Am I dating Fabio Cannavaro?

Posted by: Laura 

Some people have the right height, hair color, and complexion to blend in anywhere. I am not one of these people. I get asked, “What part of the US are you from?” Chris on the other hand has had a different experience. On more than one occasion, people have mistaken him for being Italian. One of
these people was the owner of an Italian restuarant in Antigua. He informed us that Chris looks like the Italian soccer player, Cannavaro. Whenever we enter our now favorite Italian restuaruant, we are greeted with “Hola, Cannavaro!” Yesterday, a guide at the coffee museum asked Chris in Spanish, “What part of Spain are you from?”

Apparently, the name Chris is very difficult to spell in Central America. Our bus tickets and hotel reciepts have read Chis Lovis or Cris Luis. They get my name right every time.

So, I am taking a poll. Does Chris look like Canavarro?

-Election 2008: Vote Now-

More on Guatemalan Adoption

Posted by: Chris 

Haven’t heard details about the Dateline special, but we did notice a warning from US.Gov on adoption.  For anyone interested, click here

Where the streets have no name

Posted by: Laura 

If you´ve never played the board game Taboo, the rules go like this: a player draws a card with a word written at the top.  The object is to try to get the people on your team to guess the word.  The trick is there is a list of words that you´re not allowed to say.  For example, the word to guess might be “baseball,” but you can´t say “sport,” “game,” “pastime,” “hitter,” “pitcher,” or “baseball.” I played this game over Thanksgiving break with Alissa, John Michael, Katherine, Jody, and Andrew. People got extremely frustrated when their teammates couldn´t guess the correct word. This resulted in my brother and Chris´sister yelling at each other and asking if the person was an idiot.

Learning another language is a lot like this game. The object is to try and get your team (other people who speak Spanish) to guess what you´re trying to say. The trick is that most of the time you don´t know how to translate the exact word you want to say so you have to use a lot of other descriptive words.  For example if you don´t know how to tell someone that “We often make fun of each other” when you´re making fun of your boyfriend for being obsessed with football, you say ”I laugh at the silly things he does and he laughs at me sometimes.” The other person generally understands what you´re trying to say. In that case, you win. However, if you want to ask the store clerk where to “try on” some pants and you use the same word that you use to ask the ice cream store if you can ¨try¨ a sample of ice cream, you get a blank look from the clothes store. That´s when you lose.  Overall, I´m batting about .500 right now, but it gets better every day. 

Numerous restaurants, bars, shops with local textiles, and cafes (with amazing Guatemalan coffee) make Antigua the perfect place to learn a language.  The locals we have talked to have patiently waited for us to construct sentences in Spanish and even helped by correcting our grammar.  The town used to be the capitol of Guatemala until an earthquake in the late 1700´s.  The government decided to move the capitol to a safer location (about an hour away) to present day Guatemala City.  Some of the churches are still in ruins. A massive volcano sits beside the city.  We have felt three tremors since we have been staying here. The cobblestone streets add a colonial element to the town, but are desperately in need of repair.  (I have almost twisted my ankle on more than one occasion).  My Spanish teacher informed me that the government gave the city money to repair the streets, but it ended up in the pockets of city officials.

It has been very comfortable staying in the same place for the past three weeks. I don´t have to walk around the city with a map anymore (which is impressive for me as many of you know).  The city of Antigua is laid out in a grid. Calles (streets) run east-west and aviendas (avenues) run north-south. All of the streets are named 1st, 2nd, 3rd… However, this is where it gets tricky. None of the streets actually have street names. I´m not joking.  Very few of the streets are actually marked. So you have to find some landmark like a park or cathedral and actually count the streets as you walk so you know where you are.  We have one more week of classes until we head off to check out the rest of Central America.

Guatemalan Adoption

Posted by: Chris 

While in Antigua, we´ve noticed a lot of Western women with Central American babies.  A lot.  We also read a post on a travel forum from someone who was joking about the same thing (yes we read other peoples blogs too).  On top of this, there is very real paranoia about Westerners stealing Guatemalan children for all sorts of crazy reasons: abuse, to harvest their organs, and just to kidnap.  In 2000, a Japanese tourist tried to help a crying child by picking it up and comforting it.  There have been several accounts on what exactly happened, and this is considered the most accurate we´ve found.  A mob became enraged and murdered the tourist and the taxi driver–stories range from beating with sticks and rocks to lynching.  There are other similar accounts, and virtually every guide warns not to even take pictures of local children.

