Did you read the title? No? Well read it. Guatemala has a thriving drug industry...demonstrated by how often I get offered weed and other substances while walking down the street. How can such a small country have such a large market might you ask? Well that's what I'm gonna tell you, so sit down, shut up, and get ready to learn some useless and utter muck I just made up.
Imagine this, you live in a room, a small brick room...with a bed, but this bed is special. This bed is designed so that your slightest movement will make it creak, it has a mattress ..but the mattress is an illusion. Upon lying upon your mattress you discover that all you can feel is a sheet of plywood against your legs, your hips, your chest, your shoulders, and even your head. Now as you try to sleep on this mattress imagine hearing strange propaganda at every hour of the day in some foreign language. Now imagine a deafening roar you have to yell if you want the person two feet from you to hear, this occurs every hour or two, sometimes accompanied by an air horn...this is my room.
If my bed doesn't prevent sleep, chances are a truck will come roaring up the street about ten feet from my window, grabbing gears and blasting his horn, the sound reverberating off the side of my cinder-block dorm and the equivalent building on the other side of the narrow street. Each morning a man screams outside my window, "LECHE!!!" The milkman has no desire to simply knock on your door and ask if you'd like some milk. He walks down the street starting at five thirty or six o'clock, decrying his goods. Oh, would you like some natural gas, "HOOONNKK...ZETA GAAASS" all day everyday, the truck roams the streets sneaking up behind you on the sidewalk and then scaring the living daylights out of you. The P.A. system can be heard from several blocks away.
I want to get high...I want to get so high I think I'm playing ping pong with Jupiter. That's the only way I can imagine living with this experience day in and day out...I'm from the country, all you hear all day is an occasional cow or goat who want's more food. I want to hop the schools ten foot, glass shard topped wall and be like, "pot, no! I need some mushrooms!"...but alas, all they have are psychedelic plantains (here's the real thing en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantain) and those I won't do...ever. You sit down and you think, oh it's a banana...a boiled banana...that's odd...that sure as anything doesn't taste like no banana no monkey would ever eat!
Life here is still pretty awesome, but this constant noise has given me a permanent headache, which sometimes blurs my judgement in both drugs and humor...
