{"id":445,"date":"2010-09-22T22:38:31","date_gmt":"2010-09-23T04:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/?p=445"},"modified":"2010-09-22T22:38:31","modified_gmt":"2010-09-23T04:38:31","slug":"me-te-se-lo-la-le-les-nos-odio-los-pronombres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/me-te-se-lo-la-le-les-nos-odio-los-pronombres\/","title":{"rendered":"me, te, se, lo, la, le, les, nos…ODIO los pronombres"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Mi maestro, Carlos, after he reviewed my homework on the bus to San Francisco last Friday.<\/p><\/div>\n

And I thought the past was bad.\u00a0 I wonder if I had this much trouble with direct and indirect objects when I was learning English grammar.\u00a0 I felt like my brain actually just stopped working.\u00a0 And I thought Carlos was going to choke me today.\u00a0 Good news is that I\u00b4m definitely speaking in complete sentences using different tenses and moods\u00a0correctly.\u00a0 We did the conditional yesterday and that was fun and easy.\u00a0 For homework last night, Carlos asked me to write a composition about El Futuro de Patricia<\/em> using the conditional and all I could come up with was what I might be doing in a few weeks.\u00a0 I tried to tell him that me and the future don\u00b4t get along as well as me and the present.\u00a0 He thinks I\u00b4m absolutely nuts.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Of course,\u00a0I ended up writing\u00a0about where I would like to travel and something about paying my rent.\u00a0 I bored myself writing it.\u00a0 But he thinks I\u00b4m doing really well (sans our hysterical pronoun fiasco today) and even said \u00b4wow\u00a8 a couple of times at a few of my sentences that I didn\u00b4t stumble over.\u00a0 Poco a poco<\/em> I\u00b4m gaining confidence.\u00a0 Today, I went to the mercado<\/em> to get some pechugas de pollo<\/em> and verduras <\/em>and I had natural conversations about what I wanted and how much I wanted.\u00a0 IT WAS GREAT!!!\u00a0 This is really a big accomplishment para mi.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 First of all, markets are incredibly busy and frenetic and while I love wandering through\u00a0them, I\u00b4m a little intimidated to actually BUY something.\u00a0 Everyone speaks so fast and there seem to be rules I know nothing about.\u00a0 Sort of like delis at lunchtime\u00a0in NYC where if\u00a0I don\u00b4t know the line system, I\u00a0just go somewhere else.\u00a0And also, of course, there is the possibility that someone will rip me off 20 cents for cilantro and well, I just can\u00b4t have that!\u00a0 I like prices written on, or dangling from, the object I\u00a0wish to purchase.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I bought some basil there last week\u00a0but\u00a0I was hoping\u00a0I could find it, point to it and pay for it.\u00a0 Nope, I had to ask other vendors\u00a0which stall had\u00a0basil and then I had to communicate how much I wanted AND be understood, and then ask how much it cost. Twice or three times.\u00a0\u00a0Which is why I shop in the crappy supermercado<\/em>.\u00a0 \u00a0But I actually enjoyed\u00a0shopping in the crazy market today.\u00a0\u00a0So,\u00a0bye bye Dispensa<\/em>, hello\u00a0scary market behind the church!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

No matter how good my Spanish gets I don\u00b4t think I\u00b4ll ever buy a live pig.<\/p><\/div>\n

Even though I have been working and studying so much, I still took another great little trip anteayer <\/em>to Zunil after school.\u00a0 It was a small group, just me, Cesar and Rory (a new student at Celas Maya)\u00a0but it was amazing.\u00a0 As soon as we boarded the camioneta<\/em>, it started to rain and when we got to Zunil, the rain turned into a downpour of biblical proportion.\u00a0 At one point we were stuck\u00a0in a house with an evil saint while\u00a0a river raged outside in what was a cobbled street\u00a0just\u00a0a half hour earlier.\u00a0 First we visited a textile cooperative and then the church and then the Maximon (a.k.a. \u00a0San\u00a0Sim\u00f3n)\u00a0shrine, which was the main reason I wanted to visit this small pueblo.\u00a0 It\u00b4s one of the few towns in Guatemala that\u00a0preserve an authentic tradition of worshiping this crazy pagan saint.\u00a0 Cesar told us he\u00b4s the protector of prostitutes and drunks and knew where Maximon is living this year\u00a0so we waded over there.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It was the strangest thing I\u00b4ve seen in a long, long time.\u00a0 We were lucky to arrive when a woman was performing some sort of ceremony, she was pacing and yelling at this plastic man, dressed like a cross between Johnny Cash\u00a0and Michael Jackson and propped up on what looked like a barber\u00b4s chair and then she gave him some money and left.\u00a0\u00a0We also got to see a man ply the effigy with cheap rum.\u00a0 Wait \u00b4til you see the pictures!<\/p>\n

Here\u00b4s a bit of info I found on a\u00a0school website\u00a0about the background of this wild tradition and\u00a0tomorrow I will post some\u00a0ABSOLUTELY\u00a0AMAZING pictures I was able to get of the whole thing.\u00a0 I\u00b4ve been chasing Maximon since the Lake three years ago.\u00a0 My friend Amelia saw the whole ritual in Santiago but I only got to see him in the back of a tourist\u00a0shop in Antigua.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

San Sim\u00f3n (Maximon) in Antigua from 2006. People were visiting this one too with rum, money and cigarettes, but it seemed a bit more touristy and looks a lot different than what I witnessed in Zunil.<\/p><\/div>\n

Maximon in Zunil<\/strong>
\nIn addition to Santiago Atitlan, Zunil is one of the few remaining places where the “pagan” image of Maximon is still openly revered with pomp and ceremony. Also known as Maximon or Alvarado, Zunil’s San Simon is a comical-looking, plastic tailor’s dummy dressed in western clothes (cowboy, soldier, athletic, with sunglasses, etc). Every year on November 1, at the end of the annual fiesta , San Sim\u00f3n is moved to a new house. Here his effigy sits in a darkened room, and guarded by several attendants. San Sim\u00f3n is visited by a steady stream of villagers, who come to ask his assistance, using candles to indicate their requests: white for the health of a child, yellow for a good harvest, red for love, black for an enemy, etc. The petitioners touch and embrace the saint, and they offer him cigarettes, money and rum. The latter is administered with the help of one of the attendants, who tips San Sim\u00f3n back in his chair and pours the liquor into his throat. Falling liquid is gathered in a basin below him.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile outside the house worshippers burn pom (a kind of incense) and more offerings are given over to the flames: eggs, sugar, aromatic plants and sometimes even chickens.\u00a0 While the entire process may seem chaotic, entertaining and even comic, it is in fact deeply serious and you are expected to show respect. Outsiders have been beaten up for making fun of San Sim\u00f3n.<\/p>\n

Well that\u00b4s it for me now…back to work and homework.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No matter how good my Spanish gets I don\u00b4t think I\u00b4ll ever buy a live pig.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-studying-spanish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":457,"href":"https:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions\/457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triciakarsay.com\/guatemala\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}