Sunday, December 11, 2005

The market was amazing. I didn't know what to expect. I figured that since tourists will get on a bus for a three hour trip to and another three hours back just to see it that it might be something, but who really knows? Maybe they all get sucked into unwarranted hype. I've been to markets before that were interesting and different from what I know, but hardly mindblowing. This turned out to be well worth the trip. The market at Chichicastenango is something to be visited, for sure.

It's a functioning local market at its core, with clothing, soap, vegetables, kitchen goods, whatever you would need if you lived here for sale, and it's ringed by stalls specializing in souvenirs for tourists. It's huge. It fills what I assume is the square - who knows, since it's so cramjammed with stalls, and spills out into the surrounding streets.

Then there's the mobile market - people who can't or won't rent stall space, or agents of existing stalls who roam around selling things. These are mostly women who upon seeing a foreigner will unfurl some piece of weaving and start chanting, "buen precio, buen precio, amiga..." or little kids selling necklaces and refrigerator magnets. The kids' stock is inexpensive, well-handled and of varying degrees of cleanliness; I suspect that the parents know people will buy from them out of a sense of "oh, she's so little and cute and it's only a couple of bucks."

When we got up this morning and checked out the view from the roof, we discovered that what we'd seen of the market last night had grown and mutated and stretched a long tentacle almost all the way up to our hotel. We got sucked into the crowd almost immediately, and found out that it's not a smooth flow of people to and fro, but a writhing, elbowing mass of franticicity. I mean, little old ladies were pushing and shoving. I felt freakishly tall, but that worked out for the best, as it meant I could look up from trying not to step on any feet and see where I was. But I had to be careful because it was just impossible to tell when what seemed to be a pocket of empty space up ahed would turn out to contain a child or a tiny elderly person.

The sun was bright and everything was all about color. The embroidered huipiles (blouses) of the women, the woven wraps around the packages on their heads and around the babies on their backs, more woven goods hanging from every available space, and the brightly colored yarn to weave them with, beaded jewelry and handbags, all reflecting back the strong white sun. Not to mention the elbows and knees and shoving shoulders.

First we decided to eat. Penetrating into the core of the market a bit we found a little breathing room and the food stalls. This is an area of wood grills and picnic style tables, permanently roofed by sheets of corrugated metal. Everything is cooked on grills, from pans of frying chicken to pots of caldo and pepian. The air was full of drifting blue woodsmoke and the slap-slapping sound of women shaping tortillas between their palms. It sounded like gentle applause, or the tentative beginning of a heavy rain.

There was no way to tell which ladies sold what kind of food except by asking or looking, so we nosed about until I saw a man eating something I wanted - it looked like chicken soup. So we went to that stall and ordered from a young woman with a coating of ashes on her hair - the soup for me and fried chicken for Michael. He, polite as ever, wished the man "buen provecho," when he sat down, as is the custom.

The food came with the use of a communal bowl of watery green chile sauce and some of the freshly made tortillas. Made by hand and not with a tortilla press, they were thick enough to have a center a bit softer than the slightly crisp outer layer. The food was great and as a bonus, we were the only gringos in sight. It was calmer in the food area than in the narrow aisles of the rest of the market, but there was still a tremendous flurry of activity among the indigenous women in embroidered huipiles at the center of each square of tables.

These ladies were constantly slicing, chopping, stirring, fanning the flames under the food, adding more firewood. Little girls fetched plastic tubs of water from a centrally located faucet, or emptied dirty dishwashing water into a concrete trench running along the edge of the area. A woman in our stall stood in front of me and sliced potatoes against her own palm - something I would have gotten in trouble for doing as a kid and with reason, because I would have sliced my hand off. But she was as quick and efficient and unharmed as if she'd been using a cutting board. Our meal, including two glass bottles of Coke, came to Q32, which is about US$4.25.

