Joel's Guatemala Trip

Photos

2005-12-19T21:46:00.000-08:00

Finally, after many false promises the photos of my trip are posted. Here are a few. You can view the rest here. I did not take my digital camera down to Guatemala which I really regret, but after some digital modifications here in Colorado, the photos that I did take didn't come out half bad. Enjoy.

End of the Road

2005-12-19T21:40:00.000-08:00

Breathe deep….take in the cold, crisp, pollution-free air….look at the beautiful mountain that towers over the city…damn it’s good to be home.

That’s right, after three and a half months, meeting tons of amazing people and having some wild experiences, learning a ton of Spanish (with tons more to learn) and how to SCUBA dive, I am back in at home and don’t it feel good. The saying goes that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone (or you leave it behind in my case) and that is doubly true for me. I feel rejuvenated here. The air tastes and smells familiar and fresh, the cold is bracing, the snow crunches driely under my shoes, and home looks and smells exactly like I left. I know where I belong. I am a mountain boy to the bone. I like beaches and the sea, but mountains are so much better. I love Colorado

I finished my time in the Bay Islands of Honduras a little prematurely. I was originally planning on staying there a week and going all the way through my advanced certification, but I changed my mind after doing a few more dives. It was really cool to learn how to do it, but it just didn’t have the factors that I need in an activity. I don’t know if I can really explain it very well, but diving just isn’t as cool to me as rock climbing or mountain biking. Like I said I am a mountain boy, water sports just aren’t my thing unless the water is frozen. I’m very glad that I learned how to do it and I’m sure I’ll use it again sometime in my life, but I decided not to do my advanced because my money was really starting to run out fast and I don’t have another $200 to spend there. So I departed early on the last ever ferry off the island (the ferry was going out of business due to the recent hurricane and the downturn in tourism). I went back to Copan and saw the ruins there. They are not as spectacular as the ruins at Tikal, but they are much more elaborate. There are giant stone obelisks that have intricate Mayan carvings on them and it was interesting to try to puzzle out what the hidden meaning of the glyphs could mean.I met a friend there and he loaned me his book that talked about the site, so I sat there for a while and read and tried to puzzle out what happened in this city in antiquity.

After Copan, it was back to Antigua with my friend for a night and morning of safe sleep. My last night was a little anticlimactic because I was pretty tired from two long days of traveling, but we had a really good dinner and the desert there is top-notch. We retired early and I woke up the next day, did some last minute shopping and hopped on my last chicken bus to get to the airport. The airport had a ton of security checks and fees that we had to submit to and the gate felt like a chicken gate because they crammed us all in there shoulder to shoulder for about 20 minutes until we could get on the plane. That’s when my whole world changed. They stuck me in first class again (thank you Uncle Bob) and started me off with a little champagne. It was just a little overwhelming. The flight was great and the soft lights of Atlanta stirred feeling of immense pleasure and a little relief that I was back in the States. I also noticed a marked difference to the layout of American cities as opposed to Guatemalan. From the air, American cities look much more ordered, with the lights making precise patterns that urban planners have laid out. The street lights are all at precisely equal intervals and the giant sky-scrapers all emerge out of a single point. Guatemala from the air is the exact opposite. Things are scattered about randomly. There are sections of order in the chaos, but they are quickly swallowed by random sections of housing or a large building in the middle. I have a special place in my heart for Guatemala, but man it’s good to be home.

There was also a little culture shock when I went into the airport. The first thing I noticed was that everyone was on a cell-phone. Every fifth person was lost in their cell phone to the exclusion of everything else. There are cell phones in Guate, but they are few and far-between. The other thing was just the sheer, staggering size of things in the United States. Just one terminal of Atlanta International would’ve swallowed about 20 times over the largest building I ever entered in Guatemala. I was thinking about what a Guatemalan would think when he entered that terminal for the first time. I was quickly starting to readjust to my new surroundings and it felt very good to be home.

