When the ayudante came around, I once again paid Q5 for the trip into La Antigua. The research continues. Arriving in La Antigua, we walked to Parque Central and the Cafe Condessa. There was a small group already there when we arrived at 8:35 a.m. and others continued to arrive for the next hour.
There was no program, merely introductions and pleasant conversation. One individual, whose wife is returning to Guatemala from Tennessee, has been coming to Guatemala for fifteen years and has lived here permanently for the past four years. Others we met came here from Houston and New York. There were many others with whom we didn't have time to visit this time.
I did have the opportunity to visit other parts of the restaurant, including an historic pila (colonial washing machine)
and a lovely fountain in a patio area.
We did solve two mysteries. If you remember the blog entry in which I described the woman in ropa tipica with the perfect English, I now know more about here. It seems that she is originally from Brooklyn (N.Y., not Iowa) and has lived at Santa Catarina Palopó for the past twenty years and has, as is said, gone native in adopting Mayan dress.
Another individual, also in ropa tipica, who we saw at Nim P'ot, surprised us with her fair skin and blond hair. It turns out that she is an albino, of which there are a number in some of the outlying villages.
During breakfast, we explained to the people sitting with us why we were in Guatemala and what we were doing while here. One of the men sitting across from us, named Carl, told us that he was in Guatemala volunteering with the Church of Christ. He invited us to one of their prayer meetings and we thanked him, but noted that we were attending the cathedral in Ciudad Viejas. He went on to tell us that the computer his church had was not working and I offered to check it out for him.
We first walked over to this house, which was where his car was parked. On the way, we passed the headquarters for the tourist police.
We soon were on the road to San Lorenzo el Cubo, where the church was located. Once there, we checked all the connections, plugged it in and turned it on. The tower seemed to start, but the monitor did not respond to the video output. I got out our netbook, connected the monitor to it and soon had an image on the screen. We popped the cover of the tower, cleaned out all the dust and decided that the problem might lie with the connection on the motherboard from the external video port. The external video port was wobbley, as if it had been stressed too many times. I suggested that a separate video card might solve the problem. Carl mentioned that he had a desktop at home, so we hauled the tower to Carl's house in La Antigua.
Carl's house was a very neat one-bedroom house with a loft on a quiet side street on the west side of La Antigua. I asked him what his rent was and he told me to guess. I guessed $500 and he said that I was correct. The house shares a walled enclosure with another house, and comes fully furnished with a maid and gardener. There is also space to park at least one and maybe two small cars.
We opened up Carl's home computer, cleaned out most of the dust (didn't have any compressed air) and quickly determined that it also had integrated audio. I replaced the cover, reattached all the cords and cables and booted it up. I then installed Advanced SystemCare and ran it. Carl now holds the record for the most fragmented hard drive I've yet encountered. Fortunately, Carl runs an excellent anti-virus program and the system was fairly clean, although cleaner after ASC was run.
We were ready to go to lunch and Carl invited us to join him as his guests. He took us to La Fonda, which I assumed was the same restaurant we had eaten at with Kristen on our first night in La Antigua. I was wrong. There are three La Fonda restaurants, all in the same general area of La Antigua. There's got to be a reason for this, but we don't have a clue what it would be.
The La Fonda we visited this time turned up to be the same one that Bill Clinton had eaten in in 1999. Here's a photo of his chair to prove it.
Please disregard my comment that the earlier La Fonda had been the one he had eaten it. I was the victim of incorrect information.
Lunch was a delightful, typically Guatemalan lamb stew with rice, a Guatemalan tamale (without the filling you find in Mexican tamales) and corn tortillas in a lovely patio area.
When we had finished eating, I told Carl to let me know if the new video card worked so I could do the system cleaning I had volunteered to do for him. After thanking him for the wonderful lunch, we headed over to the mercado to pick up some fruit and vegetables that we needed. After an Alice in Wonderland exploration of the mercado, we found a stand that had what we wanted and quickly purchased Q50 ($6.00) of produce. We then headed over to Pollo Campero for a soft-serve ice cream cone and a clean restroom.
From Pollo, we picked up a dozen eggs at Dispensa Familiar and headed over to our bus pickup area. On our way, we met up with Mark, who lives downstairs. His Mercedes, the one that picked us up at La Aurora Airport almost four weeks ago, has decided that it needs a new transmission, so he's reduced to riding chicken buses just like us.
The trip back was uneventful, but cost us Q6 for the fare to our apartment. Once back, we discovered that our electricty was out. Since I started this blog, it's come on for about 2 seconds and went out again. If you can't read this blog entry, it's probably because our electricity is still out.
At least being without electricty doesn't affect our air conditioning. The window is still fully open and the temperature in our apartment is a pleasant 70 degrees. Later, we may have to partially shut it to avoid being chilled.
Tonight, after dinner, we will probably watch another English language movie with Spanish subtitles, do Internet research, finish blogging and try to have another video chat with the kids...if we once again have electricty. Otherwise, we'll be going to bed very, very early.
Update: Our electricity did come back on, but soon went off once again. Our neighbor from downstairs, Mark, came up to make sure we had a candle, which we did...actually two. According to him, this is the worst outage he's experienced in the 16 months he's been here.
