Another morning of Spanish lessons. No progress so far. Two more days to go.
I have another student staying at the house I live in. Her name is June and she is a geology teacher in San Jose, California and is on sabbatical for a year. She is very fluent in Spanish but wants to touch up on the finer points of the language. She has lived in several different countries in South America and has traveled many places in the world. She has been struggling with the food we have been getting here and I think is having a much harder time than I am. I am just starving while she doesn’t like the plain cheap food. It doesn’t taste bad to me, but then again it doesn’t taste good either. After lunch today she asked if I wanted to try to go to the café museum and maybe try the massage place. That sounded good to me as my shoulder has been giving me hell probably from sleeping on it wrong. It is the one I have hurt several times and the last being the motorcycle accident I had three months ago. We finally found the café museum and it was really interesting. It is located in an old coffee plantation and they had all the machines as well as old machines that they processed the coffee. I had no idea how coffee was grown and harvested and this was a really nice museum with English language information as well as Spanish. Oh, actually there was a museum of music there as well. It was fascinating to see the instruments as well as they had a video of the indigenous people playing and in local costume at celebrations.
As we were leaving there was a sign that pointed to a nature trail that we took.
It was interesting to see the coffee trees in seedling stages as well as the mature bush/trees that the coffee beans were just starting to ripen on. In Guatemala they grow the bushes under shade trees which makes superior coffee compared to Brazil where they grow it out in the sun which make more coffee but poorer quality.
There were quite a variety of flowers on the nature trail as it went through some sort of nursery or something.
I think they grow flowers there as well as plants for landscaping around the grounds. I got a few flower photos so I will try to get a few posted.
After the tour of the café, music and flowers we headed back and June was able to talk with several people and get directions to the massage place. She did all the talking and got me in the right spot and a guy worked me over for about a half hour. It looks like it cost about seven bucks or 55 Quetzals. I tried to give the guy the info that I wanted him to work on the dang shoulder but that didn’t go over very well. Dang, they have this routine that they go through and he didn’t want to vary his treatment. The dang shoulder didn’t get much work and still is stiff. I will try again some other place down the road if the opportunity presents itself.
On the walk back to our house we passed a little shop that was grinding corn and making tortilla dough. This was a really nice commercial rig much bigger than the little one I posted a photo of a while back. At least I think I got it posted. This one had a spigot over the grain tray and it was wetted down as it went into the grinder. The dough that came out the bottom was scooped up and placed in that big tub. I guess they must have been grinding for the evening market. I actually didn’t look around the shop and they might be just sellers of the ground mixed meal or they could have had a tortilla making machine there as well. I see some Indian ladies making tortillas on the street on old oil drum lids over charcoal fires and I am sure they must buy the dough and not have any way of grinding the meal on the street.
