Trodding along

8/20/10
It's night in San Bartolome and I just got back from Margarita's house where four of us met up to hang out for an hour. My walk was memorable and worth a vivid description. Right now the town is covered in clouds which sprinkle rain upon the slick, shiny, stone streets. Hiking into San Bartolome from the hills in which I live I get a full view of the town, perched upon the mountainside. There is a big festival at the beginning of this week and the town is starting to gear up with food and game stands. It's particularly dark tonight with the clouds blocking out the night sky but the center of town is bright. Standing tall above the church is a rickety ferris wheel which has been brought in for the celebration. The empty ferris wheel sits stationary. Lit up in faded neon colors, it shines eerily in the misty night haze. The whole damp atmosphere felt like something out of a dream. Walking the steep, bleak avenues in silence under the orange glow of an occasional streetlight it felt kind of like I was in the setting of a Dickens novel. Nope, just a dreary night in a small, shady town in the Guatemalan highlands.
I like San Bartolome a lot. The layout, the scenery, the steep winding streets and I'm afforded the luxury of the full experience with my daily hike into and across town. We've been in Saint Barts (as we jokingly call it) for one week now. The next ten will fly by. The days are full as Peace Corps Pre-service training requires technical sessions and language classes all day. It was the exact same in Togo. I feel as though my Spanish comprehension has improved greatly in a week. There was an earthquake in class yesterday. Not a big one but everything trembled for a few seconds. It's my second earthquake of the year after the one in D.C. earlier this summer. Guatemala has the great distinction of resting upon the junction of three different tectonic plates: the North American, the Cocos, and the Caribbean. The confluence of these plates means plenty of earthquakes. It seems the Earth is constantly reminding Guatemaltecos just how small they really are. The country is incredibly prone to all sorts of natural disasters: volcanoes, landslides, earthquakes, tropical storms, monsters(?), and of course sinkholes. They all wreak havoc on poor, beautiful, Guatemala.