So yesterday was pretty much horrible. After school, CJ and I went on a trip with the school guide and a group of three other students who are far older than anyone else currently in the school (50s or 60s) to go see a pottery workshop in a village outside of Xela. It was intersting to see the process for the pottery, though obviously I was already pretty well aware of the process, though they do take their clay from newly minded raw material to finished product, so that was somewhat different. CJ and I got a few souveniers that I´m not sure how we´ll get home safely, but we´ll try. The pottery was amazingly cheap and very neat.
After we got done at the pottery place one of the people in our group, Pablo, wanted to go on the see the nearby village even though it was raining, but we had to take a bus. Our guide got us on a bus to the village, though the bus was acutally one of those fifteen passenger vans. When we got in, there were about two more emtpy seats left, but, this being latin america, those filled up quickly! Once all the seats were filled and there was no more space on the bus, about fifteen more pèople got in, which if you´ve being to latin america should hardly come as a surprise to you. Suddenly, in the middle of one of the random stops by ths side of the road in the middle of nowhere, Pablo announces that he´s get out because it´s too crowded in there. So he starts saying ¨lo siento, adios (I´m sorry, bye)¨ to everyone in the bus and gets out in the middle of nowhere. OUr guide is yelling, in spanish, ¨no, no, there aren´t any more busses!¨ but he gets out anyway, so the rest of us all pile out to, because the guide starts to get out to follow pablo. So we all get out by the side of the road and are standing in a random ditch in the pouring rain, and as there aren´t any more buses, we start walking through the muddy ditch, in the pouring rain, back to the pottery place which is like a mile or two so down the road at this point. By the time we got there, we were soaking wet and covered in mud. Our guide clearly thought that pablo was a completley insane jerk and given the language barrier, all I could do was give the ömg¨look to him and mouth ¨loco (crazy¨). We were none too happy.
Then we rode an hour home on the chicken bus into Xela, and walked a few minutes back to school. Then I checked email and found out that someone had canceled my reservation despite the fact that I´d had the resrvation for several days because they rented the room to someone else, so I send them a email telling them exactly what I think of them and their business practices and had to scramble to find another hotel. Since everyone in El Salvador comes to Antigua the first weekend in August (I have no idea why) this was frustrating and annoying. I think CJ and I are staying someplace very nice, and I´ve already put down a $70 deposit, so I certainly hope there will be no problems.
At around 6:30 CJ and I finally headed for home, in the rain. As we were walking down the street, we discovered that the road leading into our neighborhood had a rope (or more accurately a string) running across it so that it was blocked off to cars. I wondered about that, but once we got on the other side, I realized that the road was about two inches thick with very goopy mud. We made our way the three or four blocks to our house, and as we turned the corner onto our street, we saw the guys from the autobody shop on the corner sweeping a couple of inches of water out of their shop. As we walked down the street, we saw our family with the car parked in the middle of the street, and the grandmother of the family (who lives next door) carrying a hose into one of the houses (the houses at the end of our street are all those of the extended family). There were a couple of inches of water filling the downstairs of all of the houses on the street, which had happened before in the past, especially with hurricane agatha. I may have mentioned in the past that the ceiling in our bedroom leaks (which is not at all uncommon in Guatemala as everyone is very unsurprised and the reaction by most people if you mention that your ceiling has been leaking in the rains is the Spanish equivalent of ¨ah, yeah, that sucks- I hate it when that happens¨. Anyway, during the day, construction people had taken out a good chuck of the skylight in our bedroom to put plaster of someking over the cracks in the roof that were allowing the leak. Of course, when it started raining in the afternoon, they didn´t finish, and our room was not only filled with fallen plaster, but also didn´t even have a completely ceiling in the pouring rain. So we got to spend the night in the bedroom of our host bother, who spent the night with a friend. Beacuse of all the water filling the bottom of the house, we didn´t eat until after 9:00 and then it was difficult to sleep because I was sharing a bed with CJ who kicks and hogs the covers. So all in all, it was a great day. I don´t seem to have the correct cord to post pictures, but I´ll see if I can add some later, perhaps on Monday.
edited to add: I found the cord. I´ll try to add some pictures.
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