Tuk Tuk con Chiltepe

1) Imagine a Bangkok 3-wheel tuk-tuk, driver in the front, bench in back big enough for two small people, engine whining like a blender trying to process an avocado pit, now add cobbled streets, and trade the snarled traffic of Bangkok for the relatively empty streets of Antigua, Guatemala, so the tuk-tuk driver can go as fast as he wants over the cobblestone road while the two people in back bounce up and down and keep counting to see how many teeth they have left.

2) Imagine the acrid smell of a very resinous joint, now distill that smell into a powder and put it into a coffee filter and pour hot water over it. That's how the stuff tastes that they sell in the market place in huge cone-shaped piles that they call Toasted Coffee that Plotnik thought meant Roasted Coffee. Toasted Coffee is not Roasted Coffee. It is not coffee to drink at all, but is a reside from the coffee roasting process that is normally used as a filler for tortillas. It tastes exactly like that smell, or maybe like week-old milk you find under the bed.

3) Imagine a small, Cuban night club where P and D go to hear a guitarist and conga-drummer -- BZ, remember the little upstairs place in Cuzco with room for only a few sofas and a microphone for the guitar player? -- except the musicians' car in Antigua, Guatemala, has broken down, so they haven't actually arrived in the club yet, so they're playing Cuban records instead. Plot and Duck order mojitos and a Cuban Sandwich. The mojitos are in tall glasses loaded with fresh mint. At exactly 9AM P and D jump into the air as very loud church bells begin ringing outside, followed by a zillion firecrackers POP POP POP POP. The smoke wafts in the open windows, and the bells are ringing, but the records keep playing. So P and D sit back down and sip their mojitos, but five minutes later more church bells ring, this time accompanied by three zillion firecrackers with a few hundred cherry bombs. Bells and firecrackers. Bells and firecrackers again. Turns out it's a big Saint's Day celebration at the cathedral next door. The air smells like gunpowder. The Cubans never show up. Great night.

4) Imagine oil paintings as vibrant and unique and certainly more colorful than anything Plotnik has seen before, all from a village on Lake Atitlan named San Juan de la Laguna, that was completely buried by mud in Hurricane Stan, but the Peace Corp worker has managed to set up a show for the village's textile artisans and painters in a fancy Antigua hotel. In San Juan, the people are called T'zutzil, and both men and women paint. The artists are at the show, very short, dark haired men in jeans and long sleeved work shirts and even shorter women in long many-layered skirts. The hotel guests browse the exhibition in suits and look like amazons from Beverly Hills. Plot sees the show in the morning and runs to tell Ducknik in her class. On her lunch break they go back. They buy one from Gilberto, after a lengthy negotiation. Here it is, a T'zutzil oil painting, with the artist, painted from a bird's eye view of people harvesting coffee -- oh, boy.