{"id":87,"date":"2007-10-21T15:15:11","date_gmt":"2007-10-21T21:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=87"},"modified":"2010-09-19T10:12:22","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T16:12:22","slug":"another-week-another-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/another-week-another-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Week, Another Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hot on the heels of my trip to Manchester<\/a> a couple of weeks ago, I spent last week in Guatemala, on another business trip.\u00c2\u00a0 This time it was for a workshop on change management, with a bit of knowledge management thrown in for good measure (it’s difficult to do the former well, without having the latter in place).\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the first time I’ve been to Guatemala, which means I can cross off another country on my map (and not for the reason one of my traveling colleagues does: to indicate getting to first base with a girl from that country!).<\/p>\n

Getting there was the usual pain.\u00c2\u00a0 This time I decided I’d travel light, and hand-carry everything (everything being my laptop, five shirts, and clean underwear) so I had to go out and buy ‘sample size’ bottles of all of my toiletries.\u00c2\u00a0 I hadn’t thought as far ahead as putting them in a ziplock bag, but I knew they had them available at the airport so figured I’d do it there.\u00c2\u00a0 But of course when I got to the airport (eventually, after the road being flooded due to the rain, and having to take the back-back road in) there were no ziplock bags available.\u00c2\u00a0 They apparently don’t supply them any more.\u00c2\u00a0 My washbag is transparent on the inside anyway, so I just opened it up, and laid it flat for them to see, but Security weren’t having any of it.\u00c2\u00a0 Despite all of my toiletries being the requisite ‘sample size’, and despite Security being able to see them and even taking a couple out of the bag to check, because they weren’t in the regulation plastic bag they were all confiscated.\u00c2\u00a0 Marvelous.<\/p>\n

Sure, I know that I should have obtained the correct bag first, but the fact that you need to do that really burns my ass.\u00c2\u00a0 Just because a couple of idiot terrorists tried taking the components of an explosive onto a plane once, we have to go through this stupid exercise.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m all for extra security, but this is entirely unnecessary.\u00c2\u00a0 Firstly, the report on the original incident said there was almost zero chance of the terrorists actually being able to mix the components they had into a viable explosive.\u00c2\u00a0 And second, if they wanted to try again, they just need to send through more people with ‘sample-size’ bottles, and then just add them all together on the plane.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like the shoe thing.\u00c2\u00a0 Just because some prat tried (again, unsuccessfully) to set fire to his shoes several years ago, every one of the millions of air travelers every day now has to take their shoes off to go through security.\u00c2\u00a0 What next?\u00c2\u00a0 What if a terrorist tries to smuggle explosives (or potential components of…) through in their underpants, will everyone have to take off their underpants before boarding a plane?\u00c2\u00a0 Or only be able to wear regulation ones that the airports will stop providing after a couple of months, forcing everyone to go ‘commando’??\u00c2\u00a0 I know, I know.\u00c2\u00a0 But it still irritates the hell out of me.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, at least Continental bumped me up to First Class, which took the edge off my fuming.<\/p>\n

Anyway, despite the inauspicious start (and the plane being delayed by an hour which meant I didn’t get to the hotel until 11pm), the trip went pretty well.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d heard a lot of worrying things about Guatemala – like the high crime rate, the inordinate amount of rape and murder of women that goes uninvestigated, the kidnapping of foreigners, and so on, but it wasn’t too much in evidence whilst I was there.\u00c2\u00a0 That said, every building (save the corrugated-iron shacks occupying the median of the dual carriageways) had bars on all of the doors and windows and razor wire along the tops of the walls.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Even the corner shops had bars across the front, and all transactions were conducted through a slot in the gate.\u00c2\u00a0 There were also a lot of armed guards around – even at the entrance to the Pizza Hut parking lot (where we went to celebrate one of the local team\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s birthdays).\u00c2\u00a0 And even the Guatemalans make sure the car doors are all locked and don’t linger even at red lights.\u00c2\u00a0 But despite all that, I didn’t hear a single gunshot the whole time I was there, and none of the women I met with showed much sign of endemic stress or concern.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, I did get to see a bit more of Guatemala than the inside of the Marriott and the office block whilst I was there.\u00c2\u00a0 Each evening we were taken out to a different restaurant (the food was routinely very good – although strangely every menu had the mysterious “snook” fish on the menu – and that’s the English translation, so none of us knew what it was).\u00c2\u00a0 We even got taken to a local club\/disco, which was pretty entertaining.\u00c2\u00a0 The music was lousy (I’ve never been a big ‘dance’ fan) but the scantily-clad house dancers just about made up for it (at least the women – I could have done without the baby-oil-coated guys thrusting their pelvises at all and sundry).\u00c2\u00a0 More entertaining was watching the local girls honing in on the few white faces in the club (and with some success – you know who you are!).\u00c2\u00a0 The only downside was the way the locals in our party mysteriously disappeared when the bill arrived…<\/p>\n

On Friday we figured we had all worked hard enough, and split work early (4pm) to drive out to Antigua.\u00c2\u00a0 I always thought Antigua was a Caribbean island (apparently there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one of those, too), but this one was a small town about an hour’s drive outside of Guatemala City.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s very old, and they have done a good job of preserving its features (no retail signs, all buildings painted in traditional (bright) colors, cobblestone roads, etc.), despite moving the entire city once or twice due to nearby volcanoes erupting.\u00c2\u00a0 It would have been nice to see the volcanoes themselves, but typically it rained the whole time we were there.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, it was a really nice place (especially after the relative grime of Guatemala City), with the Casa Santo Domingo in particular being truly impressive.\u00c2\u00a0 That, combined with some good company (thanks, Ana Lucia!) and another good restaurant made for a great way to end the week (more so than having to get up at 4am the next morning to get the first flight back to Houston).<\/p>\n

On balance, Guatemala was much nicer than I thought it would be.\u00c2\u00a0 The food is good, the people warm and friendly, and the weather generally pretty good.\u00c2\u00a0 Even if I don’t go back on business (which is unlikely) I’d still consider going back.\u00c2\u00a0 Although I might have to learn Spanish first \u00e2\u20ac\u201c all that Flemish I learnt<\/a> turns out to be not that much use after all\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

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Hot on the heels of my trip to Manchester a couple of weeks ago, I spent last week in Guatemala, on another business […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13],"tags":[76,36,29],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-work","tag-england","tag-flying","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":226,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions\/226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}