Guatemala - Glorious Guatemala City

Wow! That Seychelles station was AMAZING, huh? Given, it's actually a boosted French station, but wasn't it great? They didn't play a single song that I didn't like.

What say we tune in to Guatemala today? Seems like everyone we know is heading down there for work or travel or school lately, so why not?

apparently it looks like this and any place that looks like this is ok by us.

Pinky used to work with a Guatemalan fellow when he worked landscaping for a few summers back in high school, which was about 10 years ago. (Don’t judge!) Pinky was always amazed at how good this guy was at handling American currency. He'd only been in the States a year or two, but he was so adept at picking out the right change. He'd reach right in his pocket and pull out the exact change for lunch without even looking. Of course, he had to look at the bills but he'd pick the coins out just by touch. The guy just had arithmetic in his fingers, we guess. Not unlike a blackjack dealer or a bank teller. Not the sort of thing you'd expect from a man working a shovel. We wonder what kind of job he had back home...

home again, home again, jiggity jig!

Tangentially, that's one fucked up part about American currency. Since it's all the same size, sight-impaired folks have to depend on the kindness of strangers to help them differentiate between a $1 and a $50 bill. You don't find that in many other countries. Pinky’s friend Karla helped win a federal lawsuit a year or two ago to change that. So, at some point we'll have different sized currency. We’re looking forward to it. Think how much anxiety that's got to engender not knowing what kind of money you're throwing around.

you could be spending 5 silver dollars and have no idea.

The fun part will be to see what kind of designs the treasury will come up with. Pinky remembers seeing a very, very, very low value banknote in China that wasn't much bigger than a postage stamp. It had a truck on it. It might have been worth .001 cents or something like that. It was cute. We don’t think the Treasury will do anything like that since we have a pretty strong currency and the Treasury is annoyed to use "paper" for even $1 bills.

this picture is bigger than the real thing!

Anyway, we've digressed and not really said anything about Guatemala. Sorry 'bout that. Let's go ahead and tune in to the land of totally rad Mayan history, Spanish colonialism, and a century of exploitative labor practices by Chiquita. Guatemala, ho!!!

Tropicalida

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PS: it's Pinky's birthday - wish him a good one, y'all!

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