kellita the señorita the ibby dibby dow: Tikal Temples and Witches

My new best friend at the hostel is a 3-year-old called Llana. She and her parents are from Buenos Aires, and have been here a few days selling their jewelery. Llana and I became friends two nights ago playing hide and seek swinging in the hammock for hours. Hanging out with her makes me miss Cameron, and sometimes when she finishes giggling about something and starts talking, I find myself startled that it's in Spanish. Of course it's in Spanish because she's from Buenos Aires and that's her language, but sometimes that catches me off guard and I find myself stunned and quickly trying to recover and follow what she's saying. This afternoon, we were playing and enjoying a milkshake, when she turned around and looked at the woman behind us.

She immediately turned to tell me in a rather loud voice how ugly the woman was, and then started saying, "esta mujer es una bruja" equally loud. Sometimes I confuse my words, and first I thought she was saying broma, which is joke, and I thought that was strange. So she's yelling this, and I'm just repeatedly asking, "what? what?" And then it dawns on me. Bruja is witch. This little 3-year-old is telling the world that the ugly woman sitting in the fire pit is a witch, and every time I ask her what she is saying, she repeats it louder until I finally cover her mouth and distract her wtih a new game. Hopefully the woman didn't understand what was happening, but Llana was right on. And she may have cast a spell on us.

Yesterday morning I took the 4:30am shuttle to visit the ruins of Tikal. Our guide was Caesar, and he was amazing, telling us the history of the site and the many stories and legends of each temple. It was magnificent. It's hard to imagine they could build such grand structures with such heavy and large stone before modern machinery.