I’m going to have to start hiding my peanut butter from myself.

The day in Quiché was well needed. Not only was I there to buy household supplies but I was also able to see two other volunteers: Noor and Nicole. It was great to see some familiar faces because I’m totally isolated from my fellow volunteers out in Salquil Grande. We went to the dispensa (supermarket) to stock up on supplies and buy some kitchenware.

With my new oven mitts it’s always Christmas! I mainly nabbed some food stuffs in the dispensa including parmesan cheese which is going to be absolutely bitchin’ on the pasta that is currently cooking on my stove. That pot gets terribly hot so I had to grab some oven mitts and it being the holiday season means festive designs so I’ll be mashing a print of Santa’s bearded face into the hot metal.

After visiting the dispensa we walked through the marketplace and I bought some relatively unnecessary items. When I was in high school my Uncle Rob changed the way I shaved. He gave me mug with a bar of soap and a brush of badger tail for Christmas. It has always been one of my favorite gifts and I definitely prefer the traditional way of mixing the bar of soap in the mug with the brush and then lathering it on my face as opposed to simply spraying the canned shaving cream. Like most people I shave with the common safety razor but after seeing someone selling straight razors I decided to take the whole traditional shaving method a step further. It’s going to be quite the (painful) trial and error process and the more I read about starting to shave with a cut-throat razor (wonderful name, right?) the more I ask myself what the hell I was thinking buying one. It requires a certain skill to shave with one and it apparently takes about 100 shaves (and innumerable cuts) before you get a handle on it. Might as well try to pick something new up while I’m down here. Let the great experiment begin.

The other unnecessary purchase I made in the market was Titanic II (well maybe it was necessary). I was walking by a DVD stand and lo and behold there it was. I had to pull the trigger on it. Had to. My curiosity was piqued after that previous journal entry where I wrote that I had seen it hanging on a DVD stand. Not surprisingly it was god-awful. So bad that it was unintentionally funny. So while it probably isn’t the best $1.25 I’ve ever spent, it was worth it.

I’m still consuming an absurd amount of tortillas but tamales are more popular in Salquil Grande and they’ve become a staple of my diet here. They’ve already worn out their welcome so I usually cook dinner for myself and afterwards (I’m trying to) ration myself a spoonful of the delicious, crunchy peanut butter I picked up in Quiché.

Little Gems of U.S. Pop Culture

I love the random U.S. pop culture that I come across down here. I find them to be quite special, be it The Shirelles playing on a packed camioneta (Guatemalan buses which are literally old school buses, sometimes with U.S. school district names still written on the side) or Shampoo on TV (when was the last time you heard that movie referenced?). Man it was cool watching infamous lothario Warren Beatty play…well a lothario I guess. Sometimes you come across the most random stuff and it instantly makes you smile. I love it. Hell the other day in the market I saw a DVD titled Titanic 2. Titanic 2? How is that possible? The boat sinks in the first one. I should just buy it next time and find out. Oh and Homer is Homero on Los Simpsons here.