We met Greg Mortenson!

On Tuesday night, Eric and I drove to Lincoln to hear a talk by an extraordinary man. Based on the recommendation of a kind stranger on a plane, we read a book recently called Three Cups of Tea, about a regular guy from the states who, after he is saved from death by exposure by a kind Pakistani village called Korphe, decides to build a schoolhouse for them (their "school" was a dirt clearing) in gratitude. The book is fantastic and entirely true-- packed with mountain climbing and culture shock adventures, creative solutions in the face of obstacles so ridiculous (and frightening) you could spit, and a true testament to the kind of world understanding and better choices a good education can foster. I learned on Tuesday night something I am so incredibly proud to say: Three Cups of Tea is now required reading for senior US military officials.

The book's subject, co-author and determined philanthrophist Greg Mortenson has the most unbelievable touring schedule I've ever seen, and he made a stop at Union College in Lincoln this week to talk with an absolutely packed and riveted audience. I talked to a lady who said she bought her tickets on July 17th, and 863 tickets had already been sold! We bought on August 3 and I thought I'd been quick about it.


Please pardon our camera phone pictures! We forgot our camera, as usual.

Greg is a nervous speaker. He's one of those who is always a little short of breath, always rubbing his palms on his pants. He's a little heavier than the pictures in his book (which has to be the constant travel and room service coupled with little exercise and perpetual exhaustion), so he trundles a bit when he walks. His sport coat was too tight, he was sweaty and and inflected only a little when he spoke. But the crowd was enthralled; every other sentence he spoke raised gales of applause. The crowd was not at all what I expected....there were very few young people there. The absolute vast majority of the crowd was seniors. Seniors! I actually felt a little ashamed at being so totally surprised. I will freely admit that I don't generally think of seniors as having the types of open minds necessary to really get into this kind of material. Which doesn't quite make sense because they have lived so long, so they should have more open minds. Many of the older folks I know have allowed their experiences to narrow them, so now I tend to generalize. It was different and kind of cool to be shown the wrongness in my thinking that way.

Greg offered a lot of really interesting information on Pakistan and Afghanistan, and there were even some nationals in the audience who asked him about his interactions with the Parliament and other authority figures, and had specific requests of him-- please appeal to this mullah who keeps denouncing you in this region, please get the government to allow you to film a commercial in which you tell the people how Americans are helping-- and they got all emotional when talking about how their countrymen slander Americans for being selfish when that is not the case. It was moving. We felt very lucky to be there.



By the way, Union College students are an incredibly chipper bunch.

After the talk, an announcer said that only 150 people could get their books signed and that we could get a ticket for that from the ushers as we left the main hall. The A tickets would be signed first, then Bs, Cs and Ds. Three people ahead of us, the last tickets were given out. OF COURSE! So we took our time leaving, went to the restroom, had a cup of delicious cinnamon tea with little cookies. I had a donation yet to give and just needed to relinquish my envelope, so I made my way over to a student and asked him where I could put it. Just as he said "Oh I'm sorry....I don't know," a lady came up and said "We live in Omaha and can't stay and this line is just crazy, so here's my ticket back." It was a B. I put on a coy smile and asked if that ticket was available...so of course he gave it to me! YAY! Eric was really excited. It took us an hour and a half to get through the line, but we got to shake Greg's hand and thank him, and he wrote in our book and Eric's mom's too. Greg looked exhausted and I felt kind of bad for tiring him further with small talk and the possibility of carpal tunnel...but it's not every day that you get to meet a legend of a person who is truly, honestly making the world a better place.



Here are two very nice articles on Greg's visit this week in the Lincoln Journal Star.

Greg finished his second book, Stones into Schools, just this past Monday. I think it's to be released by Christmas. There's also a kids' book, Listen to the Wind, which will be an interesting read someday.

If you are interested in world politics and especially those of the middle east in a post-911 world, as well as a dramatically inspiring success story of just one guy who cared enough to repay a debt to people commonly misunderstood, you would probably enjoy his book. Book synopsis on this page

Mortenson's website

The Central Asia Institute's website

Spending our Tuesday night in Lincoln with Greg was totally worthwhile. And if he ever comes to Lincoln or Omaha again, you can bet we'll be there, books outstretched, questions at the ready.

At Lago, where all began and ended.

Before we began planning this trip, our original plan was to go to Mount Roraima in Venezuela. We were saving money really aggressively because flights were expensive, the Venezuelan Bolivar's exchange rate was 2.15 to our $1, and I really couldn't tell online how much things were going to cost there. Eric was having serious doubts we'd be able to do it (surprise, he doubts everything) and I was desperately determined we would (surprise, I'm very stubborn), when it came time for my Spanish class to give presentations on their favorite places in the Spanish-speaking world. One of my friends, Parker, gave a talk on Guatemala; he and his wife had adopted a little girl from there two years ago and fell in love with the country in the process. He showed us this website during his presentation, of a beautiful place where his family stayed when they went to pick up little Maria, and then it was all over for me:

Posada de Santiago

The photographs on this website are astounding. After grilling Parker after class for more information on this place, I thought about it all day and leaped on Eric as soon as he came home.

"Look at this gorgeous place! These stone cottages by the lake only cost $65 a night!" I still didn't have any idea where we'd be staying in Venezuela.



After goggling at the site for a few more minutes, that was literally all it took. Eric said "Let's go here instead," Venezuela was brushed aside, and I dove headlong into planning a new trip to Guatemala, ending at Lago de Atitlan and the Posada de Santiago. So here are some more pictures of our beautiful cottage, Casa Luna.

