Here in Guatemala

1. Possums eat chickens, and in return folks eat possums. You know how possums love to play dead? Sometimes they’ll decide to play dead after they’re caught and clubbed. Then sometimes they come back to life after being skinned. Can you say angry-zombie-possum?

2. Common courtship process:
i. Boy and girl meet
ii. Boy decides he likes the girl, drives up to her house sometime after one in the morning and cranks a love song on his stereo for some indeterminate amount of time
iii. Girl goes to window and swoons for this indeterminate period of time, or goes to window to glare briefly then goes back to bed.
iv. Depends on the result of iii: (negative) the boy repeats step iii until he goes back to step i, or (positive) the boy and girl start to date.
v. After some time of going out, they become “novios,” something pretty similar  to being boyfriend/girlfriend. Then after being novios for a while, they get married.

…at any point in the process, either the boy or the girl can tell the other that they do or don’t like him/her; often neither this event nor whether or not it’s reciprocated generally affect any of the five steps.

3. It is not a meal if there are not tortillas. Literally, like it doesn’t count as a meal without them–if you eat what we United-States-ians would usually call a meal, and it’s without tortillas, you actually get to eat another meal (with tortillas, of course) because the first time around didn’t count. This is pretty awesome, although may bode ill for my health if I don’t play a ton of soccer…and number four…

4. Soccer is different. It’s like…eating a meal or walking to work. I’m used to “oh cool, yeah lets go play soccer!” Here it’s not really something to get stoked about. Not that people don’t love it…they really, really really love to play soccer…it’s simply a part of life. Just about everybody has a brother who’s played semi-pro, or plays semi-pro.

5. In the U.S. if we’re going to make a gesture to signify the person we’re talking about, we generally point with the hand or nod with the head. What’s the most common way to do this here? A kissing-like-gesture with the mouth. This one took a while to figure out.

6. They drink lots of fruit punch. It’s very delicious and very specific: apple and pineapple juice with a bit of sugar and cinnamon, only served hot and with little pieces of coconut floating in it.

7. Coffee’s like this: brewed light, heavily sugared and always with sweet bread to dip. Once in a blue moon somebody in a restaurant will order coffee with milk–beyond that, coffee with any sort of dairy product mixed in is purely out of the question.

8. There are tons of motorcycles. They all–
1. Look different
2. Have nearly the exact same Chinese chassis and engine

9. There’s more of life and death and heaven and hell than you can shake a stick at.