The next flight was rather uneventful except for the descent and landing. The pilots made a great ILS descent through a cloud layer over the Springs that was actually pretty low. That low cloud layer was causing a light snow to drift across my window. Man, it looked cold. I got off the plane and had another moment of culture readjustment. There was another kid who had flown standby on the flight and he sounded like he was going to have some problems getting picked up from the airport. I offered him a ride to the restaurants near our house so his friends didn’t have to go all the way across the city. My first though was that it might not be safe to sit in a restaurant with all your bags, but then I remembered we were in Colorado. You can sit in a restaurant (or anywhere else) without much fear of being robbed. He thanked me and refused, but my cultural readjustment continued. My dad was waiting out in the blowing snow and it was nice to get in the heated car. When I got home, I ate as many refrigerated products that I haven’t had for a while as I could, cheese and milk being the first and foremost. It’s good to be home.

I had an amazing trip and it has changed me in a lot of ways. I now have a much stronger appreciation for the people and circumstances of my life. I am so lucky in so many ways that I take for granted. I have a cohesive and supportive family, I have a great group of friends, I have a education and the ability to obtain more, and I have political and economic freedom to pursue happiness wherever it might take me, There are so many people in this world that don’t have any of these things, let alone all of them. I am so very lucky and I am also ready to work to maintain these things.

Which brings me to the next question…what now? I am still struggling to find my place in the workforce and life in general, but this trip has helped me a lot to realize what I want to do with my life. For the last few years, I have been in a battle with myself between pursuing my love of flying and my love of biology and learning. I have always loved flying. From when I was a little kid I would stare at the airplanes that would fly over my house for the air force football games. But this trip has made me realize that a career as a pilot would not be very satisfying to me. I would love the flying aspect, but I think I would hate everything else. I would hate the fact that I was away from home more often than not, not eating well, sitting for hours on end, and not experiencing the joy that flows from helping people with very personal and important problems. So I am convinced that I don’t want to be an airline pilot, and medical school is looking more and more attractive all the time. I am still a little scared of residency, but the more I think about what it actually entails it’s not too bad. Attitude is everything. So I am going to begin the laborious process of applying to medical school and then find a job that I can save some money with. I will know by next January whether or not I got into medical school and where I will be going. After that, I am hoping to go to use the money I saved to travel back to Guatemala and perfect my Spanish and work somewhere for a period of time before I head to medical school. The best laid plans…

Thank you all for being such great friends and family and for reading my blog. I have gotten a lot better about responding to e-mail this trip, so shoot me an e-mail and I’ll get back to you soon. Hope everyone is doing well. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone.

Breathing Underwater

2005-12-13T09:06:00.000-08:00

I used to have dreams like this when I was a little kid. It would be after a day of swimming in the pool and I would go home that night and fall asleep and dream that I was swimming around underwater but that I could breathe. I would wake up and think how cool that would be if I could actually do it. Well, now I can.

I am currently in the Bay Islands in Honduras. I traveled down to Honduras after my parents left and stayed in a cool little place called Copan that has a lot of Mayan ruins. I didn't get to see the Mayan ruins because I hadn't gotten any sleep the night before so I came to the city and just slept, but the hostel I was in was really nice, the nicest I've been to in Central America actually. That was good because when I got here the place I am staying is an absolute dump. I am on the island of Utila which is famous for being the cheapest place to learn how to SCUBA dive. I started my lessons yesterday with a morning of book work (this stuff is not rocket-science) and then got to go out and practice skills in the afternoon. We went to a rather nice beach with a sandy bottom and I go to try breathing underwater for the first time. I had some confidence that my SCUBA apparatus would function because I had checked it all out before I went, but it was new to put my head underwater and actually be able to breath. My instructor and I kneeled on the sandy bottom and she started to teach me. She had told me what we were going to be doing, but it took me at least a minute to come to grips with the fact that I was breathing underwater before I was actually able to pay attention to her. We went through some basic skills like taking your breathing apparatus out of your mouth and taking you mask off. It was all pretty simple stuff, but there was a lot of it and it took us an hour to get through. After that, we swam around and looked at the absolutely gorgeous reef that is here. The reef was teeming with life and all sorts of colorful fish. There are some very unusual forms of life around here.

