Following the example of Jacob, another IMCista blogger from San Diego who is in this part of the world too (and is in fact almost doing the inverse of my itinerary - he was in Chiapas and then went to Guatemala. maybe we'll meet when he comes back to mexico), I am going to blog a bit about what Ive been reading.

Local papers are always a great way to get to know a place and here a great way to practice spanish, so I've been reading Prensa Libre a lot. Its the national, sort of slightly left mostly center intelligent newspaper, as opposed to Nuestra Diario, which is the other big national paper but is almost exclusively lowbrow stories about murders and car crashes and photos of pretty girls. Easier to read, but not too interesting. Prensa Libre is actually very interesting, lots of stories you would never see in a gringo newspaper and a usually good, nuanced angle on the TLC (CAFTA) and other important issues. However according to one of my teachers at the Mountain School, their columnists are all over the political map, several are rather conservative.

Today I took the 730 am bus from Tapachula to San Cristobal. It was 8 hours but pretty comfortable except that I didnt eat anything. I guess I expected the bus to take a lunch stop or that the vendors that are ubiquitous in Guatemala that get on the bus and sell food and drink would provide me with something, but none appeared on this one, I guess because it was too first-class. But it was way better than anything I rode in Guate. a bathroom (which worked, unlike Bolivian buses that have them but they're always broken). Air-conditioning. hardly anyone on it. movies (not good movies, but oh well). The only other problem is that the road up into the highlands was insanely curvey and for the first time since childhood i was getting pretty queasy, i wasnt even trying to read. But that passed.

Anyway, I made it to San Cristobal at about 4pm and found a cheap hotel and bought a leftwing national Mexican paper, La Jornada. Its pretty great, though the trade off is that the deeper the political analysis the harder the Spanish is for me to decode. But the greater the motivation is too.

I've been trying to meet up with people from Chiapas Indymedia but the 2 people I have personal addresses for, Paco and Luz, have not answered lately. I think tonite or tommorrow morning I will just go over to the space they have, which I have the address for, and see if I find anyone. It would be great to get a place to crash while I'm here.

To get back to reading material - when I've not been poring over newspapers or my guidebooks, the last 2 books I read were 'First World Ha Ha Ha!' and '100 Years of Solitude.' The first is an anthology I picked up in Xela that collects short essays by dozens of different writers about the Zapatista uprising. Its a great book and I learned a lot, though its now 10 years old and i'm itching to find out more about more recent EZLN events.

The second aforementioned book is the great and famous novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author. Cien A