So, there´s a genuine fear of foreigners stealing children and inordinate amount of Blonde haired women carrying dark haired local kids.  I´m no genious, but something seemed wrong.  We were riding in a shuttle with a German family; 3 kids, only one was white.  Didn´t have any real reason to feel strange but I did.  Something wasn´t adding up.  So, we came to the internet place and I searched about Guatemalan adoption, and what do you know–there´s a Dateline special tomorrow night, Sunday Jan 20th at 6pm Central, about Guatemalan adoption.  It seems the demand for children has grown with wealthy families waiting only months or weeks instead of years.  The result is kidnapping and dirty business to meet the demand.  Now this post isn´t condeming Guatemala or adoption here.  Antigua is one of the coolest places I´ve been to and the people have been extremely kind.  Many abused or abandoned children go to caring families and everyone lives happily ever after.  But not always.  Business, it seems, is going well.  A little too well.

The point of this post?  I want to know what is going on.  Except I don´t have a tv.  So I need someone in the US to watch the show and please report back to me.  One of the benefits of travelling is you start learning what really goes on in the world with your own eyes and ears, not just what you´re told on the news.  Most of the time you learn how little truth actually gets to us, or else how the viewpoint has been bent.  And this is where my spiel ends: I´m not gonna rant on US politics or media bias or all the other things young people like to ramble on about, so certain that everyone in the Country is a moron except themself.  I can´t stand those travellers.  Look for a rant about them in the future(along with other fun stereotypes we´ve met).

I have no idea what´s really going on, but if our news is showing something that we are 1st hand noticing, then kudos to Dateline.  Now someone please fill me in.

Sunday Jan 20th at 6pm Central

p.s. — happy/funny post coming very soon about Antigua, just needed to get this out before tomorrow

I am a jelly doughnut.

Posted by: Laura

In college, I took two semesters of Spanish to fulfill my language requirement. I enjoyed the langauge and would have taken more courses, except entry level Spanish classes were generally held at 9:00am and met everyday.  Unfortunately, my busy college life could not accomodate that appointment.  However, when I taught at Priory, one of my best friends, Angulo, happened to be the Spanish teacher. She would teach me choice phrases and words. After four years of these mini-lessons, I built up quite a vocabulary. I became so comfortable with the phrases I knew, that one day I accidently swore (in Spanish) in front of one of the monks who shared an office with us. (I was looking for my darn keys). I figured monks only knew Latin. I was wrong.

I would describe my Spanish sentences like miniature tornados. I throw words together in a sentence, not necessarily in the correct order, tense, or gender, but native speakers tend to comperhend my meaning. While Chris knows a good deal more of the language than I do and has a good understanding of Spanish grammar, the words don’t come quite as quickly when he speaks. So, he would translate what people said to us and I would speak. 

However, our understanding of Spanish has some limitiations. The Spanish verbs for “to return” are “volver” and “regresar.” To say “We will return,” you say “Vamos a volver” or “Vamos a regressar.” Simple enough. However somehow when conversing, we combined these two verbs to say “Vamos a revolver,” which means something entirely different. Basically for two weeks, we have been traveling around Central America telling hotel clerks, restaurant waiters, and cab drivers that ”We are scrambled eggs.” 

While our mistake was not as big as telling an entire country of Germany that you are a jelly doughnut, we have decided to sign up for four weeks of language school. We are studying at Guatebuena Spanish School in Antigua, where we have class for four hours Monday- Friday.  The school is set up so that the classes are actually private lessons with one teacher to every student. We are also doing a homestay where we live with a family and eat all our meals with them. Our family only speaks Spanish, so we have a chance to practice and listen to a lot of Spanish everyday.  We started our classes right after New Years and so far we like our teachers and our school.  I have joined a gym where I can run on a treadmill. Chris has found a bar that has NFL Sunday ticket, so don´t worry, he won´t miss a single play off game. While four hours of classes + a few hours of studying + only speaking Spanish at meals is intense, hopefully after four weeks, we will no longer be scrambled eggs.