After our dive, we came back to the boat and there were other people there who were going on another dive, so I had about an hour to kill and I decided to go snorkeling. I had an interesting experience where I did a snorkel dive and my first instinct was to keep breathing normally. I had to tell myself that I can't actually breath underwater with only a snorkel. I was also kind of dissapointed with myself because I couldn't hold my breath for very long. I remember when I was a little kid and playing the trombone and swimming, I could hold my breath for a very long time. I could stay down and admire the reefs and fishes and just kinda hang out without too much difficulty. Now that is all gone. Good thing I'm learning how to SCUBA dive.

Other than SCUBA diving, this island is interesting in itself. The locals speak a dialect of incomprehensible English. I listen to a conversation and I can only pick up one or two English words. They also speak Spanish and they moderate their English to make it understandable to foreigners, but when they speak with each other, it is impossible to understand. I haven't liked Honduras as much I liked Guatemala. The people here just don't seem to be as friendly and the Mayan culture is not as prominent here. I actually heard that it is illegal for Mayans to wear their particular style of clothing here. For some reason I seem to instictively trusted Mayans. They just seemed to be happy, unassuming people. They never really had malice in their eyes like I would see with people in the cities and with most of the people here. It bothers me a little. But, I am enjoying my time here. The plan right now is to stay here and get all the way through my advanced certification. That means I get to do some really cool dives. It also will probably give me the confidence to go diving again after I leave it for a while, becaus there is not much diving in Colorado. I am planning on heading back to the States on next Tuesday or Wednesday. I haven't really decided yet, but I will post it on here when I decide. Hope everyone is doing well in the States or whereever you are and I'll see you when I get back.

On the Road Again

2005-12-10T14:05:00.000-08:00

After a wonderful week of not having to pay for anything by traveling with my parents, I am on the road again in Central America. This weeks destination are some small islands off the Atlantic coast of Honduras called the Bay Islands which are world renoun for great diving and being the cheapest place to learn. There has been an exodus of people from Xela heading down to the Bay Islands for Christmas. It should be quite a party. I am currently in a little city on the border of Guatemala and Honduras called Copan Ruinas. There are some amazing Mayan ruins here that I am not going to see because I just don´t have the time. I will hopefully see them on my way back for my flight out of Guatemala City.

The week with my parents was pretty cool. They arrived last Thursday and we hung out in Antigua for a day. Then we hopped on a chicken bus to get to Chichicastenango for the market. I have to say that I´m pretty proud of my parents for riding on the chicken bus. It was actually one of the worst chicken bus rides I have been on. Chicken busses aren´t really so bad if you can catch them from where they start and get a good seat. It get a little crowded but it´s not really that uncomfortable. The discomfort comes when you have to catch a chicken bus in the middle of the ride and have the aisle of a seat shared with three other people which was designed for two little school children. You have one butt cheek on the seat and are desperately hanging on as the bus swings around the tight mountain curves at breakneck speed. My parents endured all this without any complaining.

The market was pretty interesting and I bought a few Christmas gifts for everyone. We stayed the night there and left for Xela the next day. I have only been away from Xela for a week and I already miss it a little.The time in Xela was spent walking around and getting gifts for all the people who helped me in Xela and saying goodbye to all the great people that I met there. We only stayed in Xela for a day and then went to Lago de Atitlan. I have described that lake before here and I still think it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been...and I live in Colorado. We stayed at this really incredible hotel that came highly recommended. Our room had double doors that opened onto a balcony that overlooked the lake with perfect views of the volcanoes and the sunsets and sunrises. We actually also met some other people from Colorado Springs there. There are a lot of people from Colorado traveling in Central America right now. I have met at least 9 as of now. I think the lake was one of the highlights for my parents. My dad probably would have stayed there for two or three weeks if mom hadn´t insisted that they go home. After a day of touring around the lake, it was back to Antigua and then they were gone. I spent the next two days in Antigua hanging out with friends from Xela who are now on their way to El Salvador.

