STOP! – Put on some music.  Music and pictures go together well.

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One of the beautiful things about the Guatemalan culture is their practice of total impermanence.  Everything is a quick, temporary fix, because after all, everything is always changing.  Leaky faucet?  Put a bowl under it.  Need new door hinges?  Install them under the old ones and then paint over the bad ones.  Paint peeling after 2 months?  Slap on another coat.

This is the same shoddy craftsmanship that drives us Westerners crazy (Europeans really) when we are having a defensive, egocentric day.  On our peaceful, observational days, we admire and muse over these same modifications.

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“Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception.  Perception alone will resolve all your problems.”

-someone

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Life came to this planet a long time ago.  It mutated into what we’ve discovered and not yet discovered using the same basic elements of an ever changing code.  We are here as long as life has use for us.  I plan to take pleasure in as many irrelevant, useless activities as possible.

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Sadness is like photography in the morning.  There’s plenty of light, so open your aperture and turn up the shutter speed to 1/200.

Humans are like bacteria.  Different cultures all trying to take over their host.  Sometimes the cultures mix and one tries to annihilate the other.  It’s interesting to read about wars and then afterward the cultures return to doing what the humans do most which is just living and consuming.

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This is one of the local bars I worked at called The Snug.  Probably the smallest bar in Antigua.  It felt full every time there were between 3 and 39 people.

They have some tasty treats, too.

It gets easier living somewhere after you accept things as they are.  It’s good to challenge things, but trying to change too much just makes you frustrated.  I realized that I can’t change every person living in Guatemala to my liking.  Reminding myself this allowed me to laugh when salespeople lied to my face and everyone (including myself) was 30 minutes late if they showed up at all.

It’s not actually that I love a place, but rather my adaptation to it.  When things aren’t going my way, I do not enjoy the place.  But,today I finished work swiftly with a few bucks in my pocket and went home to sit on my comfortable cot and play music.  Things in my work and home life are set up the way I like.  My mentality is set to view the happenings with a neutral, abstract tranquility.  This style of management can make any town seem like the place to be.

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The best description I’ve heard so far (by David Gerow) is that Antigua is like a cartoon.  Illegal mezcal bars and blues singers with one-eyed dogs.

Guat City is bike and art friendly.  And their coffee/food scene kicks ass.

The mercado is definitely the place I’ll miss the most in Antigua.

I lived 2 blocks away and went almost every morning for a chihuahua-sized bag of freshly chopped fruit for 5 quetzals = $0.65

I’d like to know where us gringos learn to get angry when we aren’t in total control all of the time.  It’s not all gringos, only about 80% of them from what I’ve seen.  I think it’s a misconception that latin people explode with anger.  Maybe I’m in the wrong parts, but in the 16 months or so of living/traveling in 9 latin countries, I can only remember once someone going on a yelling rampage.  Guatemaltecas just don’t have that emotional eruption inside themselves.

I’ll miss walking aimlessly around town with my camera.

And of course I’ll miss free bananas in the back yard.

The inside is like Cracker Barrel, but the food is fancier.  Pretty decent cappuccinos.  My guess is a gringo from the South got homesick.

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I asked my friend if the guy lying on the sidewalk needed help.  She said, “He’s just drunk from watching soccer.”  I laughed and said that’s just like football fans in the States.  Pan y circo.  I used to think it was trickery to control the masses with entertainment, but on this day I realized it’s not control.  They need it.

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I joined my girlfriend Gaby for coffee and dessert.  After our how-are-ya?s I start talking about how I am working too much.  Instead of sympathizing as usual, she said, “Always.”  That stopped me in my verbal tracks.  

“Always?” I asked.

“Yup.” She said.

I didn’t know what to say.  I guess I’m always whiny.  Why is this?  All of a sudden, I realized Guatemalans are better at life than me, probably better than most white people.  They have far fewer resources, a relatively higher cost of living, and still pay the bills.  If 2+2=4 in the U.S. then 1+1=3 in Guatemala.  Man, I suck.  Back to the drawing board.

 

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Rio Dulce

Instead of dealing with volcanic ash, my brother has to sweep mayflies off the boat.  They come for half an hour every dusk to die.

My friend Eli noticed that our eyes can’t track their flight, so I turned down the shutter speed on my Nikon.

Stop taking home monkeys!

Instruction manuals are rulebooks.  Children are told what is and is not possible.  This severely limits imagination and reasoning skills.  If you don’t understand then you’ve probably never left the land of guard rails and warning labels.

