Estoy aquí, perdida y cansada

Travel was really smooth.  Made connection in San Salvador, no problem, bag didn’t get lost, even though the international airport in Guatemala City blew a transformer yesterday leaving the entire airport with no electricity.  I’m still not entirely sure how planes are landing.  Anyway, couldn’t believe how quickly I got on a bus in Guatemala City headed for Quetzaltenango (a.k.a. Xela, pron. shay-la, shortened from the Quiché Mayan Xelaju).  As soon as we left the sunny valley, torrential rain and a cold breeze followed us through the trip, but we still made it up here in 4 hours.

Studying my map, I figured I’d have no problem finding my way from the Pullman bus station (I was too tired to deal with the sensory overload of a camioneta).  Since Xela is based on a grid, I was sure that even on my most directionally-impaired day, I’d be able to navigate this new small city without getting lost.  Yeah, right. I’m not sure when I became so deluded in thinking that I ever really know where I’m going.  I may have gotten a bit cocky when I figured out that “north” doesn’t mean “whatever direction that is in front of you”.   In Xela, avenidas run north-south and calles run east-west.  Trouble is I had no idea what avenida or calle I was on. And to be honest, I don’t really know when I’m walking north, south, east or west. Sometimes I would think I was on a calle but was really on an avenida—and forget about zona 1 and zona 3.  Quisiera saber donde estázona 2???

Anyway, I walked around for two hours in the wrong zona, on the wrong avenida looking for the wrong calle. In the rain. Finally a taxi driver approached the hopelessly lost version of me and directed me to the area I wanted to be in, which I definitely WAS NOT in.   I understood his Spanish directions perfectly and finally ended up near the Parque Centroamérica, where I found a clean hotel for $6/night—Hotel Moriani, on 12a avenida y 2a calle (or is it 2a avenida y 12 calle?)

After dropping my bags, I set out to figure out this crazy grid system and got lost again.  I’m blaming it on being really, really tired and really, really hungry, because even I couldn’t be this confused.  When I finally found my street again, I decided to stick to a three block straight line from it, making sure I could at least see the corner of the block where my hotel is.  Found a cute little restaurant that served traditional Xela dishes, had some pepián de pollo con tamalitos y sopa, yuuummmmm, then came to this cafe to post.  Yes, I can still see my hotel from here.