I also had a cool little interesting adventure yesterday in Antigua. So I have been craving excercise for the last month or two and I decided to splurge a little and rent a nice to bike around Antigua. I rented the bike for 4 hours and took off from Antigua toward the volcanoe that dominates the skyline there. The rental place had given me a map of where to go and I used this to promptly get lost. I started climbing this huge hill just to push myself a little. It was feeling really good to excercise. The grade was very steep though and I spent a lot of time in the highest gear. Guatemalan vans would drive by and the drivers would lean out the window and give me a thumbs up for encouragement. I eventually made it to the top of the hill where there was a little farming town with a really breathtaking church. I had been riding on roads up to this point and now I wanted to go back down off-road. That was why I rented the expensive bike. So I just turned off on a random dirt road and went into the town a little ways. Right as I was about to be really lost I found two locals looking over the scene of a mudslide. I saddled up to them and asked them what the best way to get back to San Pedro. One of them bent down and started drawing me a map in the sand and describing where I should go. The map was dead on and I managed to find the trail pretty easily and avoid most of the pitfalls. I did get lost one time where I rode into a coffee field and had to ask the farmer how to get back, and I spent a lot of time on the narrow singletrack behind horses because I couldn´t pass them but when I got out in the open, I was having a blast riding down the volcanoe. I eventually made it back without any problems and with the determination that the next time I come back here, I am going to bring my bike.

Hope everyone in the states is doing great and I´ll see you all very soon.

The roles become reversed

2005-12-01T17:04:00.000-08:00

So my parents cared for me my whole life while I was young and now the roles have been reversed because they have come down to Guatemala and I have to take care of them. It´s not like I have to feed them or wake them up in the night or anything like that and I do get to mooch meals off them, but I do feel strangely responsible for them.

I have been spending them last couple days in Antigua. Antigua was the seat of power of all of Central America when the Spanish were in charge here. It still retains a lot of its historical feeling and charm...and this attracts tourists. Antigua is pretty much the tourist capital of the country. If you travel to Guatemala for a short time, chances are that you will spend most of your time in Antigua. I came to Antigua from Guatmala city on Tuesday. I left Xela (sadly) on Monday with a few of the friends that I had made there and the original plan was to go to Antigua, but we didn´t leave until late in the afternoon and we didn´t feel to comfortable changing busses in the night with all our stuff. So we went all the way to Guatemala City and I stayed with a friend of a friend who works for the embassy there. It was a good experience but I felt thoroughly gringoized afterwords. We had burgers and fries, watched Monday night football and drank America beer. I love America, but this felt oddly out of place.

The next day, I wandered around Guatemala city just because I could in relative safety. I had a safe place to keep all my stuff and I just took what I needed for the day out so that if I got robbed, it wouldn´t be a big deal. I didn´t feel very unsafe, people would look at me, but I didn´t really attract any unwanted attention and I could pretty much walk everywhere that I needed to go. It was kind of polluted and nasty though, so I was glad to move on to Antigua. I reached Antigua and found a hostle that was fairly cheap. The reason that it was fairly cheap is that it had just been violently robbed two days ago. I was talking with some people who were still staying there and they said that six men with guns broke in and robbed everyone and raped a girl. It was a really horrifying story and just an example of the reason why this Guatemala in general is so cheap. This is not an entirely safe country.

