Almost a week in...

So, I've been here for almost a week and it already feels like home. I am really excited for the next couple of months.
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Here are some more pictures and stories...
While we were out looking for voluntarios on Monday, I got to stop by CasaAzul which is the other CasaSito house in Antigua. This is the gorgeous view from the room of the surrounding volcanoes. The one on the right is Agua.

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Yesterday morning I had my first meeting with all of the CasaSito music festival staff. It was really long but I could not believe how organized it was. The staff made a 2 month plan at the beginning of the festival planning period with deadlines for each week and outlines for each person . We went through the plan to make sure everything was on track and reviewed the plan for using the voluntarios that we recruited. I am officially in charge of contact with the volunteers for the next two weeks.
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In the afternoon, we got to go out to Santiago Zamora where we will be holding the music festival next weekend. We had a meeting with the womens' organization of the town to finalize some plans. They are selling textiles at the event and have organized all of the food vendors. But, they are also notorious for taking the festival plans into their own hands...they thought we needed a stage for the bands so they got one (although we already had one). This time they decided it would be cool to hire 'gigantes' (those creepy guys on stilts) and tambores (drums and traditional celebration music) for the festival...

Well, so the festival is supposed to be in the open dirt patch in front of the church...much to everyones' surprise, when we arrived in Santiago Zamora...we found the dirt patch had been filled in with a garden and rickety amusement rides.

The garden, I think, will be a nice addition to the festival. The amusement park rides on the other hand...

Notice the shocked stances of my partners (Estima on the left, Paul, and Natalie).

Well, we found out that the rides at least were only in town for the festival of Santiago which is this weekend and they will be gone by next Wednesday. The rides were really scary though. They are all manual and I guess they make the kids go really, really fast. Natalie pushed on the character in front of Shrek in the picture on the right...and they are not attached to the platforms they sit one! They are just like sleds on a wooden platform! The ferris wheel is what really scares me!
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Today I was really excited to go to a natural tie-dying workshop that I had seen in Que Pasa (the monthly magazine with everything for tourists to do in Antigua). So, I got up early and went to a little cafe on the way to the Parque Central to get un plato tipico (beans, scrambled eggs, platanos, cream, cheese, bread, and tea...yes...all that food for Q24<$3). I arrived at the Parque in plenty of time to catch the shuttle...made my first phone call in Spanish(!!!). Anyway, I met some cool people on the bus. One lady is here for 5 weeks just to learn Spanish so she can talk to her ESL students (who often have social problems and she would like to be able to council them). She was traveling with her maestra (the lady who spends every day with her, one-on-one, traveling in Antigua, just practicing Spanish). Anyway, we arrived and paid and it wasn't until the transportation stage of the coffee tour that I realized I was in the wrong place. I learned all about the growth of little shade grown coffee plants and ended up on a tour of an organic farm.

It was actually really cool until they tried to get me to eat a freshly roasted coffee bean...ew. It was not the place for a non-coffee drinker.

So, the coffee workers first have to fill little bags with dirt. Then, they hand splice coffee seedlings together. They take two little baby coffee plants (one that just grows fast and one that's a really good quality...small facts: Guatemala is #11 in the world for coffee production and #3 in quality), cut off their roots, make a slice up the center of each stem, tape the two intertwined stems together, then plant them in the dirt-filled bags. There they grow for a couple of months (2 wks on the right, below) then they are transplanted by hand into big manure filled holes. It takes 3 years for a coffee plant to start bearing fruit but after that they can provide fruit for 40 years.

They have the tall trees Silky Oak trees imported from Australia to provide shade for the plants. The coffee fruit starts as little red fruits that they call the cherry stage. We got to see some in the green stage today, they will be ready to harvest at the end of November (the women have the job of picking the fruit). Then they use lots of water and gas powered machines to take off the red stuff. Then they put them out on big patios to dry for 1-2 weeks and they bag it (this is the man's job). Then there are more machines to husk and sort the sizes and they have a big electronic scanner to pick out the bad beans (or this can be done manually by women on an assembly line in a coffee factory). Then they are usually sent to the destination country before they are roasted. The beans are roasted at different temperatures for different lengths of time depending on the medium or dark roast (this is where he passed out free samples to see the difference between the regular coffee bean and the darker 'espresso' bean). Then, they are put into little plasticy metal bags to preserve freshness but there is also a hole-like feature on the bag that releases the aroma for better sales :) Then you drink it! (yuk!)

Anyway, while the plants are growing for 45 years, you may wonder if they encounter bugs or how they grow so well. Well, this particular finca was an organic farm. (Although, they claim there is no difference in the end product since all of the chemicals would be husked off anyway. Just the detrimental effects of the chemicals on the environment and workers...) They basically use manure and organic leaf material mixed with soil to fertilize. So, how do they get rid of the bugs?...PETA people, beware (see below)...they cut a hole in the top of a two liter, fill the bottom with kerosene, and fill a little eye dropper bottle with alcohol and tape that to the side. The little bugs are attracted to the alcohol for some reason then they get in there, get drunk and fall to the bottom to drown in kerosene.

Once we got to the gift shop (where I spent way to much money for being a non-cafe drinker), I asked about my tie-dying workshop.
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When I got to Indigo Artes Textiles y Populares they said that 5 people didn't come for class so they weren't going to hold it anyway. They took my name to call when they have enough people. (Meanwhile, I found out that it would cost Q400...a fortune here...about $50.) They still gave me a tour of all of the textiles and the foot-powered and belt weaving machines, a gallery of textiles from Coban (they are all pure white but they use a green liquid to bleach them...almost makes sense), and the natural dyes.
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Anyway, applied for another job today...Kafka (this bar/restaraunt/hostel) was looking for bartenders and waitresses. The average pay here is Q8/hour<$1. We didn't have water tonight so we went to Kafka for dinner. A friend of a housemate works there so he taught me the ins-and-outs of bartending. I think I'm ready to serve Ron Zacapa y Cuba Libres.