Thursday, January 12, 2006

On arrival last night we loved the town of Copan Ruinas so much that we decided to look into taking Spanish classes here. This morning those good feelings were somewhat smudged. We were out looking for a new room because the one we stayed at last night reeked of fresh paint and gave us a headache. While out, we met three young girls selling cornhusk dolls.

We did not care to purchase any dolls... I can't imagine anything that would be destroyed more completely by backpack travel than a doll made of cornhusks. But the girls seemed to have a rock-solid belief that we would buy one from each of them, and not just one, but the one they picked out for us. Each of them pulled one out of her black plastic bag and said, “This one.” We said no, thank you. They argued. No, thank you. The smallest one was eating from a bag of something like Cheetos and she held her doll out with sticky orange fingers. The biggest girl would not take back the doll she had handed to me, though I tried to push it into her hand.

Finally she took it and we turned away. Michael said, “Buena suerte.” And one of them called back, “Mala suerte!” Dang. I mean, maybe we should just start shooing them away like some people do, because it seems our politeness is never appreciated.

For some reason, that really upset us, especially after the crazy guy from yesterday, and we felt like leaving town altogether. But we wanted to see the ruins so we just changed rooms. Michael insisted on the room with the twin beds instead of the “cama matrimonial” because it was bigger, and I think it upset the lady who checked us in. She kept enunciating that we could have a room with one big bed as though we didn’t understand or were trying to be coy.

Our twin-bed room is costing us about $6 USD per night, private bathroom, cold water shower, curtain as a bathroom door. There is a bench directly outside our window and Michael said everything would be fine as long as no one sat there yammering.

We went to a little place around the corner for lunch, and the owner’s husband was filling in as a waiter. We struck up a conversation when Guns ‘n Roses came on the CD player and he told us it was a mix CD, and that his favorite song was number 6, “Lady” by Kenny Rogers.

And then he told us he’d seen Kenny Rogers in concert in New York City. And then we said we were from New York! And then he said he’d lived there for two years! And there were just exlamations and excitement all around! And then to cap it off, it turned out he had lived at Lex and 92nd, and when we told him we lived on 106th and 1st, we all just started flipping out. It was great. So we felt a little better. He says he wants to take his family back there for a vacation in the winter because his kids have never seen snow.

Now we’re sitting in the room, trapped almost, but by fascination, not any threat. The middle-aged Indian Canadian couple and the American lady who lives in Brazil are sitting on that bench right outside our window, the one I foreshadowed about. Their conversation is just too much. And it’s not eavesdropping because they are practically in our room.

“What is that?”

“Pupusas.”

“What?”

“Pupusas. It’s a local food, like tortillas. You know tortillas? Except these are pupusas. They are made with cornmeal and filled with filling like chicken and beans and then fried. They come with a salad made of beets and cabbage, which you put on top and then eat. But I don’t like beets, so I let them leave that in the kitchen.”

“And where do you get them?”

“At the pupuseria.”

“The what?”

“The pupuseria. Except normally they come with beets and I don’t like beets.”

“Sugar beets?”

“No, red beets, you know, the dark red ones.”

“Oh, I like beets!”

“Well then you’ll like this. It has beets in it, so I don’t get it, because I don’t like beets, but if you like beets, then you’ll like it.”

“So you can get chicken and beans?”

“Well you can’t get the chicken and beans together, but you can get chicken and cheese.”

“Chicken and cheese?”

“Yes, chicken and cheese, or you can get beans.”

“And chicken is ‘pollo’ and cheese is…?”

“Queso. You can get that together with the chicken.”

“Ahh. And where do you get it?”

"At the pupuseria."

"The what?"

We also learned that the pupusas are very, very cheap, about 6 lempiras each, which is just a few cents. The Canadians were very happy to hear that because their money is running a bit tight; they had come down to Central America with travelers’ checks in Canadian dollars and were surprised to find them really hard to cash. (My money’s so friendly it’ll be accepted anywhere!)

Then for a while they were complaining about the entry fee to the Copan ruins. “After you pay for the airfare and the hotel and spend all the money it takes to get down here, they shouldn’t make it so expensive to get into things,” the wife said. They all agreed with each other. “If it’s going to be as expensive here as it is at home, we might as well stay at home.” Might as well stay home, indeed. I have heard a lot of arguments for why entry fees should be low and some of them have more merit than others, but that one is just ridiculous. Like “they” are supposed to care that you chose to spend several hundred dollars on a flight and now don’t want to pay ten to see a priceless one-of-a-kind historical site. Whatever.

And then they were complaining about how last night some kids had been playing outside their door and were noisy. The American woman even said she had had a hard time concentrating on her reading. I mutely shook my impossible-to-concentrate-on copy of White Oleander that I got in Livingston as a trade for Portrait of a Lady and Michael and I dissolved in silent giggles.

So, yeah, we secretly had a non-meanspirited laugh at the Canadians’ expense, but don't think we are not going to run out and get some pupusas immediately. Good information is good information. I’ve only ever had canned beets, which I did not like, but I’ll give the beet salad a chance too.

 

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Honduran boy.

Honduran man.

Copan Dry, banana flavor. Yum.