I decided that the hostel was probably still safe because they probably would not come back and the owner had installed a rudimentary security system and would be very distrustful for a very long time. So I went out that night and made a few Antigua friends and then came back to prepare for my volcanoe trek the next day. This was one of the better expereinces I have had down here. The Antigua skyline is dominated by three volcanoes: Aguas, Picaya, and Fiero. Aguas is the absoultely gigantic one that you will see in all the pictures of Guatemala. It is not currently active and sadly boasts radio towers on top. Fiero is difficult to see, but it is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. It is constantly spitting up lava and rocks and is way too dangerous to climb. Picaya is the one that most people do from Antigua. It is a pretty active volcanoe, but not so active that you can´t climb it. The hike takes about 7 hours from Antigua (most of that on a bus) and is well worth the cost and the time. The hike is not very hard, but weather was starting to move in when we got to the summit cone. I have described the clouds here before and how fast they move and this volcanoe was no exception. Fast moving clouds rolled over us as we hiked to the top. We got near the summit and the guide of our little expedition led us to a warm steam pocket to get out of the wind. It was kind cool being warm in a cloud. He then led us up a little farther and low and behold...lava. The volcanoe topped out and inside the cone about 10 feet away was glowing hot lava. The wind was howling at out back and it burned your face to keep it turned towards that lava for any amount of time, but it was incredible. The only reason we could get that close was because of the cold wind blowing the heat away from us. We stared in fascination for a little while and then the volcanoe decided to scare us a little. It shot a small rock out of the crater and made us realize that we were completely at its mercy. If that crater had erupted while we were up there, I would not be here to write about it. I think it actually did have a small eruption the next day...incredible. But being ten feet away from hot lava was definetely a memorable experience.

Today my parents arrived. Like a good son, I waited at the airport for them for 3 hours and found them when they came out. We managed to catch a bus to Antigua with a really nice couple from Spain and I got to practice my Castillian accent. We actually ended up staying at the same hotel and now we are here settling in for the night. My dad just came back thinking that he had mistakenly given a little Mayan girl 100Q instead of ten for a bottle of water and tried to argue when she only gave him 2Q for change. I love my parents. Hope everyone is doing well back in the states and hasta la vista.

When it Rains...it Pours

2005-11-27T14:47:00.000-08:00

So true.

So for the last two weeks I have had a string of just plain bad luck and stupid decisions that have inconvienced me and cost me quite a lot of money. I have had some bad luck and made some stupid decisions before but they just seem to be coming in droves now. It started with my trip back from Flores and the Tikal trip. Somewhere in the trip I managed to lose the cell phone that I had been renting from the school. I think it just slipped out of my pocket on my last bus ride. I bought a new one about three days ago and used it as an alarm to wake myself up for the trip that I took this weekend to climb the highest point in Central America. We had to meet at for this trip at 4am and I don´t natuarally wake up at that time, so I was relying on my cell phone. Since I had just bought it, I needed to set the time. I didn´t get home on Friday night until about midnight and I set the cell phone to about 12:15. I then set my alarm for 4am and went to bed. I woke up the next morning with sun shining in through my window, cried a loud explicative, and jumped out of bed and grabbed the cell phone. The time read 18:45!! The damn thing was in military time! So I proceeded to run out the door to the company that I was doing the climb with, and they said that I could probably still catch the group if I managed to catch the next bus to San Marcos. I managed to catch the bus by taking a cab and found another group that was going the same way. I actually had a lot of luck with this and managed to barely make the connections and find my group before they started up the mountain. I was just starting to feel like my luck was changing when I got off the bus and discovered that my brand new cell phone was gone!!! I think it slipped out of my pocket again....I hate my life. So I am going to burn these damn pants and go buy another cell phone tommorrow.

I did manage to make the hike though and it was really good. We climbed to a campsite right below the summit and camped for the night. It was a bear to haul all the weight of food and water up there, but the sunset was worth it. That was probably one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life. We had made camp and hiked up to a smaller summit to witness the sunset. When we got up, there was a layer of clouds covering the valley below and the volcanoes were poking through. The sun was setting directly over the layer of clouds and there was a little bit of haze above the cloud layer that we were just barely above. I will never forget watching the last small line of sun drop behind that haze layer and into the clouds. It was a very profound moment for me.

That night was a good dinner and lots of standing around the campfire. The sleep wasn´t so good because we had seven people crammed in each tent and it just wasn´t very comfortable. But we got up at 4am (I actually did get up at four this time) and hiked to the actual summit to watch the sunrise. It wasn´t nearly as spectacular as the sunset the night before, but it was still pretty cool to watch the sun come up behind the other tall volcanoes in Guatemala. Overall it was a very good experience and I´m glad I did it. I have now done two of the four volcanoes that I wanted to do when I came to Guatemala. I am going to do the third (and very active) volcanoe when I go to Antigua this week and there is one more around Lago de Atitlan that I wanted to do, but don´t know if I will get to before I leave.

