Café!

Coffee! How does it grow? How is it made into a delicious hot drink? If you have wondered about these things - I definitely did - look at this Guatemalan coffee farm and production center that we visited.

Above is Alex, our tour guide, telling us all about the baby coffee plants. Supposedly men are actually "coffee killers" because their hands are the wrong pH for the plants, and since women's hands are more alkaline, only women are allowed to handle the baby plants. He emphasized the difference between Arabica coffee beans, which are picked only when they are very red and ripe, not green or brown. 

After you pick these, you squeeze each berry and out pop two beans. They are covered in a slime that is removed and used to make Kahlua. Then all the beans are dried out in the sun for a few days.

After they dry out, you pop off the last layer of skin and you have your un-roasted coffee beans. On my palm are two dried ones with their outer layer, and two peeled ones ready to be roasted near my fingers.

You can apparently roast them the Rrench way, the Italian way, or the Mexican way. But here are the roasted  beans. Yum!

Lake Atitlán

On our day off, we went to a lake surrounded by three volcanoes. We drove down into the valley on a steep road with views out across the blue, blue place, and then took a boat across to a town. (sorry for how off-center this picture is, I think it's the boat's fault).  Even though the town was absolutely packed with little shops and vendors trying to sell anything and everything that could be sold, it was worth the harassment for the hot day on the water. Swimming was not allowed, because it is a spiritual place to many Mayan-descended villages around the shore and because it is pretty grimy.

Antigua

We stayed in a hotel in Antigua, the old Spanish colonial capitol of Guatemala. It has cobbleumblstone streets, lots of tourists, crumbling colorful churches that are half a century old, and hundreds of shops and street markets. On our last afternoon in Guatemala, we walked up the hill where this cross overlooks the city.

Our hotel had a couple of indoor courtyards with fountains, and also a rooftop terrace.

 The views from the roof... three volcanoes!
Surprise flowers hanging from the ceilings of the walkways.

 A spectacular sunset seen from the roof one evening. The biggest volcanoe, Agua, looms over the rooves of the rest of the city. It is active, and has erupted with lava flows many times since the Spanish built the city in the 1500s.

 Since we were there during lent, we got to see the procession. Every Sunday night during lent, or cuaresma, all the boys and men in the town carry an enormous statue through the streets on their shoulders, passing it on and on so each group of people takes a turn with the monstruous thing. Just goes to show how important Roman Catholicism is in Guatemala, since these traditions still hold strong today.

The funniest part of Antigua was our dessert choice the last day: choco bananos! Frozen bananas covered in chocolate. The picture says it all.

Guatemala

With a group of 11 Bowdoin students, I had the opportunity to go to Guatemala for part of my spring break and volunteer for a few days with the organization Safe Passage in Guatemala City. We stayed in Antigua, the old Spanish colonial capitol, and took a van into the city every day to work in the project. The neighborhood adjacent to the city dump, or zones 3 and 7 of the city, are very dangerous, very crowded, and very low-income. A Bowdoin alum named Hanley started this organization in the 1990s to help keep the kids in these neighborhoods away from working in the dump and give them an educational boost.

Two support teams went down to work with Safe Passage during the same week. The picture above is of all of us, both the Bowdoin student group and the Bowdoin alumni group.

What did we do? We taught lots of English classes to help out the regular volunteer English teachers, and we brought supplies to do art projects with 7th graders and high school students. Above is a picture of my team with our winning tower - one of the art projects was a toothpick and gumdrop construction competition. The other project was yarn art. The English lessons were challenging with the younger kids, simply because we had to keep them on task and try to help them remember family words ("siblings" was a hard one to remember, as was "wife"). But it was great to meet all of them, and I'm very glad that I already knew how to speak Spanish before going on this trip.

One day we got to work in the Escuelita, the nursery school for 2 to 6-year-olds (above are the 3-year olds at lunchtime). I worked in the kitchen and in the 6-year-old classroom, which was quite the experience. I got tickled and hugged and kissed and had oranges smeared all over me by the time I was done, but the best part made up for all the scariness, which was reading to them. I climbed into their loft and read them books, and at the end recieved a compliment from one of them: I said something in English and he said ¿sabes inglés? as if it was the most ridiculous thing ever.


On our days off, we went on excursions to places farther away from montsruous Guatemala City and touristy Antigua. More to come.

Pascua de Navidad and Penguins

Christmas in Chile is celebrated almost exactly the same way it is in  North America - presents, christmas tree, cookies, etc. The one thing that's really missing is snow. Also the christmas trees are usually very small and fake, so that my host family kept getting frustrated because the cat kept knocking it over.

Also in my house they make cookies to sell by the pound, and I was so impressed with the quantity of dough it took to make 10 pounds of cookies - just the first batch - that I had to take a picture. This dough was for the fefeküchen or pepper-dough cookies, which are like gingerbread cookies in their shapes but with everything in them, literally everything from oranges to chives.

Another sort of wintry thing we saw even though it was summer: penguins!

They were on the island of Chiloé near the town of Chepu. Magellan's penguins like their privacy, so of course they were on an island that you can on get to at low tide. We walked along the coast a few miles and got across the beach to the island and back before the tide came in.

This is my last Chile blog. Goodbye and merry christmas, or ¡feliz pascua de navidad!