Portland to Guatemala City

As always, we enjoyed the past several days hanging out with our guide to local food in Portland, Eve. We put our stuff into a storage unit, ate lots of food, packed our luggage for Guat, and ate lots of food. We made sure to have plenty of Mexican, Thai, Indian, Italian, and,of course, locally grown organic at one of Portland’s finest restaurants, The Farm, knowing that the form these foods come in may be completely different in Guatemala or simply unavailable. (Yes, Guatemalan food is quite different from Mexican.) Thursday, August 31 We left the US with A TON of luggage (see photo). We checked a total of 6 items, one of which was oversized, 3 of which were overweight. (Kind of like how we were feeling after grazing through Portland’s eateries.) Tyler’s bike box was just 1 pound short of having to pay an additional $100 – SHAZAAAM! High 5! Thanks to Eve’s neighbor Susie for lending us the bathroom scale. We ended up paying $400 bucks to ship all the extra luggage, but we expected it. You either buy new stuff, or schlep your old stuff to the new place. And, the cost of shipping personal items was covered in Cris’ stipend. ☺

The flight from the US to Guat was uneventful. We like uneventful when we’re flying. The crew ran out of customs forms on our plane, so we were told to get some at the airport. Allrighty, then. Upon disembarking, we collected our 409 lbs. of checked luggage, and pushed a groaning cart toward the exit. Two customs officers asked us for our declaration form, which we were hoping to get from them. They sort of looked at each other, looked around on their empty counter, shrugged, and waved us through. KA-CHING! Did someone say, “No waiting”?

We were met at the airport exit by US Cultural Affairs Officer Erica Thibault who accompanied us to The Mariott of Guatemala City, known locally as “The Baby Adoption Hotel”. We’ve been here for less than 24 hours, and we’ve seen between 20 to 30 foreign couples in the lobby holding little Guatemalan babies. Guatemala has no laws regarding adoption by foreign parents. So, for example, while the average number of Mexican babies adopted each year is around 50, the average in Guatemala is 2000. However, what first appears as a warm and cozy proposition (Oh, look at the cute babies. Isn’t it great they’re getting a home!) actually turns out to be one of Guatemala’s most pressing human rights issues, with little protection for the birth parents and allegations of some babies being stolen for adoptions. (For more information on the topic, check out the following site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/879859.stm) So, anybody who knows us and knows our position on having kids, the irony is not lost on them that we have randomly ended up at the principal staging area for “Operation Adopt a Guatemalan Baby”.

Friday, September 1, 2006
Cris met with Erica Thibault and Public Affairs Officer David Young. Later in the afternoon, she met with the US Ambassador to Guatemala, James Durham, in his palatial home. Meanwhile, I meandered through the city to do some bicycle recon. I would have gone directly to my destination, but despite having a map, I got lost several times, causing the meandering. The city seems fairly normal: For example, there’s a big-city bustle, there’s a major pollution problem, drivers are aggressive toward non-motorized traffic. The architecture and behavior of drivers is familiar if you’ve visited Latin America. What surprised me was the amount of heavily armed guards, not those in front of banks but standing in the parking lot of Wendy’s with a giant shotgun or guarding a typical-looking office building with heavy firepower, for example. For a look at the typical type of shotgun you’d see in the streets here, take a look at this photo I pirated from someone else’s site.

One of the most common tree plantings here along city streets between the sidewalk and street is a giant ficus. If you don’t have a ficus benjamina in your house, then you certainly saw one on your last trip to the dentist’s office (see photo right). But imagine this same tree 20-40 feet high. I also saw a schefflera arboricola (see photo left) which I’ve only seen previously in pots, and here they grow with trunks 2 – 3 feet in diameter with root systems 10 – 15 feet wide that rip up the sidewalks and streets. AWESOME! (Stories of street crime have prevented us thus far from taking our cameras out onto the streets to take our own pictures. We’ll be much more at ease once reaching our town of Xela.)

We also met journalist and English Language Fellow Karen Macklin for lunch at Sophos Café (also the best bookstore in town). They had sencha! And lapsang souchong! We had really yummy smoothies – check this out – yogurt, banana, cardamom.

We travel to Xela this Wednesday and we'll post another entry shortly after then.