Tiff in Guatemala: Today's Email

The first day here, we decided to get right into the
spirit and we took a chicken bus to a huge local Mayan
market (4 hours away). The chicken buses are old
American Schoolbuses that have been painted all kinds
of crazy colors and everyone rides them. Our bus trip
was a very squished 4 hours each way. People sit
three or more in each seat with packages-chickens and
even an occasional pig or whatever. The bus careens
around mountain turns but it doesn´t matter beause we
are all so stuffed in nobody moves at all. The people
on the outside of each seat (between the seats-across
the aisle) are held firmly together by pure pressure
as they have no seat under them. The ticket guy
crawls out the door and over the top of the bus (James
Bond style) and enters thru the back window to collect
from the back. He crawls in and out between windows
and over the top like Spider man to collect from
everyone. He knows who has paid their $2. It is just
wild.
The market was huge--in between the selling and
bartering there were religeous processions squashing
their way thru the shoppers. It was chaos with
insense, virgins, priests, fireworks, and even a
coffin with a dead guy. Anyway we bought some simple
things. It was too crazy to shop. The Mayan
traditional costumes are totally gorgeous and like in
Peru they are really worn all the time.
We kept getting seperated because the people are so
tiny they just flow thru like a river and suddenly
there would be crowds between us all about waist
level. I felt like apologizing for being such a
giant.
On the way back we had to get off a chicken bus
because Brad couldn´t squish down the aisle and we had
to get stuffed in the emergency back door of the next
bus. The bus stop guy shoved us in and closed the
door behind us and the ticket taker guy climbed over
seats to collect.