Friday, February 26, 2010

February 26

Today was an unusual day. We needed to go to Socorro School in La Antigua, but knew that we needed to be there just after school let out for the day, because I needed to do a preliminary assessment of the condition of their computer lab.

We finally walked down to the highway around 10:00 a.m. and soon caught a very full chicken bus heading into La Antigua. We were fortunate to find seats, although they were aisle seats as the third passenger in the seat, which means that one cheek is unsupported.

We arrived in La Antigua around 10:30 a.m. and decided to go to McDonalds for an early lunch, but had to wait until they changed from their breakfast menu at 11:10 a.m. before we could order.

While we were waiting I took a photo of their fountain,

their fountain with their main trademark,

some of the beautiful plantings and

other beautiful plantings. Is your McDonald's this lovely?


Following our lunch, we walked across town to Socorro School and were in the library by noon. I didn't have much to do, but wanted to run several additional malware elimination programs and fix the Microsoft Office 2003 that was not installed properly originally. All these tasks were completed by about 1:00 p.m., so I headed up to the third floor computer lab. There are twenty-three computers in the lab. I booted up one and determined that the installed antivirus software was about a year and a half out of date. I installed Avast, the free antivirus software that I've been using, and started it checking the status of that system. For this, I was using a computer security CD I had burned with a variety of fee and open source tools. While this computer was running, I decided to check another one and discovered that it didn't have a CD drive. I pulled out my half-gig USB drive and plugged it in without thinking. Before long, it was obvious that the young woman in charge of the computer lab was done with her end of school day chores. These did not include dealing with computer security issues, but rather involved sweeping and mopping the floor, dusting the computer tables and the window sill and covering each monitor, tower and keyboard with a protective cover. These are good things to do, but I was finding from my virus scan that the computers in the lab were significantly compromised. Her cleaning tasks completed, I could tell that she was ready to leave, so I pulled out my USB drive, aborted my virus scan and shut down both computers. Later, when I scanned my USB drive with the anti-virus software on my laptop, I discovered it infested with trojans. I had to reformat it and reload the software I keep on it. I also need to find a way to make it read-only, so it can't get infected again.

Leaving the school, we started walking back across La Antigua. One of the interesting things about La Antigua and Guatemala, for that matter, is the sidewalks. Sidewalks, in most places are designed to promote walking. I'm not sure what their purpose in in Guatemala, as this next photo shows.

Truthfully, some sidewalks are smooth and level, but they tend to be the exception here.

Soon after leaving the school, we passed one of the many colegios (private schools) in La Antigua where the parents were lined up in their cars to pick up their children so that they could take them home. I thought Susan and Donna would enjoy this photo, since they do so much of this themselves.

As we continued our walk to Pollo Campero for our traditional soft-serve ice cream cone, we passed one of the many restaurants you can find in La Antigua.

It's truly amazing how many different types of restaurants, including ethnically different, you can find in this city.

After enjoying our ice cream at Pollo, I headed over to the Bodegona to see if I could find a mousepad. None of the computers I've been working on have mousepads and I wanted one to carry with me, since many of the tables that are used do not work well with mice. I had to go to the second floor of the Bodegona, which could more properly be called a mezzanine. I wondered over to the area where computer stuff is sold and eventually a young man asked if he could assist me. I tried to ask for a mousepad in Spanish and he replied, "Oh, a mousepad" in English. He didn't know where they were, so he asked a young woman who worked in the department if they had any. She pointed to a locked case attached to a post that held USB drives and other stuff. In the bottom were placed some mousepads. The young man checked his database and told me the price. I nodded and the began to look for the key to the case. He couldn't find it, so he asked the young woman, who threw him her keys. He opened the case and I pulled out a very plain, blue mousepad. Having a fancy design wouldn't improve my mouse work. He locked the case again looked up this particular mousepad. It was Q10 ($1.20) less than the one he originally quoted me. The then took an order pad (triplicate style) and wrote up the purchase. He had me write in my name (don't know why?), which I did in an unreadable fashion. He didn't seem to care. I pulled out the money and gave it to him. He then asked me to wait, as he went into the back to complete the transaction. Several minutes later he returned, put the mousepad and my receipt in a bag and handed them to me. All this was for a Q6 (72 cent) purchase.

I headed back to Pollo and we decided to go over to the mercado on an exploratory trip. Linda has taken a liking to the knives we have in our apartment. We learned from our landlord, that they had been purchased in the mercado. He and his wife had tried to find them, but failed. We tried for about an hour and also failed, although we did see many things and areas of the mercado that we had missed on previous visits. Unfortunately, we'll probably never be able to find them in the future.

It was almost 4:00 p.m., so we decided to have an early supper at Pollo Campero. They have an excellent grilled chicken plate with a pseudo-Caesar salad and a beverage for Q39 ($4.88). It was a good thing that we had eaten, because it turned out that finding a bus back to the apartment was going to be an adventure.

We went to a street where buses heading our direction pass and also stop to load and soon had one appear. Linda, however, has been irritated by the practice of overfilling the buses and decided to let the first one go on without us, as it was too full. The next one to come our way was about 20 minutes later and we decided to take it, even if it too was heavily filled or so we thought. Evidently, the driver was of a different opinion, as he continued to pick up passengers until they were hanging out the front door.

When we got to our road, the bus was so packed that we couldn't get near the door to exit, in fact, we couldn't even move down the aisle to try to exit. So we decided to ride the bus to the end of the route in Alotenango and take it back to our apartment from there. Sure enough, when we got to Alotenango, everyone exited except us. We moved to the front seat behind the driver, who turned around and saw us. He asked why we hadn't exited and we told him that it has been impossible to do so when we passed our road.

The bus started back towards La Antigua and when the ayudante came by to collect fares, he shook his head at us indicating that we didn't have to pay this time. Soon we were at our apartment and the driver dropped us off right at our road. You could get upset over things like this, but what would it accomplish? I much prefer laughing about things like this and enjoy seeing more of Guatemala.

Back at the apartment, as I mentioned earlier, I cleaned and reloaded my half-gig USB drive and did some on-line research. Later we did some video chatting with Donna, Sal, Nic, Cos and Gia in California. We really enjoy seeing them, especially the twins who are convinced that we live in their computer and get irritated when we don't appear whenever they want to see us.

Tomorrow we're thinking about going to a seafood restaurant in Escuintla recommended by someone we met at the expat breakfast. It's only about 20 miles south of our apartment. In the afternoon, we're going to Jocotenango, which is on the north side of La Antigua, for a traditional Mayan ball game as played in ancient times. There will be one difference, I learned. The losers will not be beheaded.