Xela

Welcome to Xela. Altitude: 7,000 ft. Population: 120,000.
Xela is the microcosm for Guatemala’s strange, paradoxical existence. It is a city where four-star hotels lay opposite abandoned lots. A city with open-air markets and a chain of mega-grocery stores. A city of travelers and tourists, and natives that can’t get passports. A place where Mayan converts alternate between Christian gospel and traditional folk songs in their native languages. A land of natural beauty and suffocating pollution. It is a city where both kindness and crime are each the law of the land. Welcome to my schizophrenic city.

This unnerving dichotomy is made complete by Xela’s werewolf-like transformation. By day, Xela passes as a livable, occasionally even charming city (where exactly Xela lies on that spectrum depends entirely on perspective). It has restaurants, internet cafes, and even a small piazza-like city center called “Parque Central.” But come sundown, Xela transforms in a decidedly less friendly direction. All of a sudden all the pedestrians disappear. And those quaint little side-streets turn into dark, eerily quiet alleyways. It doesn’t help much that Guatemalans are early-to-bed early-to-rise types, so late-night company can be hard to come by. Nor does it help that the sun goes down around 6:30 or 7:00, just about year round. Fortunately, there are plenty of taxis, and because I’m here with a group, I rarely have to travel alone.

Despite its faults, Xela is one of the best things Guatemala has going on right now. And so the people cling to it, and we along with them. It has pockets of life, pockets of growth. Pockets of middle class life, of happiness. I didn’t see it at first, but it’s seeping in, slowly. It’s a strange process of adjusting/adapting/ignoring. A rebirth of sorts, allowing your vision to reprogram itself to see something it never needed to before. The real world.