Hope everyone´s luck is better than mine and I´ll talk to you all later.

Back in Xela

2005-11-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

So I have made it back. The journey was a grueling one. I went from Dangriga to the capital of Belize and then to the border and back to Flores. From Flores, it was fifteen hours of bus riding to get back to Xela. That sucked a lot, and it gives a new meaning to the word...road rash. Anyway, now I am back in Xela and Spanish school. I have one more week to try to finish up the majority of the grammar and then my parents are going to come visit. I am going to spend a week with them and then it´s all up in the air. I think the first thing I am going to do is go down to the Bay Islands in Honduras and try to get all my scuba certifications. It costs about $400 and you can get all the way through your masters certification in a week. Then I think I am going to come back to the States. I am little tired of traveling and the major reason is because I can´t excercise here. I am used to excercising every day or at least every other day in the States and here it is difficult to find things to do and to find the time to do them. I haven´t had a regular excercise routine for the last three months and I can feel that my body is starting to complain. Also, if I return in December I can see friends that might come home for Christmas and have more time to find a job. So that is the plan as of right now, but as I know so well, plans have a way of changing pretty quickly. Hope everyone is doing well and the next post is going to be pictures.

Winding Down

2005-11-19T06:47:00.000-08:00

It's been an amazing trip so far. I've seen beatiful waterfalls, towering Mayan pyramids, rivers, lakes, mountains, and beaches. I've partied with some locals and travelers and had some very interesting conversations about life with my traveling companions. Overall, I am very satisfied.

I am currently in Dangriga, Belize for the Garifuna Celebration Day. The Garifuna are a small percentage of the population in Belize and they are descended from African slaves that were brough over here by England when they settled here. They have not lost a shred of their African heritage. The main celebration is tonight, but last night was pretty fun too. There was lots of dancing. The people stand around a drum circle and sing in Garifuna (which is a mixture of English/French/Creole) and dance a really mezmerizing dance that is mostly really fast hip movements. It is absolutely amazing to watch and really hard to do. They tried to teach me a litle, but my hips just aren't designed to move like that. The similarity between this and African music were incredible. I felt like I had stepped into Ghana for a moment.

There is also a tropical storm that is sitting off our coast right now. I can actually look out my window and see the tail end of it as it moves off out to the East (luckily). It was pretty rainy last night, but nothing severe. It looks like the Yucatan is going to get pounded again. The weather today is much better, which is kind of a shame because I have to leave today.

The last time I wrote on here, I was in a little town called Flores. Flores is an island with a quaint little city built on it. It is the jumping off point for Tikal. The ruins at Tikal are some of the best preserved and most specatacular Mayan ruins in the world. After spending a day in Flores hiking, kayaking and just kind of relaxing, we bussed it out to Tikal to spend the night. We got there and decided to go watch a sunset from one of the pyramids. Entering these ruins is spellbinding. It's amazing to think what this city of 150,000 inhabitants looked like before the Mayan civilization collapsed. Most of the pyramids were buried under jungle dirt and trees and had to be excavated, but you can still see some sides of the pyramids that are still covered. That combined with the lush jungle of the site gives you the impression that you are just discovering this city for the first time. We hiked through the site briefly to the sunset pyrmaid and climbed on up. The steps are huge and the climb is a little intimidating. It was well worth it though. The sunset was incredible with the other pyramids rising out of the jungle being highlighted by the setting sun. We spent that night in hammocks at the budget hotel. I've never actually had to spend the night in a hammock, but it was actually surprisingly comfortable. The main problem was the fact that I had left my sleeping bag in Flores so that I wouldn't have to cart all my stuff around, and it actually gets pretty cold in the jungle at about 2:30 am. So I woke up then and walked around until 5 when our sunrise tour was leaving. This was the reason we spent the night in Tikal, so that we could see the sunrise from the top of one of the pyramids. We had found a tour guide the previous day and he led us to the top of a pyramid. At the top, we sat and listened to the sounds of the jungle and ate cookies and tea. The sun rose, but it was a little cloudy so there wasn't much of a sunrise, but it was cool to see the other pyramids rising out of the mist. The other cool thing about the sunrise tour is the wildlife. Around the same time every morning, howler monkeys wake up and establish their territory. They let out this loud roar that sounds like something out of a horror movie. If I hadn´t known that the sound was just monkeys I would have been running for the nearest toilet. They wake up and roar at each other to tell other monkeys to stay away and to wake up the tourists. After watching the sunrise on the pyramid, we followed our guide around the site and he taught us all kinds of history. The most amazing part for me was imagining what this city must´ve looked like when it was at the peak. It must have been absolutely stunning. We climbed lots of pyramids, saw the field where they used to play a sport where the loser got sacrificed to the gods (the Mayans were big into sacrifices...actually they still are, jut not human ones), and learned how to make all-spice. It was a very interesting trip. I took lots of pictures and I will be posting them soon.

