We left the apartment a little after 8:00 a.m. and began looking for a chicken bus. Not seeing one, we walked up to the intersection where the roads to Dueñas and Alototenango converge. We arrived in time to see the rear end of a Dueñas bus driving away. Continuing to walk towards Ciudad Vieja, we came up on a bus just as it was starting to pull away. I quickly yelled to the ayudante, "Va a La Antigua?" (Are you going to La Antigua?) and he stopped the driver so that we could get on board. It was almost surrealistic. Except for the driver, the ayudante, Linda and I, the bus was completely empty. This is only the second time this has happened to us. The first time was in 2007 when we boarded a chicken bus at its terminal in Guatemala City to go to Panajachel. The driver began to pick up other passengers, but stopped when he got to the gas station in town. The ayudante disappeared, probably to answer a call of nature. It must have been a rather important call, because he stayed away for quite some time, which was irritating the driver. Just before he returned, another chicken bus pulled in front of our bus, which further irritated our driver. In effect, the bus in front of our bus ended up picking up most of the passengers who would have boarded our bus. Seeing this happen, our driver started to drive very slowly to allow other potential passengers to appear. Some did, but not as many as he would have liked. He continued the slow driving all the way to La Antigua. It may have been the slowest chicken bus ride in Guatemalan history.
We finally arrive in La Antigua, exit the bus and take our laundry to the lavandaria, where it would be ready at 4:00 p.m. We meet Kristen on our way to Pollo Campero, where we had planned to meet, and begin the walk to the new school. It's a Catholic school operated by six nuns that is located south of Belén Church.
The church is adjacent to the former home (according to a plaque) of Hermano Pedro (Brother Peter), the Guatemalan canonized saint.
The church faces a small park with a statue of Hermano Pedro in the center.
The front of the church is ornately carved in stone, but the interior is almost without decoration, being white washed.
The church is adjacent to the former home (according to a plaque) of Hermano Pedro (Brother Peter), the Guatemalan canonized saint.
The church faces a small park with a statue of Hermano Pedro in the center.
The front of the church is ornately carved in stone, but the interior is almost without decoration, being white washed.
We arrive at the school, ring the bell for entry and are escorted in by the maid. We go to the school office and tell the nun behind the counter who we are and why we are here. The first word out of her mouth was "fijese," which indicated that we were going to get an excuse or justification for why we weren't going to be able to do what we were there to do. This is a common experience in Guatemala, I'm told.
The story we were told was that the computer lab was locked. The lab attendant had the key and they hadn't seen him for more than a week and didn't know how to contact him. The nun did find a basket of keys and went to the lab to try to open the door, but was unsuccessful. As a result, our first attempt to assist the school was for naught.
Rather than waste the morning, we caught a tuk-tuk (three-wheeled, motorcycle taxi) and went to Kristen's apartment. She'd been having problems with her computer and asked me to look at it. To say that it was having problems was an understatement. It operated like it was immersed in molasses. To compound the situation, I discovered that her McAfee anti-virus program was disabled. I had a USB drive with me that had Avast, an excellent and free anti-virus program, on it. I installed it and started a complete system scan. I also determined that her laptop needed more memory (it had 1/2 gig and could handle 2 gig) and had far too many programs resident in memory all the time.
Leaving Avast to do its work, we went to two stores nearby that sold computers, but neither had laptop memory of the type needed. The Executive Director of Child Aid will be coming to La Antigua in the next three weeks and Kristen may order the memory on-line and have it shipped to him, so that he can bring it with him.
We separated at this point (lunch time) and Kristen returned to her apartment to work on other projects. We headed over to the mercado and had lunch at our favorite comedor. This time we had a beef dish (Carne Guisado), with rice, a salad, corn tortillas and a Pepsi Light. The total cost for both of us was Q40 (about $4.80).
After lunch, we walked over to Pollo Campero for dessert - you guessed it - cono helado suave (a soft-serve ice cream cone) for only Q4 each (48 cents). After enjoying our dessert, we walked over to El Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española, a library/study center established by the Government of Spain as a goodwill gesture. The central courtyards are very pleasant, quiet (usually) and a great place to read or study. We spent several hours studying Spanish and taking pictures of the architecture.
That morning, while walking to the school, we had seen a bookstore that we wanted to visit. Well, we tried for several hours and failed miserably. Rather than accept failure, we decided to go to the Bodegana for a few items we needed. We then went to get our laundry, only to find that it wouldn't be ready until 5:30 p.m., since the laundry owner had not had any help that day.
With time to kill, we went back to Kristen's apartment and I made an important discovery while working on her computer. She had Skype installed and, as many programs want to do, had allowed it to remain active in memory. I had tried using in on our new netbook and found that performance degraded significantly. On her laptop, with only 1/2 gig of memory, it almost brought her to a full stop. Merely exiting Skype improved her performance by an order of magnitude. I love that phrase, "by an order of magnitude." I don't know what it means, but doesn't it sound good?
Leaving Kristen's again, we went to the mercado and picked up some fruits and vegetables to take back to the apartment, continued to the lavanderia to get our laundry and went to wait for a chicken bus to take us home. The first to arrive was a bus to Dueñas, which dropped us off at the intersection in front of the cemetery, from where we walked the remaining distance to our apartment carrying two sacks of groceries, a shoulder bag, a backpack and a large bag of clean laundry. We were so glad to get back to the apartment.
Once back at the apartment, we video chatted with Nic, the twins and Donna while we fixed our supper. The rest of the evening was spent on Internet searching and our blogging. Tomorrow is another, perhaps our last, 7:00 a.m. bus trips to Chimaltenango. We'll have to be up at 5:00 a.m. to make the connections, but at least we'll sleep well tomorrow night.
