Salamá

After a noisy night in my (very nice) hotel room in which I didn't get
much sleep (I was within earshot of at least three evangelical
protestant services at one point), I decided that it was time to find a
new place to stay, and as long as I was packing everything up and
heading out of the hotel, I might as well just move on to Salamá, which
will probably be my base for my next case study, unless there's a place
to stay in San Jerónimo (the lonely planet book doesn't mention anything...)

So I packed up my stuff, and headed out to find the microbus station,
from whence I hopped on and headed to Salamá, about an hour and a half away.

I commented to the Peace Corps folks in Uspantán the other day how easy
it is to get around Guatemala. They looked at me like I was nuts, but
it really is easy to get around this little tiny country, once you
figure out how things work. The cities are really quite close together,
and even the really rural stuff is usually within a couple of hours of a
major town. You can't head out with a real stringent schedule and hope
to stick to it, but it really is remarkably easy to get from one place
to another.

I'm just glad that I only have a small backpack and a little shoulder
bag. When I head on to Bolivia, I'll also plan on cutting the size of
the baggage down. I've dropped some things along the way, but I'm
pretty sure I can go even smaller. Don't need as many clothes, among
other things. It's easy to get around, but it's a little tricky when
you're switching buses at noisy, confusing highway junctions when you've
got a bunch of luggage.

Incidentally, _The Simpsons_ isn't funny in Spanish.

Salamá is a nifty little town. It's a lot hotter here than in the
highlands--we're still surrounded by mountains here (really beautiful
ones), but it probably got up into the mid-80s today. And it's humid.
Amazing how, in just a couple of hours, you can go from sweaters to palm
trees. Noisy and

I had this really good taco-like thing tonight for dinner. It had this
thick, wheat flour tortilla, and it was filled with steak and cabbage.
Excellent, but I'm not sure if the cabbage was cooked or not. Hope it
doesn't make me sick.

Before my Cena Peligrosa, I took a walk up to this beautiful little
chapel on a hill which has really good views of the surrounding
countryside. Took a couple of pictures, which I'll put up when I get
the internet again (probably not for a while). The chapel is called
"Calvary." Appropriate, since it's on a hill, but it strikes me as a
little gruesome that the place the Romans used to torture and kill
dissidents and criminals has found its way into our culture that way...
"The Place of the Skull," if I remember correctly--that's what Calvary
means. Was that in Jerusalem? Can't remember.