Vietnam Summer Pix

The List, updated

Places I’ve been in the past six years, in no particular order (times in parenthesis if visited more than once):

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)
Nha Trang
Guatemala City
Antigua, Guatemala (3)
Amatitlan
Santa Cruz la Laguna, Lago Atitlan
Panajachel, Lago Atitlan
San Pedro La Laguna, Lago Atitlan
Jocotenango
San Jose, Costa Rica
Alajuela
Tortuguero
La Fortuna (Volcan Arenal)
Bocas Del Toro
Tikal
San Salvador
Granada, Nicaragua
Paris (3)
Lyon
Marseilles
Iles du Frioul
Cassis
Barcelona (2)
Mallorca
Cinque Terre (2)
Amsterdam (4)
Lisse
Siena
Prague (2)
Vienna (2)
Rome (2)
Venice (2)
Florence
Shanghai
Guangzhou
Hangzhou
Suzhou
Shenzen
Taipei
Kaoshuing
Hong Kong (3)
Macau
Lantau
Cheung Chau
Bangkok
Phuket (2)
Phi Phi (2)
Ko Chang
Siem Reap (Angkor Wat)
Oahu
Puerto Nuevo (10+)
New York City

Guatemala again...again!

Alright. I just can't help myself. It's an addiction.

When I see a $50 each way flight to Guatemala I just CANNOT stop myself from taking it. So on labor day weekend, I'm headed to yet another Guatemalan excursion.

This time I am trying my hand at tour-guiding and leading a group of 9 other people. It's a bigger group than I've ever traveled with, but I think it will be fun, especially since it's only for 3 nights.

More pictures, of course to come.

But first... VIETNAM! I leave in exactly 10 days.

Guatemala May 2007 pix

guatemala, here i come again!

Two weeks ago Spirit Air had a sale. LAX <--> Guatemala City, nonstop, $88 each way.
If you've been reading me long enough, you know how fast I was all over that.

I'm leaving, with my love, four friends and my cousin, to spend one night on the shores of magical Lake Atitlan, a quick jaunt up a volcano, and two nights in the old colonial town of Antigua, nestled between three volcanoes. We'll be staying here and here.

I can't wait!

Stop. Listen.

In this astonishing article, the Washington Post wages the experiment: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

What happens when you take one of the world's most acclaimed classical musicians, playing a $3 million Stradivarius, and have him play at a subway station during rush hour? How much money do you think he'd make? How many people would stop to listen?

Read the article and watch the video clips.

Consider: how often do you, in your rush to fulfill the banal, repetitive obligations that take up your days....how often do you stop and listen, observe, watch? How much of our lives do we simply let slip by unnoticed?

The Promotion

I was a dog in my former life, a very good dog, and, thus, I was promoted to a human being.

I liked being a dog. I worked for a poor farmer guarding and herding his sheep.
Wolves and coyotes tried to get past me almost every night, and not once did I lose a sheep. The farmer rewarded me with good food, food from his table. He may have been poor, but he ate well. And his children played with me, when they weren’t in school or working in the field. I had all the love any dog could hope for. When I got old, they got a new dog, and I trained him in the tricks of the trade.

He quickly learned, and the farmer brought me into the house to live with them. I brought the farmer his slippers in the morning, as he was getting old, too. I was dying slowly, a little bit at a time. The farmer knew this and would bring the new dog in to visit me from time to time. The new dog would entertain me with his flips and flops and nuzzles. And then one morning I just didn’t get up. They gave me a fine burial down by the stream under a shade tree. That was the end of my being a dog. Sometimes I miss it so I sit by the window and cry. I live in a high-rise that looks out at a bunch of other high-rises. At my job I work in a cubicle and barely speak to anyone all day. This is my reward for being a good dog. The human wolves don’t even see me.

They fear me not.

~James Tate

new year

it's strange, this feeling of starting something entirely new--again. usually when i pick up and move somewhere, it's to someplace very far away from home, in another country, across the globe--but i know exactly when i'll be coming back. now, i'm up north of L.A. at a new job and in a new house and sometimes i feel like i'm living someone else's life.

it's also so weird having an answer to the question: so, what do you do? what kind of career are you in? i'd always been working towards something before...but suddenly, i find that i have arrived. it's jarring, and not a little surreal. a beginner again.

winter reading

Picked up a pile of books at Borders the other day. Can't wait to snuggle in bed and plow through them.

