When we were stateside, one of our favored family traditions was Sunday popcorn and movie movie. We’d get a movie from Redbox or Netflix, and late Sunday afternoon, I’d commence with the popcorn making. Using my trusty whirley pop (bought in excellent condition for four dollars from a thrift store in Pennsylvania), I’d spend about half an hour cranking out batch after batch of popcorn—six in total, which is the equivalent of three cups of popcorn kernels. One batch was left salted and buttered, two batches were salted, buttered, and cheesed (with nutritional yeast), and three batches were salted, buttered, sugared, and spiced. Then we’d pile onto the sofa and my husband would tentatively bounce up and down and say, “This sofa is going to break one of these days,” and “we won’t be able to all fit on this much longer,” and then we’d start the movie and eat popcorn and apples till we bloated.

I contemplated bringing my whirley popper. I did, really. But then I thought, Nah, we’ll make do with kettles like they used to do in the olden days (like, back when I was a kid).

And that’s how it came to be that I’ve scorched batch after batch of popcorn here. I tried large, lightweight kettles and super-duper heavy-bottomed kettles and little teensy-tiny kettles. I tried stirring the popcorn until it started popping and then clapping the lid on and shaking wildly. I tried leaving the kernels to go about the business of exploding themselves undisturbed. I tried adding extra oil. I tried blue popcorn we brought from the States and regular yellow popcorn from here. Nothing worked.

And then I experimented with my big, flat metal pan—success! True, it was so shallow that I could hardly pop any popcorn in it at a time, and true I had to shake it so hard my butt about fell off, but we were eating popcorn!

One night my husband, sick of watching my butt almost fall off, I guess, scrubbed a couple nails and added them to the pan of oily kernels. In the shaking process, the nails rolled all over the pan, stirring up the kernels just like my whirley popper. I didn’t have to wiggle my butt nearly so hard. The next time, he upgraded from the lightweight nails to some heavy bolts.

And so now, every movie night, I take the bolts out of the mug where they’re stored with our few precious twisties and rubberbands, plunk them into the pan of oil and kernels, and shake us up a bunch of movie night popcorn.

The end.

PS. I bet Amanda doesn’t have Bolt Popcorn included in her Year of Popcorn series!

I’ve always loved grocery shopping. I love perusing the aisles, studying the options, dreaming, scheming, imagining. I love picking up the bags and boxes, puzzling over the ingredients, searching for something that I can’t quite find, admiring the novelty ingredients and wondering about the people who eat them. I love being surrounded by mountains of culinary potential. I love that everything in a grocery store centers around one of my very favorite activities: eating. Therefore, it only makes sense that I’d fall hard for the market with its mountains of fresh produce, sacks of dried chilis and beans and coffee, and slabs of meat hanging from hooks.

Even things that have nothing to do with food intrigue me. The men hawking large plastic bags to protect from the rain or pills for anything that might ail you.  The magician with his tricks and crowd of gawkers. The group of women squatting along the curb nursing their babies. The babies sleeping in empty crates tucked under the tables or right in the middle of the piles of melons and squashes (I am so tempted to point to a baby and inquire how much). The dog fights that never really take off thanks to some old lady with a cane calmly cracking them over the back. The men bent double with enormous sacks of food on their bags, and the women walking erect and regal with baskets of cloth-wrapped steaming tamales on their heads. The bargaining! The loudspeakers! The shouts and laughter! The tinkling of the ice cream man’s bell. The pat-pat-pat of fresh tortillas being made. The smell of fried chicken and raw meat and boiled corn and urine and fresh bread mingling together to create an olfactory sensation that will forever be imprinted on my mind.

Monday morning, the sun was shining, so I stuffed my camera into a shoulder bag and walked into town. I entered the crowded market and immediately slipped into a store where I squatted down, dug out my camera, and discreetly snapped a few pictures.

Once I got my bearings, I approached a couple women sitting on the curb outside the door. I asked them about their wares (banana leaves, squash vines, and something else I’m not familiar with) and if I might take a picture of them.

There was a space beside them, so I sat down and we commenced to talking. Turns out, one of the women was a Mennonite, and the other one had wanted to go to Bezaleel to study but wasn’t able to make it work out. We talked about food, school, and life in general, and I snapped a bunch of pictures of whatever struck my fancy.

Yesterday, we went adventuring. We’ve been here two months—long enough to develop a routine and to appreciate a break from it. It was time to go some place fun.

The night before the kids laid out their clothes and I baked cookies. In the morning, we woke early. I made a mountain of sandwiches, washed apples, and filled water bottles. We gathered sunblock and bug spray, flip flops and towels, money and camera and The Lonely Planet because hey, if you live in Guatemala, you’ve gotta let your tourist freak flag fly on occasion!

