Into the light

(for readers who don't follow this regularly, ie every day, please read Bible-lenght entry below for background before reading this one)

Ahh. Acclimatization city! After a second night of murderless sleep I am feeling a whole lot more comfortable. The presumed-harmful-guatemalans-rate is now down from about 99% the first day to - well, let's say 2% (at least in daytime), which you can probably imagine gives me some time enjoy myself a little more than what was the case in my previous entry. I was up at 8, on to a marvellous breakfast; it cost a whopping 50 quetzales ($6.50) for eggs, bacon, bread, some vegetables, sausage, pudding, coffee and a lemonade. This would the price of the lemonade - 'twas real lemonade, mind you - in my beloved Norway. An expensive, fancy place, it was, live chilling music and all! Satisfied and - well, energetic is perhaps an overstatement, but at least normalised, I then gladly left my home/prison for the last two nights, the far-from-cozy hotel Shalom. Then there was my first taxi experience, which went well, up to the terminal from where the chicken bus was cackling a welcome to its soon-to-be old friend. I'm actually beginning to enjoy these chicken buses, they're sort of a relaxed way of travelling, and you get to see a lot. My destination (where I am now) was Huehuetenango, which is abot 2 hrs north from Xela on the way to Todos Santos Cuchumatán - that's where I am heading tomorrow for Spanish classes. The ride up here was quite picturesque; forest-clad hills and valleys; scattered population most places, with drought-ridden patches of farmland awaiting next months rainy season; horses and cows grassing here and there, the cows often tied to the stick-and-rope we norwegians only know from cartoons; indigenous women flashing their tits in creekbeds (well, there was one); people in hats, everywhere, yes; indeed this is a nation of hats: pale tourists in stupid mosquito hats - I've not yet bought one; young and grown-up locals in baseball hats or the like; grown-up and older people in indigenous hats or cowboy hats; yes, they actually have politicians on election posters posing in cowboy hats here; hehehehe; I bet what they don't yet have is a local variant of the wonderful american expression "all hat and no cattle", or these guys would be sitting ducks; I'm definitely having one of those cowboy hats. This wonderful two-hour Guatemala documentary - yes, the one outside the window of the bus, stupid - cost Q15 (=$2). Anyway, I'm hungry again. And much less paranoid, thank God. The only thing lacking the first night was a scottish suicidal neighbor going on about a secret city of Mayans deep inside the jungle, where happiness and honey and milk prevailed - providing me with a map before blowing his brains out. It would have made sense then and there, that's what's scary.