Yo deseo saber mas espanol

I have a hard time making myself sit with a notebook and memorize spanish words. Studying was never my strong suit.

Anyway, today is Sunday, and though many businesses aren't open, the parque is usually rolling with the influx of people from all over town together to worship at the big catholic church. We've gotten into the habit now of walking up a side street from the house to the park, which is quiet and still. We can walk on the road so that we don't have to stare at the back of the other one's head, and there's no exhaust or honking.

The car honking situation here is another befuddling thing to me. There is a specific language invented around the car horn that I've had to learn recently along with Spanish. First of all, there's the idea of the "friendly honk." I've heard of the existence of such a think in places like NYC, but in Richmond, if you hear a car horn it means one thing and one thing only, and for the sake of my extended family who possibly read this I will abstain from using that kind of vocabulary. So here, there is the "hey, I know you!" honk, the "you drive a car just like me!" honk, the "i'm here, are you ready?" honk, the "I'm turning left now" honk, "I want that parking place", "do you need a cab?", "thanks for letting me merge", "thanks for getting out of my way," "I'm passing you", "I want to turn right, but there's possibly a pedestrian crossing, please have caution." "you're foreign", "you're a cute girl", "you're wearing a red shirt". There's also, still, the angry honk. Generally it's longer in duration and accompanied by some unintelligable Spanish, or in the case of Gonzalo, Quiche. Angry honks mean a range of things as well, such as "you cut me off!", "you didn't let me cut you off!", "why are you stopping?!", "why are you stopping at this stop sign!?", "This road construction makes me angry!" Then there is the mass transit system, which has a full language of it's own. The chicken buses, which are pimped out, blinged out, decal laden recycled school buses, honk more than any other vehicle on the planet. In fact, their horn, which is one of those pull chord deals like a tractor trailer, is usually decorated with streamers or beaded or woven out of colorful plastic lanyard material.

This might actually be a good opportunity to describe the chicken bus experience in general. These guys love their job. There's the one guy who drives, and then he's got his buddy up at the front with him that operates the door, collects the money, shouts destinations, throws large loads onto the luggage cage on top, or otherwise changes the CD or grabs a bag of mango for the driver from a vender. The driver, while he's shifting gears and eating slices of mango out of a plastic bag, somehow manages to steer at the same time. Every bus has a woman's name, either Marie, or Guadalupe, or whatever, and often has something about God watching over it painted across the windshield. On the inside i've seen posters and decals of the Simpsons to Che Guavara. My first experience on the chicken buy to Cantel was a little harrowing. These guys fly... I don't know how you get a school bus to go this fast, I guess they pimp out the engines too, but we're barreling UP a mountain, and in the distance we can see a full dumptruck probably full of gravel or bricks or something else ridiculously heavy. It's creeping through this narrow pass, our bus honking at it the entire time from a good distance behind. It disappears around a blind pin turn right as we are starting to catch up to it, and the driver is NOT slowing down. As we come to the turn the buddy is just hanging on the horn, and we're barreling through, and I'm in complete shock as to how this could possibly not end in my bus and that truck becoming one united vehicle. And we make it to the other side of the blind turn right at the moment when physics and instinct tell me we should be directly on top of that dump truck, and low and behold, it's just taken it's own initiative to move itself out of the way. Granted, out of the way means it was in the lane of oncoming traffic, so that we passed it on it's right, which is something else completely brain melting for someone who holds a virginia driver's license. None the less.. out of the way. The one guy communicated with the horn that he was coming and to get the hell out of the way, and the other guy obeyed. Sorry mom and dad, that story might be more than you can handle. All that fun for only 3 Quetzales.

So anyway, now that i've got that out of the way, we walked through central Xela some more, came back for that siesta, cleaned the house a bit before the family returned, and headed out again in search of lunch and something to fill up the afternoon. Lunch landed on this touristy mediterranean place that was really delicious and really comfortable. Maybe I don't want to eat tacos for the rest of my life here. After that, we headed out to find the cemetery. It was a pretty easy walk through the east part of Xela. We passed I think 3 Xelapan bakeries before we got there, so I'd say it was about a mile or so. The cemetery is attached to a gorgeous yellow church, and there were a lot of people milling around, so we tried to find the street entrance. The wall of the cemetery has a couple murals on it from what looks like elementary school students, addressed to the police. They were really bizarre and I wiish I had a better command of Spanish so I could interpret them. One was an armed police man escorting an old man holding possibly a kitten. I couldn't tell if he was helping the other across the street, or taking him into custody. Then, my favorite, a man in what looks like a hazmat suit, gas mask and all, spraying something onto vegetation. No idea. The street entrance was locked, so we went back to the church, where a procession was forming, and down the street, a large crowd of people and a coffin rounded the corner on it's way into the cemetery. What was interesting to me was that the colors of mourning for traditionally dressed women are purples. The modern dressers were in black, and the old maya women were in purple. We watched that for a bit and then headed home.

Here's another weird thing. There's a public bathroom attached to Parque Central, but you have to pay 1Q to use it. Literally, a guy with a cash box sits inside the doorway. I can't figure out what the money goes to.. they don't even provide toilet paper! (rest assured, I never leave home without it.)

Well I'm really tired, and I have nothing else to report, besides the fact that I made the most delicious and satisfying cup of hot chocolate I have ever encountered. And I have swallowed a lot of hot chocolate in my life.

Buenos noches!