tacos 4ever

The internet connection here seriously kills my soul. I feel like the Mayan gods of technology are working against me very diligently. In other news, I discovered a bakery today called Xelapan and I can now safely say that I will return to the US weighing at least 93982 pounds. I got an eclair for the equivalent of about 40 cents and proceeded to bathe myself in powdered sugar. SO GOOD. These past few days have been relatively uneventful, but fun. Most of my time has been spent eating tacos, actually. There are two taco places right down the road and they make the most magical tacos I have ever experienced. They are made with these little corn tortillas and come with all sorts of unidentifiable spicy sauces. I actually can't remember the last time we've gone a whole day without eating tacos at least once. Anways, I guess I'll try to remember what I've been doing these past few days. On wednesday morning, I went with some of the AMA women and Tony to film the different steps mayan weaving, which was really awesome. Apparently in the mayan towns, the women of the community do their weaving kind of in an assembly line fashion. There are about 8 or 9 steps to the process, starting with getting balls of cotton from the sheep, to spinning it into yarn, to using all sorts of machinery to stretch, tie, dye, and manipulate it, to finally weaving it into these ridiculously complex and beautiful fabrics on giant looms. So in these communities, different women are responsible for a different step in the process. They do their part in the weaving process, then pass it on to the next woman to do the next step, and so on. Though they said that the final process involving the loom is usually done by men, because those looms are HUGE and require a lot of strength to operate. When they showed us the different steps they just had a lot of different pieces in various stages of the process so we got to see all the steps without it taking too long. On wednesday night I went to a salsa dancing class with Jessie at the school she's taking spanish classes at, which was a lot of fun. It was very basic and geared towards gringos with no rhythm, so it was perfect. Then afterwards a bunch of us went to see a guatemalan pink floyd cover band playing at a nearby restaurant, which I enjoyed exponentially more than i would have if it was the real pink floyd. They even had smoke machines and neon lights. On Thursday morning, i went with Tony to do more filming, except this time it was at a center run by mayan midwives. Apparently mayan women face a lot of discrimination at hospitals because a lot of them don't speak spanish, so these midwives opened up a center where women can go for checkups when they are pregnant, to give birth, and for more checkups after they have their baby. They gave us a tour of the center, which was really cool. Everything they do there is completely natural, so they had extensive herb gardens with herbs to treat every possible problem, pain, or sickness, as well as a sauna and lots of scary looking unidentifiable tools. Definitely a learning experience. Tonight I am going to a dinner/salsa dancing extravaganza with Jessie at her school and then tomorrow Jessie, Tony and I are going on a trip to Panajachel, this touristy city right on Lake Atitlan. It's only about 2 hours away and is supposed to be beautiful and have awesome markets. Then you can take a boat ride over to the smaller towns of San Pedro and San Marco, which are big hippie communities where (I've heard) people live in forts in the trees. Sounds like the best kind of place, ever. Feliz fin de semana!

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Part of trip: Highland Support Project Internship

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