Jueves y parte de Viernes

THURSDAY!

What a massive day. Wednesday night, Marvin came to the house. He’s one of the drivers we had when we came here last year. He usually lives in Chichicastenango, which is about 2 hours away. He knocked on my door and told me to be ready to leave at 4:30. So in my brand new room I slept like a feather, which is the farthest thing I can think of from a rock. Every time a car went by or a dog barked I woke up. Plus the room is really big and smells kind of bad, so it was just a bad night. So 3:30 rolls around and I’m awake but stay in bed till I have to get up. Marvin and I leave at 4:30 and I have to tell him I don’t know much Spanish, which really might have been a bad thing to do, because instead of trying to talk to each other, I think he thought of me as being kind of hopeless and we didn’t talk at all after that. We picked up Sylvia at her house and got on the road.

5 hours later we’re in Antigua, stopped in front of a hotel which apparently Lupe and Vladimir stayed at that night. Lupe jumped out and directed us to a restaurant to meet her at. There I had a giant bowl with a mixture of fresh fruit, granola, and rich yogurt. Which I ate about 10 bites of. Seriously, the roads around here are nothing I’ve ever experience before. Add that to the nature of the truck, and I’m toast. It has a row of seats behind the driver that’s equal the amount of space as probably my Camry, but it’s the cab of a truck, so the windows are small and placed more industrially than esthetically. Then the windows are tinted, so I’m in a truck pod, I can’t escape the interior of the truck, so I get so unbelievably nauseous. The only thing I can do then is to just try to fall asleep. Which I did. But it didn’t help my appetite.

After we finished breakfast, we all piled in, Vlad included, to go to a market in Antigua. This town is tourist city. There were probably more white people there than Guatemaltecos. Antigua is also ancient. It was the capital of the country for a while, till a water volcano destroyed it. That’s right, a volcano erupted that was full of hyper-heated water and killed everyone. I’m not sure what year that happened in, but it wasn’t the first time Antigua was destroyed either. There was a fire at some point too, if my memory serves me correctly, and each time the city was rebuilt it was in a slightly different location, so there are technically 3 different Antiguas. The market was kind of like an outdoor shopping mall full of those kinds of stores that you see in tourist towns. Carved masks and lots of weavings. There was one store that sold all second hand Mayan traditional clothing, which is where we got a bunch of belts and different patterned items for inspiration and to actually use for new jewelry ideas. I also made them get this unbelievable brilliantly colored Corte. Cortes are traditional skirts that is honestly just made out of straight yardage. It is rectangular in shape, and contains something like 5 yards of material. It’s wrapped around the waist several times and secured with a long woven belt that is also simply wrapped around and the ends are tucked in. Usually, the corte has a simple vertical and horizontal cross embroidered on top of the multicolored fabric. Carlos told me the pattern of the horizontal line indicates the days of the Mayan Calendar, and the vertical line signifies the months. These people are the real deal. I’m telling you. When your every day clothes have that many hidden secrets, you’re not messing around as a culture.

After we got what we were looking for there (I got a belt with birds embroidered on it, what a surprise,) we were walking through the market, talking about ideas with Guatemalan jade, as we then also stumbled onto a store exclusively selling it. Lupe asked where the storekeeper got her jade, took a card, and we went back to the hotel to pack up the two new travelers. Lupe made a few frantic phone calls which I couldn’t even begin to translate, I had no idea what was going on, and then told us to hurry, we were going to the jade factory. I’m pretty confused at this point, too. She gets in a cab, we follow in the truck, and end up at this compound behind a tall steel fence and razor wire. We knock at the door, totally uninvited, some lady comes finally and lets us in. On the right, under a corrugated steel roof and a fence are 5-6 men and women in front of lapidary machines, grinding and polishing. On the left is a larger roofed section with some bellows and hammer, which I take to be the metal working side of it. We follow the path back and back, through papaya trees, to where some automatic machines are cutting giant bricks of jade into more manageable pieces, and go inside this giant, expensively furnished house in the middle of a giant, well manicured yard, sit at the dining room table and order things. They brought out every color Guatemala had to offer, every shape, and we even ordered some custom. Lupe knew of one other factory, apparently, so we got a little from one and headed to see what the other was about. That place was smaller and clearly more geared towards tourists. The silver workers were under and open air studio type building (which I am incredibly jealous of) and inside was a showroom with all their makings. Lupe asked for the raw stones, no silver, and some lady scratched some up unwillingly. We looked around, noticing how the prices were not only high, but they were marked in dollars, not quetzales, which is a very bad sign. The lady ended up telling us their jade was something like 10x more expensive than the other places. So we left there in a hurry.

It’s about 1:00 now, and I’m thinking we’ve done what we needed to do, we can go home now and be back in time for a late dinner, but no, we’re off to Guatemala City. All five of us and luggage included. We stopped at Pollo Campero (the chick fil a of Guatemala) and headed to a shop downtown that vends fabric. I’ll just go ahead and say that this place is my heaven. It is a cooperative project where traditionally made Guatemalan fabrics are woven in bulk for the world market. It’s incredibly good quality, incredibly well made, stunningly beautiful, and incredibly expensive. I got the honor of being looked at as the most educated in style and fashionable person of the bunch, I guess my qualifications were that I was young and from the U.S. Also, being related to Meg counts in my favor. I basically got to pick out all the fabrics for the new line of bags Sylvia is making for AlterNatives. I was in heaven. Her designs are all so incredibly cool, one of them is actually inspired by a bag I sent to Lupe, telling her something like it would be popular at the store. So that bag will be made out of the corte we bought in Antigua, and then others from the fabrics we picked out Thursday. 4 in total I think. Heaven. And I want them all. Sylvia is so incredibly talented as a seamstress, and the work she and the two other girls do is just amazing. I want one so bad and they haven’t even finished the designs yet.

