You can screw over a native people so that a few ruins are the only reminder of all that they once were, but you can’t keep the masons from doing their thing. They continue to build damn crazy stairways. This is for you, Mayan stone workers. Keep it up.
travel
Carlos and Denis
Jorge and the Canche
Ice cream kid
Carlos the doctor and Milca the nurse
Denis the doctor
That horrid song
Yesterday morning at six thirty sharp I was woken up by music. This song wasn’t horrid like the title says, merely very curious. It was being played over a megaphone on top of the house kity-corner to the one I live in. It was being played very loudly, too. I didn’t really understand the lyrics, could only make out something about jesuchristo, then something about jamas asi o algo asi. Anyways, I was only bit annoyed; by now I’m accustomed to things happening unexpectedly in the morning (machine-gun-fire story coming soon). The part that mildly annoyed me was how the chorus had this terribly screechy and out-of-tune violin part.
Then the song finished. Phew! I thought to myself–now onto a different song, or if I’m lucky that was just some good-morning-world greeting from friends to another friend. They have different ways of showing friendship here.
Silence…for a few moments and then the music started up again, the same song.
Uh-oh..this cannot be good, I thought. I thought right. This song, at first innocently curious, for 14 hours repeated, became horrid.
At eight-thirty p.m. yesterday I left the house to go to the office. I’d spent the better part of the day making soup and reading and was at my wits end with this horrid song. I’d tried thinking about it as a joke, and this worked for a while. I tried enjoying it, and this worked for a while. I tried making fun of it in my mind, and this too worked for a while. I finally plugged earphones into my little mp3 player and used this, but the earphones aren’t sound isolating so I had to use serious volume to overpower the neighbor’s megaphone-piped screechy-violin song. Finally at eight thirty my head hurt too much to think or really do anything, so off to the office I went, and there I found good peace and quiet–it was wonderful. I’m ashamed of it, but I actually did have brief thoughts to wait till a bit later at night when there’s good darkness and then to hurtle a rock at this screechy-song-spewing megaphone. Honestly, I thought about it–but no, that’s not a good thing at all. I quit the ideas of destruction or violence, but remained very bitter and somewhat angry at whatever ridiculous person, the ridiculous person who thought it some sort of stupid joke to play the same horrid song all day long.
This morning at six thirty sharp I was woken up by music. Again.
Yes, you guessed it, the song with the out-of-tune screechy-violin chorus. However, there is a saving grace, and because of this saving grace I actually laughed out loud (lol!) when I heard the song pipe up. Today is the first day of work–a day I’ll spend at the office, not at home, not near this horrid, horrid song. Because of this, I laughed–those silly fools, their snarky joke today will fall on nothing but an empty house. Bahahaha. I have to say that, at the office the night before, the resident security guard Don Alvaro had mentioned that an old man had died and the music was some sort of tradition, some custom of the indigenous people–that didn’t really strike me as too important though. It paled in comparison to both my headache and the concept of this ludicrously snarky joke. By morning today, I’d practically forgotten what Alvaro had mentioned.
There’s a little tienda, this tiny snack store, a stone’s throw away from the office; I’m a ten-a.m. regular. At least two or three days out of the week I head down to the tienda to quench the jones for some sweet and salty treats; sometimes I go healthy with juice and a piece of bread, other times it’s Coca-Cola and chips.
As I was walking out of the office to the little tienda thinking about Coca-Cola and chips, I heard music. It was the screechy-violin-chorus song! I heard it faintly, growing louder; I froze in my tracks and looked to my left down the dirt road towards where the music was coming from. There was the funeral procession, forty or fifty people: family members and friends. All the men were dressed in old suits dirty with road dust and the women in traditional woven skirts and blouses, all of them somber and quiet. Towards the back of the group was a beautiful ornate coffin on the shoulders of five younger men. I walked to the side of the road and stood, cap in my hand, thoughtless. Walking next to the pallbearers was an older woman with a single candle. The small yellow flame, barely wavering in the calm breeze, was hardly a notable thing in the bright midmorning sun of a cloudless sky. One man was carrying the megaphone mounted on a tall two-by-four, another was carrying the stereo and battery, a third the cables that carried this song from the stereo to the megaphone to be sounded out in static-heavy reproduction for all to hear, as if it was transmitted from a poor radio station or a radio station in a town very far away.
They passed by me and proceeded on to the cemetery, led by a pastor with an old and worn bible in his hand.
I ate lunch at home in peace today, the song wasn’t playing any more. The man who had died was 65, I don’t know if he left behind a wife or not.
The end.
Edit:
Later, I explained this a little bit to my sorta-boss and really-mentor, Danery. As I got to the point about hearing the song and realizing that the funeral procession was passing by, I thought of my friend who died and his funeral and what it was like to see soldiers and his brothers and his coffin being carried by them and I nearly started crying right there half an hour ago. And right here as I type this in the office I’m a hairs-breadth away from falling apart into a bawling mess. Asi anda la vida.
