Today we were to go to the Melotto School in Chimaltenango. We got up at 5:00 a.m. so that we could meet Kristen in La Antigua by 6:45 a.m., which was the time she told us she would need to leave today. We were down by the highway by about 6:15 a.m. and decided that we would never make it to La Antigua on time after two full chicken buses declined to stop and pick us up.
Compounding our problems was the loss of our Internet connection last night. It seems to be back today, but was very flaky. We finally decided to postpone our return trip to the Melotto School until I'm able to download and burn the Qimo Linux distribution. Qimo is an operating system and set of games/educational tools that is aimed at children. I'm hoping that it will be possible to run in in Spanish, since there are Spanish language programmers working on it.
After returning to the apartment, we decided that we had some tasks we needed to accomplish. First, we needed to take our dirty clothes to a lavandaria (laundry). We then needed to update our blogs, since our Internet access at the apartment was out. I needed to download a copy of Qimo, a Linux distribution for children that I wanted to test at the Melotto School. We needed to get more minutes for our cell phones and, finally, we needed more groceries.
After making our shopping list and deciding what we needed to take with us, we once again walked down to the highway. In a short time, a chicken bus appeared and, this time, stopped to pick us up. In no time we were in La Antigua and began looking for the lavanderia we had used back in 2007. We found it and arranged to pick up our clean clothes at 1:00 p.m.
Our next stop was the study center established by the government of Spain in the former and restored Compañia de Jesus church. While it is a quiet and pleasant study site, I discovered that it lacked free wi-fi (wireless Internet). We then headed for a famous American eatery that offers Internet access - McDonald's, but it too lacked free wi-fi. Our third stop, Pollo Campero (the Guatemalan equivalent of KFC), was successful.
Typically, businesses offering free wi-fi expect you to purchase something, so we did. Our first purchase was two bottles of agua pura (bottled water). We nursed them as we set up our netbook and uploaded our blog files. Soon I decided to try to download Qimo, a Linux distribution for children that includes an assortment of games. Qimo is 698 MB and it took us about three hours to get it downloaded. During that time we had two Mediterranian salads (with chicken strips), two cono helado suave (soft serve ice cream) and, finally, as we were almost finished with our downloading, an order of papas fritas grande (large order of fries), which we enjoyed with a hot verde (green) sauce, as Guatemalan ketchup is about half sugar we were told.
While we were almost finished with our three-hour download, I went over to the lavanderia to pick up our laundry and stopped by a tienda to pick up some cell phone minutes, since it was triple saldo day (three minutes for the price of one). Once the download was complete, we headed to the mercado to pick up some fruit and vegetables. We've started making soup for dinner as it's something that is easy to fix on our little three-burner propane stove. After we found our way out of the mercado (rabbit warren isn't complex enough to describe it), I left Linda on a bench at the Mercado Artesiana (artisan's market), while I went to pick up a few additional items at Dispensa Familiar (a grocery store chain owned by WalMart). One of the items I picked up was eggs, which came in a 30 count container. I was amazed that they actually made it back to the apartment without any losses.
Meeting up once again with Linda, we headed over to the chicken bus terminal to find a chicken bus to Alotenango. We don't actually want to go to Alotenango, but it's the only route that goes by our road across from the cemetery. Before long a chicken bus appeared and, along with others who were also waiting, we boarded. As we headed out of town, more and more people got on the bus until it felt like a human sardine can. Both Linda and I were sandwiched in between two other people.
As soon as we had passed through Ciudad Vieja, I started looking for our cemetery. Seeing it, I began moving towards the front of the bus, where I told the driver that I needed to get off at "la fin de la cemetaria." This wasn't the first time we had ridden with this driver and ayudante (helper who collects fares, loads luggage and announces the destination along the route), so they knew where we wanted off and were proud of it. We were amazed!
Once off the chicken bus, we carried our laundry, two shopping bags and two backpacks up the hill to our apartment building. It was about 3:30 p.m. and we were exhausted, so we rested for a while. The rest of the evening consisted of cleaning up, cooking, cleaning up after cooking, burning five Qimo CDs and recording our blog entry for the day, which will probably have to be uploaded at Pollo Campero, unless the Internet service in our apartment starts working again.
Tomorrow, we're up at 5:00 a.m. again to get to La Antigua in time to take a 7:00 a.m. chicken bus to Chimaltenago and the Melotto School, where I hope I can get Qimo working on those five ancient computers. This time, instead of waiting on the highway down the road from our apartment, we're going to walk to the beginning of the cemetery, where the road to Dueñas meets the road that passes our apartment. There's a stop sign there. Maybe the chicken bus from Dueñas will notice it and stop and we can sneak on.
