Weinie bar

Dear casting for spiderman, superman, anyone needing a super strong and fearless man, a real man's man;

Perfect candidates found: Guatemalan bus driving team.

We woke up at 5:30 after going to bed around 2:00 to make the first chicken bus to xela for the ultimate fair: carnival rides that have been sold or trashed because they no longer meet american safety standards, and any other regulations have been completely disregarded because here "risk" has a totally different meaning. I officially don't think you can call yourself a real addrenalin junkie until you have bungie jumped from a platform made of corn stalks and completed with discontinued american materials, with no directions or rules of operation.

I however have abandoned all intentions of being an addrenalin junkie since hiking 8 miles off a mountain with a broken back so I have no room to talk but seeing such an extremely different culture of non-fear did jolt me. Even though fun places like the fair highlight our differences we were all the most shocked by places of non fun but necessity such as the chicken bus.

At the end of a long but good weekend we made our way at around 5 to the bus terminal not sure if the last bus left at 5 or 6 or if they even ran that late on sunday, thankfully I still don't really know spanish because when we asked where the buses going to the capital were(we knew we were too late for a direct bus to san pedro) they said nowhere, gone, there were no buses left...while I was blissfully unaware they remembered there was one last bus that was running late so we followed at a run and made the bus, but the driver was running late and gets paid by trip rather than hour so we began rally-ing it to the capital. After several stops one of them including doughnut venders getting on and back off while the bus was moving it started to rain hard and get dark all at about the same time we made it to the major mountain highway. Here I started to notice the guy that wasn't driving would disappear after each stop out the back door and reappear in the front door much later.you could even hear him crawling around on top of the bus strapping on oversized cargo.every turn you can feel the outside wheels lift a little, we are taking turns at like 60mph. I'm afraid the bus is going to roll yet this guy is literally carrying heavy cargo on top of a tin roof then walking to the other end and swinging in the front door, hundreds of times a day, everyday.

Not quite as shocking, but everyone you meet here lives life so differently, I talked to a girl earlier today that said she wanted to sail the world so she literally showed up at a dock everyday asking people with boats if she could sail and after a week someone said yes and she grabbed her stuff and left that day. it makes you realize life is at our finger tips, we just have take it. So much is possible that we think is impossible,i was amazed for me it was a stretch to ride a chicken bus, yet for so many others the bar is so much higher.it made me wonder how many things we could do if we just believed them to be possible, or needed them to be possible, an artisan told me that for two years he used a drill bit and a deconstructed lighter as a mechanical drill because he needed to feed his family, and that was his work, he did what he had to do.every artisan I meet i am amazed, the ingenuity is amazing, like nothing I have ever seen, and I think its because of a culture with a mixture of nessesity and non fear. people seem to know they have to take charge of their lives and can't or won't let fear or anything else stop them. maybe im wrong and I just haven't seen the culture in depth and I'm sure I will change my mind again but for now I'm amazed I wonder what could happen if these people had access to the resources we do, if they would turn into us or if they would freakin make things happen?