were lots and lots of fireworks.
Anyway, I got to sleep in today. And have now been in this internet cafe for hours, trying to set up this blog and upload photos. The latter has been less successful, but I'll keep you updated.
And I still have like 100 sentences left to write.
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