Fucked-up spanish.

---

Panajachel, night time. So we found ourselves a reasonable good hotel, a shower and a few hours to sleep off that all that beer we consumed after getting of the bus from Quetzaltenango.
We are now in a bar and we know it is a gringo bar even though everybody around us is doing their very best to speak spanish, I told you in the other entry that this place is nicknamed Gringotenango because of the huge number of gringos studying spanish here.
Though James is constantly bla-bla-blaing in my ears, I try hard to eavesdrop on the confusing babble of converstations going on around me. The bar is packed and most of the spanish I hear from gringo throats is completely fucked up.
If this fucked-up spanish is what the guatalmaltecas teach around here, I would take my spanish classes elsewhere.
Still most of the people I speak to - mostly americanos - seem to think their spanish is first rate. They boast to me about the local family they boarding with, how the family only speaks spanish to them, how happy they are they can now speak spanish, what a revelation it is to speak a foreign tonque....I don't want to disappoint them and adjust my own Espanyol to their fucked-up spanish smiling at them and shaking hands, making aqauintances, switching to american english when their spanish turns out to be not enough for a real serious conversation.
I keep a keen eye on James who is really wasted by now and showing off the arm long machete he bought in Quetzaltenango, to who-ever wants to see it, things could get nasty here....he is getting himself worked up by all these americanos speaking spanish to him which he can not possibly understand.....when he gets into this state, drunk and all that, he is capable of murder.....I can see people around him getting worried too.
Enough is enough so I drag him home through a pitch black Panajachel, no street lights in this village, only to find the door to our hotel locked, light out and barbed wire over the the gate.
We manage to climb over it any way and find our room in a very dark hotel that seems to save on the salary of a nighttime receptionist.
Tomorrow we aill have to change our hotel.

---

Photos

Three little girls
in their traditional clothes.