Chamelco has a great little market. It’s one, large block-sized building packed with stalls, meat shops, and little comedores (eateries). There’s a second story that I’ve never explored, and on market days (Monday and Friday), the surrounding streets are so thick with vendors that the roads are shut down. (The market is open seven days a week, but outside vendors only flood the place on official market days.)

My husband and I pass through the market on our way to and from work. We always put a market bag or two—large, reusable plastic-weave bags with handles—in our backpacks. This way we’re always prepared to haul whatever it is that catches our eye and strikes our fancy. Yesterday morning on the way to work, I bought two pounds of popcorn and a pound of spicy peanuts (and two bottles of imitation vanilla, one light and one dark, to experiment with) from a bulk foods vendor. That afternoon, my husband was assigned the task of getting some fruit. He came home with a watermelon, pineapple, tangerines, and mangos.

The other week, I photographed the contents of my market bag for your viewing pleasure.

This is a limón, otherwise known as a giant green lemon:

But it’s kind of like a lime, too. Except limes are really small and dark green. So really, I don’t know what this is exactly. I squirt some of the juice over my mashed avocados and the rest of the juice (and there is certainly a lot of juice), I mix with sugar and water for a juice. Each one costs about a quetzal, or US$0.13.

The green beans cost Q3.50 (about US$0.45) a pound. They are tougher and a bit more fibrousy than the green beans we grow at home, but given a long boil in salted water, they are equally delicious.

Cilantro (Q2.50 or US$0.32) is everywhere. I see it growing it corn patches, and the market women have large baskets filled with the herby bunches of green goodness. (Cilantro Haters, you are missing out so bad.) I chop the cilantro into fresh tomato salads or mix it with avocado or flurry it over the supper tacos. Invariably, I end up throwing part of the bunch away—they are big and I can never seem to use it all before it goes yellow-limp on me.

 Bananas: we can’t get enough of ’em. They usually cost about Q0.50 or US$0.07, each, but sometimes our neighbors give us bunches of bananas for free. I prefer the locally grown bananas even though their peels are crusty, sticky, and black. The fruit is more yellow and sweeter, and doesn’t go all mushy as fast. These bananas that you see above are white bananas, the same kind that you get in the states. Here, they seem to go bad awful fast, so I try to buy them on the green side and use them up quick. Which isn’t too much of a problem—the other morning my youngest ate five.

Broccoli runs about Q2 (US$0.26) a head, but the other day I got some heads for one quetzal each. I always have a couple heads on hand for roasting, boiling, or turning into a favorite cheesy potato broccoli soup. They are like candy.

The broccoli (and all other fruits and vegetables) is heavily sprayed, so there are no worms, bugs, anything. I wash/soak all fresh vegetables with a liquid soap that’s designed specifically for this purpose. I have no idea how well it works (and I’m washing the food in unpurified water), but we haven’t gotten sick yet.

Potatoes and tomatoes: I feel naked if I don’t have any on hand. Potatoes cost about Q2.50 (US$0.32) a pound. They are always new potatoes, and their skins are pale golden and delicate. The other day I bought two one-pound bags of new baby potatoes for Q2 each, perfect for drizzling with oil and roasting, which I did.

Tomatoes are always Roma and always delicious. They cost about Q4 (US$0.52) a pound. I slice them up to add to our cheese sandwiches, or, today, tuna sandwiches, and we eat them in homemade salsas, soups, and curries.

We are coming to the end of avocado season. These avocados I bought were extra large, and, it turned out, rotten. I prefer the hard, crusty, perfectly round avocados that pop open when you give them a good squeeze. The little ones usually cost about one quetzal each, though I think, if I’m remembering correctly, that I once bought four for one quetzal from a street vendor (US$0.03 each!).

Tostadas: not a fruit or vegetable, but a market purchase nonetheless. Some students served us chicken-topped tostadas for Valentine’s Day, and they were so good that I stopped by the market that evening to buy some for ourselves. They’re just fried tortillas (Q15, or nearly US$1., a bag). The vendors have them hanging around the tops of their stalls.