That’s CARVED from a TREE.  Good luck even trying to imagine doing that.

My good friends Karlita and Elito.

Separating Lake Izabel from Rio Dulce, this is supposedly the tallest bridge in Central America.

Side A – When I walked around the tree and noticed this guy was 2 feet from my bare feet my voice got all cartoony and high pitched like Butters on South Park.  I said something like, “Ugh guys, I don’t think we should walk on this nature trail!”  Looking back I just think: What a pansy I was!

Side B – The middle of this 5′ dude was easily as big around as my calf.

So if you’ve never been stoned for 7 days in a jungle with naturally heated water falls, howler monkeys, some kind of skin-softening hot spring mud, and the Nat. Geo. soundtrack on ∞.1 surround sound, go ahead and put that on your calendar.  I finally understand why people like living in Rio Dulce.

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“Anything that challenges what you believe is going to make you feel unsafe.”

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If you want the majority of a country to be trained a certain way, you DEFINITELY don’t want them traveling.  Even the most unobservant people start questioning their belief systems.  

It’s nobody’s fault for the things they were taught when they were 3 years old.  The understanding of what’s “right” and what’s “wrong” probably starts with breast feeding.  Happy emotions vs. angry/sad emotions are learned from family, teachers, church, and all other members of society.

When you go to a new cultural system, people do things that they were taught are “right”. In parts of the world it’s perfectly OK to pee on the side of a busy road in daylight or to stand against the next person in line at the grocery store or to set a backpack in a stranger’s lap on the bus.  In one part of the world it’s ok to let children run and yell because they are kids.  In other parts of the world kids are punished for acting like kids, depending on who’s around or where they are.

What I’m getting at is this: what is “right” in one place is “wrong” in another but both are possible and don’t really harm anyone or improve survival.

We get information about different cultures, not from the culture itself or even people who have experienced that culture.  We learn about the world through the tinted lenses of television, Hollywood, and the news.  Only after enough people have been paid do the remnants of truth trickle down to us in our plastic bubbles.

As a young American from a small town in Georgia, this is what I learned: 

Mexicans and Indians are roughing it.  Africa is fucked.  Europeans have a little bit going for them.  At least they look like us.  And they drive nice cars.  Even if they talk funny and wear clothes a little too tight, they are the most similar to us.  So, we’ll consider their method of living to be acceptable even though they aren’t quite “right”.  One thing is for sure— you don’t want to end up in a place where you can’t blend in.  All other species of humans, especially the one’s that look different, are very, very dangerous.

It amazes me how much of the U.S. believes this.

Nothing grabs your attention quite like a pack of little kids sprinting toward you with huge smiles and even bigger knives.

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Birth right is a pretty messed up concept.  Natural born citizens act as if they demonstrated some herculean effort to have earned their “rights”.

“Pride is a sense of worth derived from something that is not part of us.” -BL  

To visit the U.S. requires total proof of returning home and costs a Guatemalan $150 (a month’s rent in Antigua) plus all associated entrance and exit fees and transportation.  This is possible if you have adequate sponsorship from a U.S. resident.  Multiply the cost of your rent by 6.  That’s the relative price to step foot in this country.

Some argue this difficulty is to prevent immigrant labor from working harder and cheaper and longer hours than the spoiled citizens of ‘Murica.  It’s ok to manufacture goods in less developed places like India or China and pay them next to nothing, as long as we don’t have to look at their ghettos every day.  It’s smacks of the same flavor when we send our youth to foreign soils to get shot at and kick down strangers’ doors.  Do we really have to ensure our way of life at the expense of theirs?  I have to admit it was thoughtful of them to install those nets at the Foxconn factory (Apple and Hewlett Packard) in China to catch the employees after 14 killed themselves by jumping out the windows.  But, I digress.

So what is the real reason we defend our borders from our more friendly, lively, and compassionate neighbors?  My mind immediately goes to real estate value.  No doubt the problem is complex.  The way I see it, my life could have just as easily started in Madagascar.  I wouldn’t know the difference.

One thought on leveling the playing field is that the rich will lose at the gain of the poor.  I think lazy people will stay lazy and the only change is that the lazy Americans will either get it together or fall behind.

They already have huge advantages with being able to read and speak English.  A taste of the world’s reality might give them a touch of humility and appreciation instead of blindly hating anything different, groping desperately for more stimulus, and following whichever side is predicted to win the next election instead of consulting your own dust covered intuition.

“People already made up their minds [about what they believe] and only listen to supporting evidence.” – Eli Vellieux