Veronika Decide Morir (original Spanish language edition)by Paulo Coelho

Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser

Aloft by Chang Rae Lee

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, by Helen Fielding

Infectious Greed, by Frank Partnoy

The Millionaire Mind by Thomas J. Stanley

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

I PASSED!!!!!

thank you god. thank you, everyone, for your support, and for believing in me. thank you thank you thank you thank you.

clean sweep

The House. The Senate. Rummy leaving. I am so, so relieved--and for the first time in a long time, optimistic about the future of this country.

too much food network!

I have been cooking up a storm since I've been back.

Dinner last night:
Fish stew (tilapia, red snapper, clams, squid, veggies in a clam chowder, sauvignon blanc and creme fraiche base)
Butter and garlic pan seared giant scallops
Sourdough for dipping

Dinner tonight:
Tagliatelle bake with sweet italian sausage and ground turkey and four cheeses
Roasted fennel and carrots in herbs and shaved parmesan
Polenta, pan fried in garlic and then topped with shredded parmesan and baked until parmesan is crispy
Butternut squash soup, made from scratch (my friend Mat made this and it was delicious)!
Balsamic glazed raosted brussels sprouts
Columbia Crest Two Vines Shiraz

Here is the recipe for the Butternut squash soup, which is absolutely scrumptious.

BUTTERNUT SQUASH SOUP
1 Butternut Squash
1 whole head of garlic
Chicken stock
Olive Oil
Salt
Pepper
Nutmeg
Curry Powder

Cut squash into quarters, remove seeds and membrane. Rub with oil, salt, pepper, and a little curry powder and nutmeg. Wrap in foil. Cut top off of head of garlic, drizzle with oil, wrap in foil. Place squash and garlic on BBQ grill, close lid, and grill for about 40 minutes, or until squash is roasted and soft. Let cool a little. Remove from foil, scoop out squash and squeeze out garlic from casing. Puree in small batches in blender with chicken stock. Transfer to pot, re-heat, sprinkle some more nutmeg if desired. YUM!

Photo album is up!

Here it is, 101 photos of Central America. Click to view!

Central America, Summer 2006

Oct 10, 2006 - 101 Photos

Mayan temple, Tikal, Guatemala

That's me way at the bottom!  

The List, updated

Places I’ve been in the past five years, in no particular order (times in parenthesis if visited more than once):

Guatemala City
Antigua, Guatemala
Amatitlan
Jocotenango
San Jose, Costa Rica
Alajuela
Tortuguero
La Fortuna (Volcan Arenal)
Bocas Del Toro
Tikal
San Salvador
Granada, Nicaragua
Paris (3)
Lyon
Marseilles
Iles du Frioul
Cassis
Barcelona (2)
Mallorca
Cinque Terre (2)
Amsterdam (4)
Lisse
Siena
Prague (2)
Vienna (2)
Rome (2)
Venice (2)
Florence
Shanghai
Guangzhou
Hangzhou
Suzhou
Taipei
Kaoshuing
Hong Kong (3)
Macau
Bangkok
Phuket
Phi Phi
Ko Chang
Siem Reap (Angkor Wat)
Oahu
Vegas (10+)
Puerto Nuevo (6)
New York City

convento san francisco, antigua

  

back

i'm back! the flight was quite arduous (guatemala city to san jose, costa rica, overnight in san jose, san jose to miami, overnight in miami, miami to LAX). my body reacted by developing a large cold sore. i'm not leaving the house until it disappears.

Mouse has forgotten about me, and I am heartbroken. She seems to view me as an unwelcome extra presence in the house, a disruption to her blissful coexistence with my boyfriend. They curl up in bed together and cast hostile stares me way.

doorway, antigua

  

tal vez: perhaps

VIII. TAL VEZ...

Tal vez ya no le importa mi gemido
en el indiferente edén callado
en que el espíritu desencarnado
vive como dormido...
Tal vez ni sabe ya cómo he llorado
ni cómo he padecido.

En profundo quietismo,
su alma, que antes me amara de tal modo,
se desliza glacial por ese abismo
del eterno mutismo,
olvidada de sí, de mí, de todo...

