Pictures from Guatemala and Honduras are here.

When we won the World Series, I began to wonder what had become of the ticket from the Sox game I had gone to in August (against the Blue Jays, just when they were starting to put together that huge winning streak.) I was really glad I'd made it to a game that season (even though I paid way too much for my bleacher seat) and I wanted to save the ticket stub with the bobblehead dolls and newspapers and other artifacts of the season. I am something of a pack rat, so ticket stubs often sit around for a while before getting tossed in the trash, but more and more I am trying to curb that habit and just throw things away. So I really had no idea what had become of it, and since I didn't find it when I was home for break I assumed that I had tossed it out right after the game.

But while I was in Copan fishing through my pockets for a map of the ruins, my hand closed around the remains of the ticket. Yes, it was a bit torn up, it had been through the wash a few times -- but still! What are the chances?

In Copan Ruinas (try saying it aloud, rolling the r a little, Spanish style -- the difficulty of doing this properly is the only thing that keeps me from using the full name all the time like some pretentious freak) it is striking the way cars, bikes, people, horses, dogs and cats all coexist in the streets. The cars have no particular superiority since the narrow rough-cobbled roads prevent them from having much of a speed advantage. The streets are not made for them -- in many places two-way traffic is mostly theoretical, and the grades are often incredibly steep. But they do manage to get through, just like everyone and everything else. The sidewalks, on the other hand, are just not meant as a clear walking path -- there are too many gates that open right out across the sidewalk, too many blankets covered with things being sold, too many small fruit stands and shops spilling out of their buildings into the open air. So the people too walk in the street. And the children, lacking yards to play in, toss their balls around in the street as well.

Everyone maneuvers among each other with what seems like a sort of recklessness, given that there are no road signs and right of way is largely arbitrary, but although there is much less margin for error than there generally is in the United States (and that margin for error is pushed to its absolute limits) somehow everything usually goes okay. Yesterday on our way back from the ruins we came to a narrow four-way intersection where traffic was completely stopped due to a bus, a pickup truck, our van, possibly another car, and various micellaneous rickshaw taxis, people, and animals attempting to pass through all at once. Gridlock in the middle of Copan. The truck backed up to within inches of the van to make room for some other vehicles to get out of the intersection (people in the van actually squeaked for fear we might be hit), then moved out of the intersection to let the bus through, after which we were finally able to get clear.

The streets quiet down at night, like in any small town, with only a few people walking silently here and there. But in this town the cats and dogs are loose in the streets and meander silently as well. It is funny that in such a poor country I feel more sympathy for the animals than for the people. But here it is the bony cats and horses that show the strain the most.

Sound carries in the valley. One of our professors demonstrated how speaking at a reasonable volume from the top of Temple 11 will carry throughout the main plaza of the ancient Mayan city. But this holds true throughout the town. We complain to each other at the hotel about how easily we can hear conversations in the garden from our rooms. Each morning it sounds as though roosters are crowing and a cow is mooing right outside our door. One night I heard a gunshot and then the death wails of a dog as though it were right next door. Then every dog in Copan began howling in sympathy.

No matter what I do I am conspicuous. Sometimes we are treated like tourists because we run around in a giant group, talking loudly in English and taking pictures everywhere. The children ask us for money (and pens, of all things). The adults follow us around hawking souvenirs. But just this afternoon I was sitting alone in the plaza, no camera, not speaking, just writing in a notebook, and every single person who passed gave me a long, long stare as they went by. A little boy came up and started talking to me. "No me molesta (Dont bother me)," I told him, remembering the last children I had been friendly to, who cornered me and pestered me about what I had in my bag, wanting something to play with. I felt bad. But it is frustrating not being able to blend into a crowd, being so white that I am a tourist attraction to the residents of Copan, to play on words. I can't seem to hide.

I guess my point is, it is very different here.

Here is an exercise for you. For fun, try doing it all in your head as I have been.

You are standing at an ATM in Honduras. You do not know what obscene amount your home bank is going to charge you for using a foreign ATM, so you want to use it only once. You have to pay for three more meals in Honduras and a few reasonably-priced gifts. Then you will return to Guatemala, changing money at the border (and paying $5 border crossing fee) and then buy two more meals there and a couple cheap souvenirs before going to the airport, possibly paying $27 to exit the country, changing your remaining money, and flying to Atlanta where at least you can be sure the ATM fees will not be more than a couple dollars. Given that you have $20, 20 Guatemalan quetzales, and 50 Honduran lempiras, and the exchange rate is 18 lempiras to the dollar and 7.5 quetzales to the dollar, how many lempiras should you get from the Honduran ATM?

If you can figure this out in your head without becoming hopelessly confused, congratulations, you have better math skills than I do (which is not saying much). If not, now you know what I have been going through around here. I do not know why a pocket calculator did not appear on the list of things to bring when such items as Woolite somehow made the cut. Woolite?

The modern town, like the archaeological park, is called Copan Ruinas, both because it sits on a significant portion of the ancient city, and because it gets what money and importance it has from the nearby Mayan ruins. I like turning over the name in my mouth, knowing it in its entirety, reveling in it a little as you might when you learn someones middle name for the first time. A bit of knowledge that somehow makes you closer in some symbolic way, makes the town or the person more your own.

Today we visited a bird sanctuary called Macaw Mountain. One of our professors explained that it was called that because there is a hieroglyphic text in Copan that refers to a Macaw Mountain as a place that one of their rulers visited on pilgrimages. No one knows for sure which nearby mountain Macaw Mountain would have been, but one archaeologist is convinced that it is the mountain behind the bird sanctuary. So the name has this meaning also. The professor sounded almost regretful that the name had brought a sort of permanence to such an uncertain idea.

It was then that I understood why the buildings at the magnificent ruins of Copan have such bland names, "Stela B" and "Temple 22" and the like, at most an obvious one such as "Hieroglyphic Stairway." By naming we make things our own, we set things down as certain, and try as we might it ends up taking on a certain power of its own. As another professor pointed out, "Once you call something the Temple of the Sun, it is the Temple of the Sun." The guesses we make about what the Mayans used their buildings for are ever-fluctuating and always informed by our own experiences and desires as well as, one would hope, the objective information we have found. And when we name their things we make them ours, as surely as we make our pets our own by naming them. Without this caution we will find ourselves building a city of our own imagining instead of digging up the remains of someone elses.

Hi! I am in Copan, Honduras!

I was in Guatemala for the past few days and, oddly for me, felt incredibly homesick. But on the bus ride back to Guatemala City from Antigua I saw Orion hanging in the sky and thought, at least the stars are still with me here. (Though it was odd to see Orion out while it was so warm.)

But now we have arrived in Copan, with vast ruins and Mayan glyphs and the loveliest little town, and I am perfectly content and excited to be here. When I get home, I will show you pictures!

earlier -- later