Yel Kaye – Travel Blog, Writing and Photography

As of today, I’ve been living in Guatemala for five months. I have learned so much about this country, and certainly understand a lot more than I did when I arrived in June.

However, there are still some things that confuse the hell out of me.

These aren’t bad things. They are just things that perplex me on a daily basis.

1. Where do chicken buses come from?

Okay, I guess I know where they come from. Chicken buses – those colourfully-painted buses that serve as Guatemala’s public transportation – are second-hand school buses from the United States.

What I really want to know is: how do they get here. I mean, there must be tens of thousands of these on Guatemala’s roads, but who brings them here? Does someone have the job of going up to the United States, finding a derelict school bus and then road-trippin’ it down here through Mexico? If so, how do I get that job?

2. How Guatemalans cut their cakes.

If you’ve eaten cake before, chances are you’ve noticed that most non-Guatemalan people cut it in the same way:

Pretty standard, right?

Guatemalans, on the other hand, always cut a circle in the middle of the cake and then cut slices around it:

Now, what purpose does this serve? From my experience eating cake in Guatemala, this does not aid in any way in the structural integrity of the slices. What is more, the person with the center piece will be left without the delicious, icing-covered outside. So, why?

3. Electric showers.

Right, right. These showers aren’t actually that bad. Sure, you don’t want to touch anything metal while you are in the shower (unless you know it’s safe) but these showerheads aren’t gonna kill you, despite the scary looking wiring.

In fact, it’s possible to get a good shower out of these after some practice. Some, in fact, give a delightful hot, decent-pressure showering experience. The majority aren’t great but at least get you clean.

Still, who the hell came up with these. Who said “hey, I know what goes well together – electricity and water!”???? And how did these become popular in the first place?

4. White people in advertising

In telenovelas (latin soap operas), commercials, product labels, newspaper ads and so forth, the vast majority of actors and models are pretty damn white. Most are just really light-skinned but still sort of latino-looking, but many are even blond! Whatever the case, the people you see in advertising are a far cry from the dark-skinned average Guatemalan.

It would make some sense if this only happened in international stuff – you know, TV shows or advertisements from Latin American countries where there are lighter-skinned people. But even in local ads – say, for a college or restaurant – the people in the ads are still super-white.

Why do they do this? And how come it works as an advertising technique? (For the record, the same phenomenon exists in Burkina Faso.)

5. How nobody knows who sings those songs at the nightclubs.

Seriously. There are about a dozen salsa or merengue songs that I really like that play frequently at the local clubs. I really want to know who sings them so I can download (or even buy!) them and listen on repeat until my roommates kill me.

But the same conversation has happened with a zillion people on various nights with many different songs:

Me: “Oh I love this song! Who sings it?”

Dance Partner: “Uh, I dunno…”

Me: “Goddammit!”

Now, this might not be so perplexing if it wasn’t for the fact that radios and bars basically just play the same 20 songs on repeat all the time.

Would it really be that hard to know who sings a song you hear 17 times a day?

I guess my only hope is going down to the local pirated music stand and buying a few dozen “HOT MERENGUE 2009″ or “SEXY SALSA HITS” type CDs and hoping something turns up.

Ok. So to those of you that don’t know me, these may seem like complaints.

But really, it’s these strange perplexing quirks that makes living abroad addictive, hilarious and wonderful.