After that came the shopping, which of course includes bargaining. I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of bargaining, but I'm certainly not going to pay the first worth-a-try idiot price because then they laugh at you, so I had no choice. But then playing against not wanting to get taken advantage of is knowing they probably need the money more than I do. So when we got down to the last five Quetzales between our offers and they said "it's just five Quetzales more," I couldn't bring myself to argue, "it's just five Quetzales less." But I talked them down quite a bit and walked away feeling satisfied with the result, so that's good enough for me, and probably for them too since I'm a pretty tentative bargainer.

The kids selling necklaces, and the many shoeshine boys would try their best sales tactics on foreigners ("Amiga, buen precio... un regalo para su familia... mira, magnets...") and when that wouldn't work would fall back on, "Un Quetzal para mi?" They know, I guess, how uncomfortable it is for us to see little kids struggling along for pennies. I wonder if they really need these Quetzals. You can hold your angry e-mails - I know they are poor. But are they more poor then kids in the next town that the gringos never sprinkle their vacation budget into? Or, to put it another way, does the amount of money they bring home change their family's circumstances enough to make up for the psychological scarring of being sent out to beg all day?

Even a little girl from the family that owned or ran our hotel got in on it. While I was in the bathroom she asked Michael for a Quetzal. She said some other things to him that he didn't understand. When I came out he asked her to repeat them for me, but she had a shy attack, I guess. But he told me she'd asked for a Quetzal. I asked her if she lived in the hotel with her family, and she said yes. That was my subtle way of telling her she didn't need a Quetzal from us and I don't know if she got it or just figured we couldn't properly follow a train of thought, but she didn't ask again.

Michael told her I was Colochita, and he asked her name. She gave it and it was a Mayan name that we didn't understand. I took a stab at pronouncing it and evidently did well enough to earn another three syllables of it, which made it almost impossible. After that she said, "Voy a ir a la tienda," ("I'm going to go to the store") and left. We saw her on her way back and she was hiding a bag of chips or something behind her back.

So there is something to the idea that some of the kids just pick up asking for money as a habit, or a fun lottery game. But others are clearly underfed, and what is the best way for us to do something about that? Michael bought some tortillas for a little boy who had followed us for about ten minutes. After giving up trying to convince us to let him shine our shoes, he fell back on whining, "Amiiiigo, un quetzal para mi tortiiiiiillllla, amiiiiiigo, tengo mucho haaaaambre. Amiiiiigo...."

We can't give to every person, and he was one of the unlucky ones, but much as we didn't want to encourage that kind of following and begging, his persistence wore us down. While we were waiting for the tortillas, I asked him a few questions, even though I felt wrong doing it because it gave me some weird uncomfortable half-memories of being a dirty little brown zoo-exhibit girl in Brooklyn. But I was curious, so I asked.

He said he was seven years old. I asked him if he worked a lot, and he said no. I thought he might mean that he didn't get very many customers, so I asked if he worked every day, and he said he did. I asked him if he lived in Chichi and he said yes. Then I asked him if he went to school, and he said yes. I asked him if he could read and he said yes.

I might as well have saved myself the uncomfortable feeling because something about his manner left me unsatisfied that all those yes answers are true. Maybe my Spanish is not as good as I thought, or maybe he caught on that "yes" is the right answer, or maybe he just didn't feel like paying for a few measly tortillas with all his personal information. But the part about him being only seven is probably true, and that is not so good. I hope the part about going to school is also true.

Michael's innards are sensitive, and he thinks the market stall food made him sick, but hopefully we can still manage a chicken bus back to Antigua tomorrow. If not we'll just try to move to a nicer room con baño and stay here an extra day.

 

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Chichi market crowds.

Chichi market crowds.

Chichi market crowds.

Chichi market crowds.

Chicken and papas frying at the Chichi market.

Chichi market crowds.

Incense burns on the church steps, ringed by young vendors.

Crowds encroach onto the steps of the 400-year-old Church of Santo Tomas.

Chichi market crowds.

Chichi market crowds.

When we didn't want to buy any magents, these young vendors were happy to take a photo with me for a Quetzal each. The girl in white joked that I should get a Quetzal too, and I made Michael give me one.