The other aspect of the trip which also had a profound effect of me was the cultural side. While I gained many cultural insights into the Guatemalan people, I still feel, even now, that my experience was different because I was a tourist, a student, and an American. The scale of these realizations wouldn't fully hit me until I traveled later to Cuba. Because I was much more immersed in the culture there, I gained a completely new perspective from the people. But that is for another post later :) Nonetheless, these cultural insights (or shocks rather) still taught me a lot about how different the world can be. Speaking bluntly, the degrees of poverty that I saw in Guatemala were simply more frequent that what I was accustomed to seeing in the US. It wasn't that I was culturally ignorant or that I didn't understand my standards of living in comparison to theirs, but the reality of it was something I hadn't truly realized. It was a cultural awareness I had not reached, a sociological mindfulness that I now treasure becuase I saw it first hand.
While I was in Guatemala, I also gained an appreciation for hand-crafts. Maybe this appreciation grew because I actually met the creators of these crafts and I saw how skillful they were, or maybe it was the incredible simplicity and beauty of the crafts. Nonetheless, and as a reminder of this tip, I purchased a wallet. I still use this wallet and in this wallet I still have the strip of tape that has the name of my wallet's maker, Julia. My wallet and my memories of Guatemala and what I learned from the culture and the people there remain important to me. Basically, I can know that a culture is unique but I cannot understand what that means until I experience it myself. Guatemala proved to me that the experience of learning about cultures is truly an eye-opening and amazing phenomenon, wherever you go and from whomever you meet =^. .^=
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