To eat, I smear each tostada with a scoop of refried beans, a drizzle of sour cream, some grated cheese, a blob of salsa, some guacamole (for me only), and then we chow down. Once the beans run out, we eat them plain, broken into bits and dipped in salsa.

Along with watermelons, cantaloupes, papayas, and honeydew melons, pineapples are everywhere. Each pineapple costs between Q10 and Q15 (US$1.30-1.95), depending on size. They are juicy, sweet, and delicious.

Some sunny market morning, I’d love to go to town with my camera, both literally and figuratively. Give you a real
eyeful. But I don’t know. Playing the role of tourist makes me feel loud and obnoxious.So, we’ll see… Maybe eventually, some day when I can summon the necessary devil-may-care attitude.

Update: my husband just not-so-kindly informed me that my numbers are completely off. So now I’m re-doing the math part. (Actually, he’s helping me do it. I’m hopeless.) (If you want to be a fact checker yourself, it’s 7.8 quetzales to 1 US dollar.)

One of the things that has been difficult for me to adjust to is the grocery shopping. In the states I had two large freezers, one large refrigerator (with yet another freezer up top), a basement stocked with dozens of jars of canned goods, and a pantry stuffed to the brim with sacks of oats, wheat, gallons of oil, etc. Here, I have one medium-small refrigerator with a small freezer on top, a few small baskets for storage, and no stash of home-canned/frozen foods to draw upon.

Oh, and no vehicle. (How I long for the ease of loading up the back of a van with bag upon bag of groceries and then driving directly to wherever it is I want to go, no waiting, no paying, no walking, no hauling, no flagging down of taxis or buses, no getting my toes squashed…)

This means that anything purchased in town has to be lugged—via taxi, bus, or foot—to our house. A gallon of milk is heavy. An open flat of 30 eggs is cumbersome. A watermelon, two pounds of potatoes, a bag of sugar, and a bottle of oil will break your back, given a mere twenty minutes of toting.

That, combined with the sticker shock—Q22 for a box of cornflakes! Q42 for 8 ounces of cheese! Q26 for a 3-quart jug of milk (it’s about Q8 to the US dollar, so even though the prices might be reasonable, or even cheaper than in the States, it feels everything is through-the-roof expensive)—means that I can hardly stand to buy more than one of each item. “Stocking up” means spending hundreds of quetzales in one quick go which is oftentimes more than my psyche can stand.

So…here’s how I do it. Every day on the way back through town, I (or my husband) pick up some groceries. If we space out the acquisition of the melons, flats of eggs, jugs of milk, loaves of bread, and dozens of bananas, then it doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming.

Despensa Familiar is the name of the one grocery store in Chamelco. If I understand correctly, it was recently bought out by Pais, another grocery store chain, which, in turn, is owned by Walmart. Which means that I get my groceries at Walmart.

La Despensa, however, doesn’t look anything like a Walmarts in the States. In our little Despensa, there are about three aisles of food (about half of which is cookies, soda, and candy), and tiny sections each of produce, meat, and frozen goods. There are several aisle of toilet paper and shampoos.

Upon entering the store, shoppers are required to place all bags and packages into one of the lockers right inside the entrance. There are keys dangling in the locks—lock your stuff up, take, the key, go shopping, and then fetch your stuff before exiting the store, leaving the key in the lock for the next person. The couple of bored guards stalking around the entrance are added protection should the locks not be adequate.

Once the stuff is safely stashed (often times I feign cluelessness and keep my backpack on my back—I have yet to be reprimanded), I grab one of the drag-along-behind wheel-y baskets and begin the task of searching high and low for grocery items. Often on my list: oil, butter, yogurt, milk, cornflakes, bread, rice, baking powder, spaghetti sauce, pasta, coffee, jelly, flour, sugar, crackers, raisins, etc.

