Four Interesting Things About Guatemala

1. Beans
I do love beans, especially black beans, and the way they fix them down here is fantastic. They are pretty much a staple, which is fine, but does leaves one’s stomach in a state of, shall we say, borderline distress. I guess that’s enough to say about that. (But I do love them, and the tortillas, too, which are unlike anything you can get in the States.)

2. Chocolate
Ohmygodthechocolate. I didn’t really take the time to experiment and learn more about the chocolate here the last time I was in the country. The Mayans were the first to discover the joys of chocolate thousands of years ago, and boy, do they know how to do it. My favorite is chocolate puro, which is just fantastic dark chocolate heated in hot water, but you can have it made with milk, coffee, whipped cream, cinnamon…… yum. Needless to say, I bought a hunk of it to bring back with me.

3. Parking
The way folks down here have to manipulate their cars would drive most Americans crazy. Not only are the streets narrow and crowded for driving , if you’re lucky enough to have a place to park your car (which is generally in a courtyard of your house behind huge steel or wooden doors), the process goes something like this when you come home at night: pull up in front of your house on a crowded little street and hope that there’s a place nearby where you can park it temporarily; unlock and push open the gate to the courtyard of your house; get in your car and maneuver it back and forth, back and forth in the narrow street until it’s positioned to back into your drive. Slowly back the car up and over the low curb, into the narrow opening of the gate, and into its narrow space in your courtyard; close and lock the huge gate.

Fun, huh?

4. Malls
I just found out the other day that they have two big malls here - one of them is humungous, with a big parking lot and everything. Talk about culture shock in Central America………