Monday, March 1, 2010

March 1

Today we go to Socorro School to hopefully finish up in the school library. We walked down to get a chicken bus to La Antigua around 9:15 a.m., but decided to walk towards Ciudad Vieja to increase of chances of getting picked up. Several buses passed without stopping, but it was obvious that they were already packed.

At the edge of Ciudad Vieja, we were finally picked up by an empty chicken bus just beginning his run to La Antigua. For some reason, we traveled through a majority of the town without finding any more passengers. Finally, other passengers began to appear and, by the time we reached La Antigua, we had a decent load, not jam packed, but decent.

Since this was laundry day for us, we were hauling two laundry bags with us. After arriving in La Antigua, we walked over to our usual lavandaria and dropped it off. We then walked back to Alameda Santa Lucia (the main drag on the west side of La Antigua) to find a tuk-tuk to take us across town to the school.

After finding a tuk-tuk, we were at Socorro by 10:00 a.m., which is the time of the official Guatemalan country-wide snack time. We went immediately to the library and found the librarian using the computer I had recently cleaned.

My task today was to create an iso file (a special type of file used to burn CDs and DVDs) that could be mounted in a virtual CD cd drive. I'd done this for years in my computer lab back in Iowa. It both speeds up cd access and eliminates potential theft of the CD, since is is not in the real CD drive.

I decided to start with an atlas CD that came with a new world atlas the library recently acquired. I created the iso file and then loaded a program called DAEMON, which creates the virtual CD drive environment. For some reason, I couldn't get it to work. Finally, around noon, I decided that more research was needed (there we go again) and we left to go find lunch.

We walked across La Antigua to a small comedor across the street from the Bodegona and had a typical Guatemalan meal. It wasn't bad and also wasn't very expensive. Afterwards, we walked over to the mercado to see what we could see. Believe it or now, we once again found parts of the mercado that we had never seen before.

By this time, we were getting fatigued, so we headed over to McDonalds to sit on the patio and read the latest copy of Revue, a free English language Guatemalan magazine with special emphasis on La Antigua. While reading, we did some research by eating a McDonalds soft-serve ice cream cone. At this time, our evidence indicates that we prefer the ice cream at Pollo Campero, which is also Q1 (12 cents) cheaper (obviously irrelevant).

While reading the Revue, we found an ad for a second-hand store called Tienda Segundos, which just happens to share a location with Revue Magazine. Since it was only about half-way across town and we still had time to kill before picking up our laundry, we decided to check it out.

We found a number of interesting things at Tienda Segundos, but are finding that we hesitate to add any weight to what we have to lug around both now and in the future. Since nothing fell into the "must have" category, we headed over to the lavandaria to pick up our laundry.

It was just being finished, so we sat down and waited for it. Once it was ready, we paid and headed over to our chicken bus pick-up location, which was just a block away. We tried to get a bus to Alotenango and let at least one Dueñas bus leave without us. Finally, not seeing an Alotenango bus, we took a Dueñas bus, which dropped us off at the beginning of the cemetery.

After greeting our friendly state police, who seem to live on this particular corner, we walked the length of the cemetery to get back to our apartment. Back at the apartment, we had to put our laundry away and remake the bed, as we had washed our sheets again. We then had dinner and watched some movies. Lights out will be early tonight, as we have to be up by 5:00 a.m. to be able to make the 7:00 a.m. bus that will drop us off at Melotto School in Chimaltenango on its way to Panajachel. We'll pick up the same bus on its way back from Pana when it passes the road to Melotto School at about 1:05 p.m. Tomorrow night, we're having dinner in La Antigua with Kristen, John and Sam. While we've mentioned Kristen and John before, we'll be meeting Sam for the first time. He's the Executive Director for Child Aid in Oregon and is in Guatemala doing a periodic program review. I'm looking forward to discussing how computer literacy is complementary to the literacy work already being done in Guatemala by Child Aid.

By the way, this evening I tried mounting that same iso file on my laptop using the same DAEMON software and achieved the same results. It looks like more research is needed.