At the checkout line, the cashier runs everything through and plops it into baskets. If I want plastic bags, I have to tell her how many and she’ll scan them, too—each one costs a few pennies. After paying, I haul my basket of goods over to the counter by the door and bag them up. I retrieve my stuff from the lockers, nod to the guards, and stagger out the door, past the destitute father and daughter crouching along the wall under the sign that cautions parents against leaving their children unattended in cars (see, this is Walmart!), and across the mostly empty parking lot to the road and the line of waiting, beat-up taxis.

Last week we took the kids out of school early so we could tour a coffee cooperative.

A group of Canadian high schoolers were spending the week volunteering at Bezaleel, and we decided to piggy back on their touristy outing. (It’s funny, but now that we’re here, I have almost no interest in doing any sight-seeing. I just want to go about my business, working, cooking, navigating, living. The notion of traipsing around for the sole benefit of seeing things just sounds like work.)

When we were in Guatemala a decade-plus ago, we toured a coffee plantation. We got to see the poor working conditions and the sheds where the workers’ families were packed in like animals.

This cooperative was completely different. At least, I think it was. The feeling of the place was different. It had a gentler, kinder air about it. I like to think the workers are treated well.

An indigenous woman gave us the tour, detailing the growing process of the coffee plants. Let’s see if I can remember the details:

It takes about one year from when they plant the seeds till they are big enough to put directly into the ground. Then it’s two more years till they are big enough to bear fruit. From that point on, they will produce beans for the next 30-50 years.

Or something like that.

Side note: banana plants take three years from start to finish. Each plant yields one bunch of bananas. It takes about 9 months for the bananas themselves to grow. Once the bananas are ripe, the plant’s life is over.

Since banana plants are everywhere, I thought they had a relatively short life cycle, like a year or so. Three years is surprisingly long.

We picked beans off the trees and peeled back the fruit to get to the seeds.

The fruit is sweet and juicy—it actually tastes a lot like green beans.

Right now a series of molds/viruses are damaging the Guatemalan coffee trees. Because of Chicoj’s altitude, they’ve only been affected by two of the six strands. Still, because they’re an organic farm, they can’t treat with chemicals and therefore have to cut down (a large number of) acres of trees and start over. They will be bringing in a big shipment of plants from Salvador, but it’s risky—they don’t know if the plants will survive in this climate.

In any case, it was encouraging to see a large coffee plantation (er, cooperative—can a cooperative be a plantation?) doing things the slow, hard way because it’s healthier in the long run. The whole world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket after all!

Part way through the tour, we entered a pine forest reserve.

The trees grow tall, not fat, and boy, were they ever spectacularly tall!

At the top of a hill in the pine forest, we came to Station One of a six station zip line.

I thought some of my kids might not want to do it (if you’ll recall, they already had a negative experience with a zip line), but nope. They were all over the idea of flying through the air at high speeds towards unknown destinations.

They outfitted us with harnesses, gloves, and helmets, and away we went…

Lift your legs when you go over the coffee trees! And, Wait! Watch out for the guy crossing the path with a sack of beans on his back!

I was sore for the next four days. Apparently, braking—the fancy procedure in which you squeeze the rope hard with your gloved, right hand—involves a lot of stomach, side, underarm, and back muscles that don’t get much use on a regular basis.

At the end of the tour, we made it to the processing plant at the same time as the workers. They were patiently standing in line, bent over from the stuffed sacks (180-200 pounds worth) of beans on their backs, waiting to weigh the day’s work.

Inside the plant, they pulverize the beans to get the fruit off.

Then the seeds are fermented and repeatedly washed.

They are dried in the sun before being moved indoors to the roaster/tumbler.

Here you can see the beans that came from the sick plants:

They use these beans for instant coffee and the cheap coffee that the Guatemalans drink. This coffee is ground up very finely and comes in little bags for about 12 cents each. The bags say “coffee and wheat”—I haven’t asked anyone yet, but I’m curious: do they actually mix wheat in with the coffee?

I bought a pound of the coffee—the good stuff. The coffee in this area is highly acidic, and, it turns out, I’m not a huge fan of acidic coffee. (Medium acidic coffee comes from the Lago Atitlán area, and the smoothest coffee comes from the Petén, or at least so says my guide book.)