Well, anyway, enough of my bliss session. We got back in the car and made the long trip home. I was in the middle of the back seat, which was good because it gave me the full view out the windshield, but bad because I’m trapped. I don’t know what it is about boys. It’s like they expand once they sit down. They will take up as much space as they believe they can physically allow. So I’ve got my knees jammed together, halfway in Sylvia’s seat, because as time goes by, Vladimir just expands. It’s a physical law that applies to most boys that will forever confuse me. I think if I took a particular offender and tied his legs together, after 3 hours in a car, the rope will have frayed and snapped. Such is the force of the expanding boy. (Sorry Vlad, this isn't completely directed at you, but boys in general.)

Sorry, that was quite the tangent.

Once again, incredibly sick. Vladimir keeps talking to me, and I keep uh-huh-ing, but I just can't can't keep up with the chatter. With my stomach about at the level of the gravel beneath the tires, I’m just not up for brainwork. I want to go to sleep. Eventually I think I do.

We arrive around 9, eat some black beans and eggs, and talk for a while. Claudia introduces Vlad to the house. I think he’s only staying here about a week though. He says he wants to live somewhere that is more socially active. This place is a bit of a wallflower as far as that’s concerned. I like it that way though.

Friday morning Lupe’s got me up and supply shopping again. I was supposed to go to Espunpuja, but I told Lupe about the troubles I was having there, and she basically decided to cut out losses and told me not to go anymore. If this isn’t their thing, this isn’t their thing. We’re just going to waste money and time and my patience trying to change it. So I played hooky on espunpuja. I’m a bit relieved about it. Hugh, Sylvia, Lupe, and I, with Marvin still driving, ran around town getting ribbons, beads, and leather together. We came back and worked feverishly until we couldn’t stand it anymore. It’s frustrating, though. Lupe has examples of jewelry she wants to reference for new design ideas, which I’m all about, but as we were shopping, she made it a point to buy the exact-to the T-materials that were used in the examples. Same leather, same beads, same ribbon, same colors. It’s scaring me. I’m not into that. We get back and she starts more or less going at it. She has an idea in mind, but doesn’t have the means to follow it through. It’s kind of what I went to school for, so I was pretty successful with it. I don’t think she quite understands the creative process. Coming up with an idea, which is where she’s at, and she’s good with that, but then brainstorming, refining, thinking through the details of it. Sketching, playing, working, getting to know new materials. It’s difficult! Making jewelry out of textile is general is difficult, unbelievably, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do it myself for something like 2 years now, unsuccessfully. She started cutting and stitching and gluing, and I could tell she was really unhappy with how it was going. I got myself some clear thread and that ribbon, and I’m kind of excited with what I found out I could do with it. I think what Lupe was working with-the original weavings-is a good plan, well representative of the region and culture, and will work, but will be really hard and take some time to figure out. I’m up for the challenge, though. What else I’ve got going on with the ribbon, though, I think will take on a different life. I major part of Maya culture is maize, corn. The Mayans figured out a way to grow and prepare fields so that they could harvest the same fields year round without tiring out the soil. It’s an involved process that has been difficult, since, to reproduce, but benefited them by making it, literally, so that they only had to work 3 months out of the year to provide all the food they’d need. This then allowed the Mayas the extra time and freedom for religion, art, cosmology, study of the heavens, and abstract though in general. The science museum in Richmond has an upcoming project with this farming method that Ben (Lupe’s husband) has a part in, and HSP is planning some events in correspondence with it. Soooooooo, I’m thinking about this jewelry having some design element of the corn leaves in it. We’ll see how it goes. Lupe seemed ok with that. I couldn’t tell if her lack of excitement was directed at the project in general not going the way she wanted it to, or frustration for her unsuccessful hours of gluing weavings (trust me, it was hard to watch that beautiful hand woven fabric get cut and glued and cut some more. I’m about to do the same things to it.. I’m sorry, weaving gods, don’t punish me!)

I went to school after that, in no mood to put up with any crap. I couldn’t help but feel like I was being treated like a preschooler by Rosario. She had me read this book about the sun, and another about the rain, which were meant for kids. I understand this concept, I did it with Carlos. I’m on a gradeschool reading level, here, so I’ve gotta read gradeschool books. It’s the commentary provided with it that killed me. “And the sun makes the water in the oceans turn into clouds!! I don’t like thunder storms, they’re scary! Don’t you think so?” Yep. I did have a science class when I was in 3rd grade. And please talk to me with your adult voice. Claudia called Olga to tell her about Vlad, who’s going to be a new student, and I think told her I was unhappy with me teacher. She asked me, quietly if I was happy with my last two weeks, and I told her not really. I’ll tell her the full story of it sometime, but there’s never really any privacy. I actually still have one more class left since I missed the one on Thursday. I hope I can take it with someone other than Rosario. She’ll probably just try to get me to fix more jewelry. She offered, very emphatically, to come to the house and teach me here. She really, really wanted to do it. She tends to be of a lazy nature, being a hamster and all, so the only way I can figure why she would want to come over so badly is so she’s close to all my jewelry equipment. She wants desperately for me let her be in my class, she likes shiny things so much, and she’s so emotionally involved in my repairs to the things she’s brought me. I think it was a strategy. Anyway. I think I’m done with her.

After class we came home and I left again for a voyage throughout Guatemala that had me jumping in jungle lakes with all my clothes on, among other things. I’ll have to write about it another day, it’s too late now and I’m too tired, but there will be pictures of our adventures on Flickr. So you can check those out before you get the full commentary if you want.