After our day into Tikal, we traveled to this little town that is kinda between big destinations on the "Gringo Trail" called Finca Ixobel. This place was amazing. It´s a working farm that is also kind of a relaxtion resort. They grow all their own food, have a horse stable and lots of land to ride on, an animal terrerium with monkeys and some beautiful tropical birds and a swimming pond with a little waterslide and diving platform. The biggest draw about this place is the food though. Every night they have a buffet style dinner and for $5, you can get more amazing food than you can possibly eat. We decided to stay there for two nights because the girls in our group wanted to go horseback rising and I wanted to eat the food some more. So we hung out at Finca Ixobel and I studied a little Spanish, played some volleyball and soccer with the workers, went swimming in the pond and ate lots of food. I have to quickly mention a very fun activity that we did at the swimming pond. There was a small retaining wall that was submerged about 2 feet and was covered with very slippery moss. The locals had invented a chicken-like game where you have to stand on the wall and try to knock the other guy off who is facing you. We must´ve played this for a good hour and a half and it was extremely fun. I didn´t manage to win very often, but I knocked a few people off.

After our second night at Finca Ixobel, it was off to Rio Dulce. This town is at the mouth of the river that runs from Guatemala´s biggest lake. There´s not much to do there except stay for really cheap. There is a really cool feature that is about an hour away in the back of a pickup truck. There is a really amazing waterfall that is fed by a natural hot spring. The spring creates a small river where the warm water flows down and finally over a cliff into a river. The waterfall is perfect shower temperature and you can climb around on it because the water is too warm to allow anything to grow on the rocks and they are very grippy. Unfortunatley, we didn´t have much time to explore the waterfall because we traveled there in the afternoon and it was difficult to return while it was still light, and you don´t want to be traveling in Guatemala after dark. So we swam around the waterfall a little and then returned to Rio Dulce. The next day, we took a day trip down the river to a place called Livingston on the Carribean coast. The river trip was interesting. We got to see a castle that had been built by the Spaniards to protect the lake, a island full of waterfoul and some small natural hot springs that flowed into the river that would occasionally emit waves of scalding hot water. Livingston was not very entertaining. There are really only two things to do there and those are eat and hike to some waterfalls. We got there in the afternoon again, so we couldn´t hike to the waterfalls, but we did manage to eat some of the local food. The local specialty is a curry stew with all kinds of seafood. You get a gigantic bowl that has a fish head poking out of it, and you have to dig through and extract the seafood. I´m actually starting to like seafood, it just takes a lot of work to eat it. The stew was delicious though. We returned to Rio Dulce that night and kind of a special dinner, because the next day we were going to break up our group. I wanted to go to Belize and they were going to more Mayan ruins in Honduras. So we had a special dinner consisting of bread and terrible cheeze, but with interesting conversation and good desert.

