(Did I say I'd try to keep these short? Mmmmmmmm-oops.)
Jump back in to time to Saturday, the day we arrived in Nebaj. We went to an archeology museum (and had a fun time gaining admission, which is another story) and saw a lot of pottery and talked to a young man named Diego. This was the first of 3 Diegos we were to encounter.
The museum was started by a Protestant pastor who saw the need to preserve the history of the Ixil people. A huge amount of artifacts and treasures from Guatemala are owned by museums or private collectors in other countries, so this man wanted Nebaj to hold onto its own history. The museum building used to be a church.
The coolest thing I saw there were these big clay jars used to bury corpses. The Ixil used to bury their dead in the fetal position: since that's the way people come into the world, that's the way they should leave. There's only one other location in Guatemala where archaeologists have found bodies buried in the fetal position. (That's also how they were buried in Chile.)
Diego and his friend painted all of these pictures.
Diego gave us some advice about where to go to next to learn more about Nebaj, which leads to our next adventure...
He told us to go to la Pista, a little town just outside of Nebaj. It was the site of a lot of killings during the war. We took a microbús there on Sunday, and it truly was a one street town. We poked around a little bit and farther down a dirt road some little kid shouted "GRINGOS!" Clearly, they don't get a lot of tourists. There wasn't anything to do so we bought some Coca-colas and sat down on a curb to watch the world go by. It went by very slowly.
This isn't "the road" of the one road town, just to be clear.
We thought that since we were there we might as well walk around some more, so we went up the hill and followed the main road past a school and some fields with horses. The road became very wide, oddly wide, and stretched on for a long ways.
At the urgency of someone's bladder we returned to the main street to find a bathroom. We asked and were directed to someone's house. They just let people use their toilet pit, I guess. While we were waiting for the bus outside a store Grace saw someone inside she recognized: it was Diego from the museum! He asked if we saw la pista and we answered yes -- that was the name of the town wasn't it? After thirty seconds of us describing what we had seen, which was not much, Diego realized we didn't know what a pista was. "Did you see where the planes land?" he asked us. OOOH. So that's what that big wide road was for!
Later that day we took a took-took to the outskirts of Nebaj where Diego had told us there was a Maya ceremony site. The driver didn't know exactly what we were talking about but gave it his best guess. We walked down a little path between farms until we came to the site, a fire pit. It would have been disappointing if the scenery hadn't been so dang pretty. The took-took driver had advised us to continue walking up the hill where he dropped us off in order to see Nebaj from the top. We did just that, and it was even more dang pretty.
Monday morning we left Nebaj. There was some confusion getting on the bus because we wanted to go to el Quiché, but the bus assistant replied "yes, we're going to Santa Cruz." "No no!" we said, "where's the bus to el Quiché?" The assistant looked at us like we were idiots, which we probably were, and clarified, "Santa Cruz del Quiché!"
We enjoyed some giggly conversation with two young ladies on the way to el Quiché. They advised us not to marry people from different cultures because we do things differently -- the example they gave was a Guatemalan husband wanting fried plantains and tortillas for breakfast and we North American girls not wanting to cook that. My solution was that he could make his own tortillas, which was either not the right answer or a very right answer because an older woman in front of us almost choked from trying to keep from laughing out loud.
After an hour of laughing with them we learned they both had children of about eight years old. They were in their early twenties, just two or three years older than us. We tried to contain our surprise -- they started having kids when we were in the middle of high school. There's nothing shocking about that, but after chatting for a long time we perceived them as girls, very giggly girls, who played on their phones and wanted to be facebook friends and were crammed in this van together with us. And only after that did we learn about a huge difference between our lives.
One of the few pictures that isn't blurry, taken on the bus ride from Nebaj. Only three crazy buses and five hours to Antigua.
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