Archive for I Love Antigua
Free Wine Tasting Today
Posted by: | CommentsThere is a free wine tasting today at El Sitio for Que Pasa VIP cardholders. If you live here or visit occasionally and you don’t own the VIP card, you should; it entitles you to discounts at dozens of Antigua’s best establishments as well as invitations to little member-only events like these. Even those on Antigua’s Blacklist (such as yours truly) can attend with the card.
Bottles will be opened at 5pm.
Top 10 Things I Love About Antigua
Posted by: | CommentsThere’s been a lot of what Santiago would call ‘whingeing’ on the blog lately, so I thought I might write something that one reader referred to recently as ‘uplifting’ or ‘inspirational’. Truth be told, I don’t know if I can go that far, but here is my own personal list of my top 10 (maybe other bloggers will follow in turn).
Not in any particular order:
1. The weather.
2. I can smoke where there are ‘no smoking’ signs.
3. I can park where there are ‘no parking’ signs.
4. You can buy beer/liquor at a gas station at 2am in El Progreso with no shirt on and drink it inside, or outside, or both and stop every pickup truck that passes by asking for a ride to the capital and no one will say anything (except perhaps ‘no’).
5. If your car breaks down, within minutes 3-5 Chapines will volunteer to push it for you and think nothing of it. That’s normal.
6. You can buy almost any drug without a prescription. Cocaine? No problemo caballero, pero, es muy carro….
7. You can tell a cop, “You are bothering me, go away” without being tased, waterboarded and getting intimate with a broomstick.
8. I can order a capuccino ‘con amor’ and wink at her without getting hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit (or anything else for that matter).
9. If you know the right people and have some Q, you can get almost anything you want or need.
10. You can go to the hospital on Christmas eve and get a wound cleaned, stitches, antibiotics and the bill for $70 and be home before Santa arrives.
Hall of Fame Farmacia
Posted by: | CommentsTwo of the things I love about Guatemala are a) the lack of (enforced) government regulations that serve no purpose, and b) the widespread availability of home delivery. Even if a company doesn’t formally offer servicio domicillo, you can arrange it or just hire a taxi driver or tuktuk to get it for you. In my case a taxi driver is Q80 round trip, but often delivery is free.
A recent example was a call to the farmacia:
Senorita: Good morning, thank you for calling, how can I help you?
DM: Good morning, there are a few things I need, can you deliver them?
Senorita: Of course, sir, what can I get you?
DM: I need Gatorade, 12 rolls of your best toilet paper, baby wipes, ciproflaxin and one of those ginormous bars of Hershey’s chocolate.
Senorita: Disculpe, qual es ‘ginormous’?
DM: Extra grande chocolate.
Senoria: Ah, entiendo. Que algo mas?
DM: Solimente.
Senorita: Okay, we’ll send it right out to your house.
Sure enough about 45 minutes later a guy on a motorcycle arrived with everything we needed. As far as I could tell there was no delivery charge. Friends tell me there is a Q100 minimum order, but I’ve had stuff delivered under that. Can you imagine trying to have anything delivered from a pharmacy in the US (without a prescription or identification?)
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Posted by: | CommentsAfter recent posts which generated some unexpected heat, I thought I would take a break, step back and say,
“It’s 72 degrees and sunny, the maids arrived on time, the vegetable guy came with lots of great looking fruit and a dozen roses, the bill from my lawyer (graduate of the best university in the country and prominent member of one of the 7 families) is 1/3 of the hourly rate I pay in Phoenix, business opportunities abound, advertisers are competing for space on the blog, and the most difficult decision I’ll make today is whether to buy a Honduran or splurge and buy a Cohiba”.
Well, there is also whether to call the taxi and pay Q40 or the tuktuk and pay Q30…
Welcome to GuateLiving.
Washington, We Have a Problem
Posted by: | CommentsWatching the US from afar has given me a different perspective these last two years. In many ways I find my old life not very appealing. On an increasingly regular basis there are absurd things reported online. I’m not talking about absurd as in controversial, but as in perfectly representative of the problem with governments.
For example, two IRS agents visited a Sacramento business over a delinquent tax bill of…4 cents. That’s four pennies. I’m not kidding. If it had been me I would have insisted it was some sort of hidden camera prank, but the business owner commented, “They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending”. If you’ve ever dealt with the IRS before you know the experience was real because that’s how public ’servants’ really do behave.