Here’s how we got to where we were going:

A summoned taxi drove us into Chamelco. There we met up with an EMM worker who would be joining us for the day and hopped on a bus to Cobán. Then we took a taxi (we fit all seven of us, plus the taxi driver, in a small, five-person car) across town to the Lanquín bus station. We had to wait an hour for the bus to leave, so we wondered around the block, bought a bag of bread, spied an open barber shop and forced my younger son get a haircut, and bought a bunch of chips (the agreed upon bribe for getting the haircut). Then the bus ride to Lanquín, part of which was on paved roads and the other part which was on gravel. The gravel part was all downhill. I did not know this before, but driving downhill on a gravel road for many minutes at a time is akin to a medieval form of torture, or it would be had there been cars in medieval times. And then in Lanquín, we bargained with a truck driver (I still think we paid too much) who agreed to drive us to and from our destination.

So to sum up: taxi, bus, taxi, bus, truck, PLAY FOR TWO-PLUS HOURS, truck, bus, taxi, bus, taxi. Or, in other words, eight hours of travel for two-and-a-half hours of play.

This, my friends, is why we call it adventuring. There are no guarantees and nothing is easy. The end.

Oh! You want to know where we went?

Well, sure!

We went to Semuc Champey, which, according to some sources, is the most beautiful place in all of Guatemala.

Now, ’tis true I haven’t seen all of Guatemala, so I can’t confirm this exactly, but it certainly was stunning.

Upstream from where we were, the river goes crashing down under the ground where it travels along for a ways before emerging again someplace downstream. We did not get downstream to see where it comes out, but we did walk upstream to see where the river gets eaten by the earth.

The place scared me half out of my wits. I went with my older son, ie the kid who is fearless. He escorted me across the slippery sandstone rocks to the roped off edge which I couldn’t see over, thank goodness. And then I waited there while he walked to the other side (it was permitted, but very wet and I had my camera and didn’t feel like risking ending up on my butt) and down a bit to the edge so he could photograph the river-eating hole. There were guards over there keeping an eye on him, and other, braver (stupider?) than me tourists, but even so, I couldn’t watch. I had to turn around and focus on picking my way back across the rocks to keep at bay the images of him slipping over the edge.

(In the picture above, you can see his head in the bottom right hand corner. Eek!)

Needless to say, we did not take the other kids to visit that spot.

Anyway, while the river roils along under the ground, up above is a whole series of crystal-clear pools (fed by a different source than the underground river). You know, water falls, deep blue holes for diving into, long ledges of limestone for lounging, all that natural beauty stuff.

The kids fed the minnows and fat yellow fish.

My little one took to jumping off the edge into the blue deep and then swimming the whole way across to the edge. “I’m not going to be afraid of jumping off the diving board when we get home!” he informed me proudly.

We ate the sandwiches and apples and cookies and bananas.

I watched the tourists and pondered, once again, my belief that, when it comes to swimming attire, less does not mean more.

The whole place was idyllic, but I, however, wasn’t into it. After the long morning of travel, I was whupped. And while I would’ve loved to go swimming, the hoards of tourists made me shy and self-conscious. Plus, I was (in retrospect) stressed about the return trip. We had been forced to pay the pick-up driver in advance—would he be there to take us back like he said he would? And we were catching the last bus from Lanquín to Cobán—would we get there in time? And if the truck driver didn’t show and we missed the bus, would be have enough money to spend the night out here in the boonies? With all that on my mind, it was kind of hard to relax.

So I took pictures and pretended I was relaxed and worried about money (day outings for a family of six are expensive!) and thought about all the things we could do to make it more worth our while…and then it was time to come home. The truck driver was there waiting for us, and the last bus waited for us (the taxi driver and bus driver were in phone communication on our behalf, bless their hearts), and they even cleared out some of the seats so we’d have a place to sit.

Several hours later, we were home sweet home. It had been a hot day (and the power had been off the whole time—a scheduled event), but we didn’t realize how very hot it had been until we saw the butter dish.

The very best part of the whole day? Eating cereal for supper and drinkingdrinkingdrinking and getting showers and reading a couple chapters of Homer P. Figg before tucking the adventured-out chillen’s in their beds and then snuggling down into ours shortly after.

(Oh, and getting an email from a friend in which she recounted their outing to a maple festival and how they saw a newly born calf on the way home and, at their leisure, stopped to watch it. To drive somewhere, in a private car, with complete control over time and speed and destination—what a novelty! Can you imagine?)