Maybe this doesn’t come as much of a surprise to you. It certainly wouldn’t if you’d been around me the last few weeks and listened to my endless grumbles of “I don’t get paid enough for this” or “I’m not here to play Hilary Swank to a bunch of unmotivated, ungrateful punks.” Because besides the… Read More I Quit My Job
According to the New York Times article More American Expatriates Give Up Citizenship, 743 Americans traded in their citizenship for permanent lives abroad in 2009. And although that’s a minuscule amount compared to the 5.2 million Americans estimated to be living outside the US, it’s a lot compared to the number in 2008 (235) and it’s… Read More Would you ever relinquish your citizenship?
Patriotism by Alex Thomson “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” That’s what the crowd of Americans seated at the table next to mine were shouting. My housemates and I were in a sports bar, eating cheeseburgers and buffalo wings and watching the World Cup football (soccer) match between England and the United States. While this may have resembled… Read More Patriotism: Good or Bad?
Last Saturday I went to Mexico. I ate some tacos, watched the World Cup in an air-conditioned restaurant, bought some toilet paper at Sams Club and then…went back to Guatemala. The entire trip lasted six hours. My tourist visa was about to expire and I needed to get it extended for another three months. And… Read More Visa Run
The Education system in this country is corrupt. I know that this shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering that this is Guatemala, after all. It’s by no accident that two percent of the population live in mansions while the rest of the country (read: the Mayan indigenous population) live under the International poverty line. … Read More Guatemalan Schools are Corrupt (I know. Duh, right?)
As far as places I’ve lived with weirdo customs, Japan definitely takes first prize (remember the Penis Festival?). But you gotta give it to Guatemala for trying. When it’s your birthday here, people have this interesting annoying tradition that involves lighting fire crackers outside the birthday boy or girl’s bedroom door. At dawn. Or sometimes… Read More How’d you like to wake up to THIS on your birthday?
Today at work I was asked to substitute teach the Spanish class. One of the high school Spanish teachers had called out sick and being that I was the only teacher with a free period during that time, I’d been picked to fill-in. Which would have been perfectly fine if it weren’t for one teeny,… Read More That’s Guatemala For Ya
If you read “teaching job in Guatemala” in my last post and envisioned me sweating it out in a humid, windowless shack while my students sat on the dirt floor, shoeless yet eager to learn…well, you’d be a tad bit off with that one. The reality is that I teach in a very posh International… Read More My New Job
My goals for coming to Guatemala were simple: Become fluent in Spanish, write a book and volunteer. Well, thus far I’ve managed to become fluent in SpanGlish, write two-thirds of a book and volunteer for two whole hours at a domestic violence shelter. So basically I’m zero for three on the goal front. But I… Read More I Found a Job!
My roommate shrugged and then said the line that we use so often here it’s practically become our life motto: “Well, that’s Guatemala…” Tweet