- Amado Nervo (Chilean poet, 1870-1919)

mariposa negra

Last night while we were eating dinner, the duena (landlady) came to talk to my host mom. The corner convenience store had just been robbed. My roomates and I stared around the table at one another, frozen to our seats. The store is not 75 feet from where we were sitting, and we had heard nothing.

I thought about the night before, when I had walked there alone at 10:30pm, to buy apple juice. I remembered the bored-looking clerks, two of them, young men, who explained to me that one of the refrigerators was broken so if I wanted cold juice, I would have to buy apple, and not grape, as I had originally asked for. I thought about what could have happened if I had chosen to go a day later.

We briefly considered not going out that night, but decided to go dancing anyway. Spent the night dancing (or in my case, trying to dance) to salsa at a club called Casbah under the arch.

Today at lunch, Dona marta told us that there is a black trash bag tied to the door of hte store in the shape of a bow or butterfly. The clerk had not just been robbed--he had been shot dead.

It seems to wrong that at the exact moment I was sitting down at dinner, discussing where to go dancing that night, less than half a black away someones life was slipping away.

There are 200 violent attacks, mostly robberies and mostly in the capital, on the camionetas (chicken buses) every day. Every other day or two the newspapers fill up with the count of people who had been shot dead on the buses that day. Last friday, there were 12. Yet every afternoon, the buses roll by, packed to the gills with passengers and laden with luggage tied to the roof.

Don´t Move

Once in awhile I come across a book that grips me and doesn´t let go until I have stayed up all night with it, fell asleep clutching it with the lights on, cried into my sheet, and spent the whole next day reading very, very slowly for fear it will end. Don´t Move, by Margaret Mazzantini, is one of those books. It is incredibly graphic, vulgar, gripping, heart-rending and gorgeously written.

English language books sell at a premium here in Antigua, so it behoves me to trade my used copy of this book in for a discount on teh next book I buy. But I can´t. This one I´m lugging all the way home.

antigua

nine days left until i leave for san jose to connect to miami to connect to LAX.

over the weekend, my host mom took me to a Quincinera in a neighboring pueblo. The whole town seemed to be there, dancing and celebrating the coming of age of a striking young woman.

My roommate and I met a very friendly family with tons of rambunctious kids at the party, who invited us over the next day for lunch. We arrived Sunday morning and spent a good part of the day teaching the kids oragami. Nancy, the mother, is the same age as I am. She has 4 kids, three her own and one ridiculously cute baby girl that she and her husband adopted a month ago. they are such a happy family, and the parents are so full of love for each other and their children. the kids and parents take turns hugging and adoring the baby. all of them live in a 1 bedroom concrete house about 200 square feet in size, but what they lack in material wealth they more than make up for in an abundance of laughter and smiles.

lax to gua for $188

yes you read that correctly. LAX to Guatemala City, round trip, for $188. dates are december thru march. Check farecompare.com leaving from LAX and you will find it...at least until it runs out. this is so cheap it makes me want to....oh wait....yes.... i´m already IN guatemala.


Update: Deal is no longer available. Sigh.

comida guatemalteco

i love guatemalan food. love. it.

i don´t know what all the dishes are called, but they are delicious! there is a lot of rice, so i don´t miss chinese food as much as i thought i would.

my host mom doesn´t need to spend that much money on the food she feeds us, but she takes pride in her cooking, and for good reason. other students are not fed meat every day, since their families scrimp on food in order to keep more of the money we pay them. but not marta. she feeds me heaps of meat, usually 3 times a day.

this morning i had pancakes with papaya, banana, watermelon, melon and pineapple for breakfast. for lunch i had pepion, a typical guatemalteco dish with chicken in a spicy chile puree over rice. i cannot wait to see what´s for dinner!

i am attending a salsa & merengue dance class this afternoon. tomorrow i am visiting a macadamia farm, wednesday i am taking a bike tour of the city, and later this week i am visiting a coffee plantation. the cost of all activities, 4 hours of private one on one spanish instruction per day, lodging in an adorable house, and 3 meals a day is $165. that´s less than i would spend per week if i were living in san diego and eating cheap food every day. i will really miss it here when i leave in 3 weeks.