The awesome carved door


Inside




Looking out the door


And down here a little ways is the restaurant/reception, pool, sauna and hot tub.


I will return with tales of the restaurant, our tiny tiny show, eating, shopping and Maximon. :)

The Story of the Swindle

So I apologize for not finishing up as soon as we got home. I was just tired. Tired of being alert and on-point every day, tired of condensing everything into blog-format. In fact, we were both so tired that we voluntarily missed the only Hall and Oates show that will likely ever again grace the Midwest. And being Eric's favorite cheesy 80s band, that's saying a lot. Now...onward!

In my last post, I said we'd been swindled out of around $20 but it actually was around $40; and when we got home, everyone asked how that happened. It's stupid, and the dialogue is lengthy. But I've repeated it so many times, I may as well tell it anyway and frankly, I'm still kind of mad.

When you arrive at a destination in a colectivo, it's pretty clear you're a tourist. And since we had been cautioned to avoid the general public buses for safety reasons, we took only colectivos if we were going any significant distance from our current location. Okay, so when we arrived at the shore of Lago de Atitlan, in a little hippie town called Panajachel, everyone knew we were tourist and thus everyone with something to sell mobbed our van. "Pulseras! Bracelets!" "Manteles! Shawls!" "Lanchas! Boats!" Oooh there we go--we needed to get to Santiago, on the other side of Lago de Atitlan.

Nodding at the first man who asked if we were going to Santiago, we grabbed our bags and followed him down the street. He and I made idle chat, the usual stuff: "Where you from?" "The US." (I didn't see any point in saying we were from Canada, since probably all paranoid US tourists do that and I think our accents are different anyway.) "I'm pure chapín (Guatemalan, roughly) and I run boats, obviously. What do you guys do?" "We're musicians (NOT RICH AMERICANS)." "Do you want to take a public boat or a private one?" "Public is fine." "Oh, why? You don't want to sit next to someone you don't know, or someone dirty. Take a private boat with me." "That's okay, we've been traveling this whole time next to people we don't know. It's fine." "But here, the public boats will take over two hours to get to Santiago. I can take you in thirty minutes. They stop at San Pedro first, and another place, and see here how big the lake is?" He showed me a little laminated card and made a big show of tracing the routes the public boats supposedly took. At this point I was really confused, because dammit, I'm NOT fluent and I was only catching about half of what he was telling me. "And then when you get to Santiago after two hours, you have to take a tuk-tuk up to your posada, and it's far away. I'll take you right up to the private dock." Eventually, I let him convince me, and he made another big show of haggling the price. "It's only 450Q." "That's way too expensive. We'll take a public boat." "The public boats are $25 per person. I am only asking my price because there are no tourists in Santiago, and I won't make any money on the way back. I have to buy gas, you know." "We only have quetzales, and that doesn't make sense. Why is the cost in dollars when we're in Guatemala?" "It's a tourist town, that's just what they do here." I felt weird, and suspicious. But did I listen to my niggling feeling? No. Instead, I secured the ride for a whopping 350Q, and if I'd done the math and realized that equaled $43.75 total or $21.88 each, I HOPEFULLY would have realized this guy was pulling one over on me. He had told me a total of eight lies so far.

From BelizeGuate09

We hauled our stuff into his empty boat and sat down. Then I paid him. He started the engine a couple of times, fooled around in the back, and then another boat drifted by, holding around 15 people. Our guy and the other driver chatted back and forth a minute, and then our driver turned to me and said "You guys get in this boat." "I'm confused. Why?" "It's okay, this is the same service, get you to the dock in 30 minutes." "I've already paid YOU." "I know, this is my dad. You can ride with him." "I paid for a private boat and that boat is not private." "Yes, but...I don't have very much gas." More lies. At that point, I should have yelled/throttled him/demanded my money back, or at the very least shrewdly announced that we'd wait while he went to buy gas with the wad of money I'd just given him. Because I'm DENSE, and STILL DIDN'T GET that he was cheating us! And poor Eric didn't understand our conversation at all, otherwise he probably would have spotted the scam far earlier. Instead, we pulled all our stuff into the other guy's boat and the driver of the now-empty boat gave us a cheerful wave as we pulled away. CHEERFUL INDEED! I spent the whole ride confronting the growing dread that I had been stupid and gullible and screwed up and been too loose with our money, and now we had to find an ATM and what if Santiago didn't have one, then we'd have to come BACK to Panajachel, and why was I so conceited as to think we needed a private frickin boat, and what if I was too dumb to figure out when we were getting scammed again? And until a few minutes into the ride, Eric still didn't really know my suspicions.

From BelizeGuate09

You can even see the brow furrow. I am PISSED.

I'd filled him in by the time we pulled up to the dock of our absolutely beautiful hotel. We had arrived a little early, so we relaxed in the restaurant and had a snack of blue corn pancakes (delicious, by the way) while the the maids finished up with our cottage. It was an absolutely awesome cottage too-- clean, rustic, roomy, with a tap dedicated to drinking water, a small writing desk and fireplace you're practically ordered to use, plenty of candles and matches, and a very informational binder of things to do--and prices--in Santiago and the surrounding area. Eric actually tried to keep me from reading it. It turned out the public boats cost 25Q per person, or $3.13 each. And I know I hadn't misunderstood the guy when he said 25 DOLLARS.

Welcome to Lago de Atitlan! SUCK