Navajazo

I love how the Spanish language has words for things that English does not. What would take 3 or 4 English words to describe can oftentimes be summed up with one Spanish word.

Example:

Navajazo – a knife wound

Navajera – a female criminal armed with a knife

Navajero – a male criminal armed with a knife

With information such as this I usually like to invent new –ar verbs like navajazar – to stab someone with a knife. It should be a real word.

Bean Powder

I don't know about beans made from powder, especially given that two of the listed ingredients are chicken meat and chicken fat. I guess these aren't vegetarian friendly beans.

Rodeo Boy

This kid who performed at the Tactic rodeo had a Vicente Fernandez type amazing voice and was quite the ham which made for a very entertaining intermission.

A diputado (Congressman) from Alta Verapaz

Guatemala's Starbucks

Unfortunately there aren’t any Starbucks in Guatemala. (Perhaps the fact that most Guatemalans would have to work more than a day to afford a cup of coffee from there has something to do with that.) No, instead of there being a Starbucks on every corner, in Guatemala the sacred fried chicken joint Pollo Campero gets the ubiquitous chain award.

The picture below is of Calzada Roosevelt (pronounced ruse-e-belt), the road that heads out of Guatemala City to Antigua or Chimaltengo, depending on which fork you take (I highly suggest the one that leads to Antigua). The Pollo Campero sign circled on the left does not belong to the Pollo Campero restaurant circled on the right. No, just out of view of this picture is another Pollo Campero restaurant that sits directly across the street from the visible one. And there is also another Pollo Campero in the Tikal Futura shopping center (next to where I took this picture) as well as another in the adjacent Miraflores shopping mall. That is four Pollo Campero restaurants in less than a square mile radius. Now that’s a lot of chicken.


On a related side note: While Guatemalans love PC’s (that is Pollo Campero, not Peace Corps) chicken, they generally find the establishment’s tortillas to be lacking, in both quantity and flavor. So, where there is a Pollo Campero, there is at least one woman sitting outside the front door with a basket full of tortillas. People will buy a Q or 2 worth of tortillas and bring them inside to enjoy with their meal. I would love to see how a set up like that would go over at McDonald’s.

Test Day

13 hundred hours.

In t minus 1 1/2 hours I'll be taking a test that will decide the future course of my life. Okay, so perhaps the GMAT isn't quite that important, but I worry that if I perform poorly, I'll spend the rest of my days as a sandwich artist at Subway (no offense to you current sandwich artists). However, if I do well, I could be the manager of those sandwich artists.

You've got to dream big.

Tactic Fútbol

Kilos & Pounds

I was reading a Prensa article the other week about a police seizure of over 100 kilos of cocaine in two separate operatives. It made me curious. Why do the US and Guatemala use the metric system when referring to quantities of drugs while they use the English system for most everything else? (Well, Guatemala is actually English/metric mixed depending on if its volume, weight, or distance, but trying to explain that is for another post.)

But thinking more on this kilo/drug connection, I realized it isn’t for all drugs. You never hear about the police catching someone with a kilo or grams of marijuana. It’s pounds and ounces for weed.

Is there actually some good reason for this, or is it just custom? I suppose I could ask one of the local traffickers for his insight, but really I’m not that curious.