Then there is the story about the Pennsylvania police raiding several pubs for selling unregistered beer. Follow this for a moment; these are places that have a liquor license, bought the beer legally from a distributor, but some bureaucrat in the capital decided to show up and confiscate a bunch of exotic beers, mostly Belgian imports. Not surprisingly, the government idiots compounded the problem by not being able to recognize that their own lists contained typos:
At one bar, Maida had a beer listed as “de dolle Oebier gran reserva;” the beer itself was “de dolle oerbier,” but the police had it spelled as “de rolle oebier,” she said.
So…the police are having to return some of the beer. Meanwhile the bar owner’s legally acquired beer sits in some government warehouse, probably not environmentally protected, rotting away.
And then there is the story from my own home state of Arizona, where the town of Gilbert has outlawed bible studies in private homes. You read that correctly; local zoning ordinances apparently prevent people from gathering in a private home to study their bible.
These three examples, one from each level of government (federal, state and city), show just how tyrannical governments tend to be. Marxists will, if admitting to the problem, claim these are exceptions to the rule but we all know from experience that it is more the norm. That’s why governments should be small and weak, because they are the number one threat to liberty. As President Ford once said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have.”
One more reason to move to Guate, where for the most part the market sets the rules and the government, albeit as incompetent and dangerous as any from the first world, simply does not have the ability to control every element of your life.
I Love Antigua, #121
Posted by: | CommentsLast night’s sunset was a beauty, even by local standards. At one point Fuego was covered by clouds and a small eruption turned things pink around the peak. It was a nice distraction from the pathetic excuse for a ProBowl.
I tried to take pics but the iPhone doesn’t do it justice. Fortunately Brad and Kara are skilled with a camera, so go check it out!
I Love Antigua, Reason #118
Posted by: | CommentsTwo weeks ago I was out with The Wife when a tumulo scraped unusually hard and a block or two later the oil level light came on. Readers may remember that this old Mercedes has had a few run-ins with tumulos before. Knowing the car was losing oil quickly, I had to make a quick decision and so drove the wrong way on 7th Avenue in order to park the car in front of a friend’s apartment, where it sat until Gunther could tow it to his place (the gas station on 4th Calle at 1st Avenue).
It turns out the most recent ‘cold weld’ repair to the oil pan was just too fragile for the tough streets of Antigua. This time around I asked Gunther to take a few additional preventive steps, which included new shocks on the front end, plus what he called some ’spacers’ which he would insert in the springs on the front axle. I’m not a car guy, but I understood the idea would be to lift the delicate parts of the underbelly of the car about an inch higher off the ground, and the shocks would hopefully keep the old girl from bottoming out.
I had also mentioned to Gunther that the brakes were shaking a little at high speed and asked him to investigate.
Well, it took two full weeks, but here was the itemization:
1. New front shocks
2. Spacers in the springs to ‘lift’ the car slightly
3. Turned the discs
4. New weld on the oil pan
5. Tow across town
And the bill came to Q2500. It was hard to complain that it had taken longer than I thought it should have.
I have since had a steel skid plate designed and will hopefully have installed within a few days. That will show those tumulos! And, instead of bringing another Mercedes down, my next car will be a Range Rover and I’ll ride those tumulos with pleasure.
Next time you need your car worked on, don’t hesitate to call Gunther’s at 7832-0215, and tell him Don Marco sent you.
I Love Antigua, Reason #115
Posted by: | CommentsReaders may remember that a few weeks ago I asked for helping getting a bible rebound. Someone who signed in only as ‘Guest’ suggested La Copia Fiel, on 1st Ave Norte. As it turns out, I’m really familiar with that avenue having spent so much time walking to and from Gunther’s.
You have to walk down a long, narrow open-air corridor headed east from 1st Ave to find the little office. Anyway, La Copia Fiel is an old-fashioned printing and binding operation. There are printing presses and binding machines that probably helped Guttenberg perfect his process. It was pretty cool to watch. The senorita at the front desk was very polite, giggled at my Spanish and understood exactly what I wanted.
She pulled out a hardback example to get my approval, then asked me to choose my color. She assured me it would be done in only three days at a cost of 60Q.
I had to ask her to repeat it because I couldn’t believe it. ‘S-e-i-s-e-n-t-a’ she said slowly. I just blinked, thinking that surely this must be for only part of it, and she says loudly and slowly ‘S-e-i-s c-e-r-r-o quetzales’. Si, entiendo.
I paid, got my receipt and left, doubtful.
When I returned three days later, she pulled my good as new bible out from a drawer, took my receipt and thanked me for the business. This thing, which is probably 70 years old, has never looked better. It even has a bunch of new colored ribbons on it, so your spouse can mark all the passages she wants you to read up on for behavioral modification purposes.
Welcome to GuateLiving.
Loading ...