Mexico
So this one time I went to Mexico.
Surreal
Today I rode through a little town in the middle of nowhere in a developing country in Central America on an old dirtbike, to my desk inside of a warehouse-building-turned-office.
…and another list!
I left Seattle last tuesday at 10:30pm ish, arrived at Barillas late friday night. Here’s a list of things that I’ve done since stepping off the plane in Guatemala City.
One of them is … FALSO! As the old song goes:
One of these things
Isn’t like the others
1. Eaten at Pizza Hut
2. Eaten at Pollo Campero
3. Played soccer..while having absolutely no spanish-soccer-vocabulary at all (with the exception of “GOALLL!”)
4. Made italian food for dinner
5. Driven country highways and a little town at nighttime, dodging people, boulders and buses
6. Not gotten sick from anything…with the exception of the oatmeal I accidentally dumped italian seasoning into. Mmmmm yum.
7. Watched a truck drive sideways (well, not completely, but pretty close to it. That rear axle was seriously out of wack.)
8. Taken ~500 photos
9. Used facebook
10. Acquired 5 (female) body guards. Yessir, one very safe gringo.
11. Read The Old Man and the Sea by Hemmingway
12. Switched to using Google Guatemala. I don’t mind it, but it’s not really by my own volition. Google is very persistent about it.
13. Become…EL MATADOR DE INSECTOS DE MALARIA (yeah you Guatemalan mosquitoes, you heard that right. BE AFRAID.)
Books!
I’m moving to a little town out in the sticks..of Central America.
Book list, in the order the stack sits in on my bedroom floor, with little notes when fitting
1. Scarne on Cards (my late Grandpa P.’s copy, with his notes. He was a poker boss), Scarne
2. Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis
3. The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis (yes..Lewis again)
4. A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
5. The Applications of Elliptic Functions, Alfred Greenhill (I will go nuts, guaranteed, if I don’t have a math book on my shelf to study once in a while)
6. The World’s Last Night, C.S. Lewis (and again)
7. The Signature Classics (seven of his most popular books), C.S. Lewis (yeeeeah…)
8. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Mark Doty
9. The Short Stories, Ernest Hemingway
10. Jesus and the Victory of God, N.T. Wright (Big thank-you to my friend Grant V. for the recommendation)
11. Bible, NKJV
12. Bible, Spanish (I have no clue what “translation.” It fits in my pocket though..win.)
13. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
14. All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy (read it this summer, holy crap incredible. It’s actually a funny story, it’s my Christmas gift from Mom, and I wasn’t supposed to know she was sending it with me. I came across it in a used bookstore, and got very excited. You can figure out the rest)
15. The Blue Valleys, Robert Morgan
16. The Mountains Won’t Remember Us, Robert Morgan
Road trip: part II
part II:
Nikon F3; Zeiss Planar 50/1.4 and Dad’s Nikkor 28/3.5 (except for a few shots I took with an E series 50/1.8); no photoshop.
(part I is here: http://wp.me/p11VMI-j0)
Roll 1: Kodak Gold 100
I have previously dissed on Kodak film. It’s for chumps? Real camera nerds use Ilford for black and white, and pro-grade Fuji for color, right? Well, this roll saved the day. I had decided to bring one roll of film–and absentmindedly grabbed an already-exposed roll. Smooth move dave, smooth move. As the dice fell, a nearby gift/souvenir shop just happened to have film. What film was it? Kodak Gold 100. Kodak, I apologize; your film is everywhere, you rock.
Roll 2: Fuji Pro 160S
I like this film. Nothing really super crazy, just good color and grain.
Roll 3: Fuji Sensia 100
The jury didn’t even have to go out on this one: I <3 slide film. It is beautiful. If I had to take a camera, lens and two films for the rest of my life, it’d be the F3, a 35/1.4, and Sensia 200 (or maybe the Kodak slide film, I haven’t tried it yet) and Ilford HP5+. Done deal. Actually that doesn’t sound like a half bad plan anyways…
Roll 4: Fuji Superia 200 (another one of the old rolls of film from pops)
Nothing too crazy here, same reddish vintage-looking hues from the 7-year aged film. This roll was halfway used up when we left, so it had only a few trip shots worth posting here. Why call it roll 4? Because I didn’t realize until a moment ago that it was the first, not last, roll I took on the trip; water under the bridge.
Without further ado, here they are:
Road trip: part I
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Nikon D200; Zeiss Planar 50/1.4 and Dad’s Nikkor 28/3.5. The 28 is pre-AI, which made for some trickiness, but with some creativity it’s nothing insurmountable. By miles and miles this takes the pie, cake and tart in the biggest-post-on-dave’s-blog competition, and will likely keep those respective desserts for a long time. No Photoshop.
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It was a great trip; I do hope the 53 photos were enjoyable.