Shopping in Chichi

I enjoy shopping in Chichi.  It is a totally new experience for me, since I'm used to doing all my shopping in a super-department-houseware-hardware-grocery store, all under one roof (think Walmart).  In Chichi I have to walk down street after street to find little stores that sell what I'm looking for.

Often there is a pile of clothes in the road for sale in Chichi.  There is also usually someone yelling, in Spanish of course, "¡Un quetzal! ¡Un quetzal!" which translates to "13 cents!  13 cents!"

So sometimes I stop and dig through the pile with the other ladies.  The clothes are very good quality used clothes from the United States.  Our maid, Micaela, told me that having ladies' American clothes to buy is new in the last five years.  Before that, there were only locally-made outfits to wear, like the lady above on the left is wearing.  Most of the Mayan ladies still wear this traditional outfit.  In fact, they say you can tell which dialect of K'iche' a lady speaks by what her outfit looks like, since each municipality has its own traditional style.

One time, while looking through a pile of clothes, a lady handed me a colorful sweater she had found in the pile and said, "¡Este es para usted!" ("This is for you!")  I laughed and said, "¡Tiene razón!" ("You're right!")  But in my heart I added, "Thanks God!" because I always pray that if there is something in that huge pile that God knows we could use, He would help me find it!

From there I usually walk over to the fruit and vegetable market.  This is the lady who works at the fruit stand I like to go to.  There are several stands together that all sell the same produce, so it's just a matter of choosing one.  No more Walmart produce section for me!  In the States I have never found such delicious, fresh pineapple, papaya, or mango.  See my big bags that I have to carry all my produce in.  I always take one of my daughters with me, and she ends up loaded down, too.

There are various stands in the market where one can buy chicken.  It usually looks very fresh (see the white stand on the right-hand side).  I get bone-in chicken breast for $2.00 per pound.  I'll include a photo of the butcher shop where I buy beef in a future post.

Another food we buy a lot of is freshly-baked bread.  There is a bakery three doors up the street from our house!  Talk about good smells coming our way during the day!  Pair up some pan dulce (which means "sweet bread"), with a cup of hot Incaparina, a sweet drink made of powdered corn which the poor Guatemalans drink, and you have a delicious breakfast.  We eat this every Sunday morning.

The bakery sells about 15 different types of sweet bread, so we are trying to learn all the unusual sounding names, for example, champurrada, corona, sheika, campechana, recado, and simanteca.  I have pictures of the bread drawn on a sheet of paper on our refrigerator with the name listed next to it!