The next day, I got up early to go to Belize. I immediately caught a bus that carted me (eventually) to Puerto Barrios and from there I caught a ferry to Punta Gorda in Belize. I was very surprised when I arrived in Belize. Belize is originally a British colony and everybody speaks English. I started talking to the customs official in Spanish and she asked me to speak in English. Apparently, she had needed to study Spanish in Antigua for her job and she still had a few problems with her Spanish. The infrastructure in Belize is a step up from Guatemala. The busses are not jam packed with people, all the roads that I saw were paved, you can drink the tap water and actually throw your toilet paper away in the toilet (In Guatemala, you have to put toilet paper in a trash can because it will clog the small pipes there). Unfortunetly, you pay a price for more infrastructure. Prices in Belize were about triple what they are in Guatemala.

I caught a bus from Punta Gorda to this small town on the coast called Placencia. It used to be an island until a hurricane came along and pushed a sandbar up that connected it to the mainland. They built a road to it, and now it is a bustling tourist trap. It´s actually easier to get it it by water taxi and I arrived by boat at about three in the afternoon. I walked around trying to find a hotel for about a half an hour because there are almost no signs there. I finally found a relatively cheap one for $15USD that had it´s own bathroom and shower...what luxury!! I immediately threw my pack down and went to the beach. The beach in Placencia was absolutely beautiful. It was a long strech of white sand with clear, warm water and lots of little cabins. If I ever want a beach vacation again, I am going to come to Belize. I swam for a little while and then walked along the beach. I found a bar with a bunch of people and sat down to have a happy hour pina colada. It was excelent. I got to chatting with a couple at the bar and ended up having dinner with them. I actually ended up hanging out the whole night with them because we went back and sang karaoke at the beach bar until late in the night.

I woke up the next day and wanted to do a little snorkeling, but there was a future tropical storm Gamma building up off the coast of Belize. None of the guiding companies wanted to go out, so I decided to head up the coast to Dangriga, so I hopped back into the water taxi and here I am. I am getting ready to head back to Xela and I´m not loking forward to it because it´s going to be two days of traveling. Not fun. Hope everyone is doing well and I´ll talk to you later.

Logical Paradoxes

2005-11-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

How can you swim on a bridge? How can you dive into a pool of water if you´re underground? How can there be so many amazing places in this world that we never hear about in the US? All these questions and more will be answered if you read on.

So I´ve been sitting on my butt in Xela for too long. I don´t have anything to talk about on my blog and so I start writing political rants. Now that I´ve offended just about everybody, I´m back on the road again and having an amazing adventure. It started at 4am on Wednesday morning when we took a first class bus to Guatemala city for the first leg of our travels. Our ultimate destination this day was a place just about in the middle of Guatemala called Coban. I am traveling with five other students that I met at my Spanish school. They originally planned this trip and I had heard about it, and then my parents changed their mind about coming down, so I decided to see as much of Guatemala as I can before my parents come down, because after that, it´s off to see the rest of Central America.

The first leg of our travels went relatively smoothly. The bus ride took 4 hours and I slept and chatted with a very nice Guatemalan business owner and lawyer. My Spanish has come a long way since my first bus ride into Xela. We got to Guatemala city and started looking for a the bus to Coban. We hadn´t walked two blocks when we saw the next first class bus headed for Coban and hopped on it. This ride was another four hours (it´s amazing how long places take to get to here) and we arrived in Coban at about 2 or three. For those of you who are thinking about coming down to Guatemala, Coban is a crappy city. Apparently, it rains all the time except for a three week break during the nice season. It was raining when we got there and we quickly decided to get out as fast as possible. We had a little lunch and then found a bus to take us to Semuc Champey. This was our ulitmate destination, but we figured we´d have to spend a night in Coban. We lucked out and took the last bus to a little hotel right next to the park called Las Marias. This bus was not nearly as comfortable as the last two and they crammed about 18 people onto it. It took another two hours, we had to switch to a pickup truck, and it started to rain, but we finally pulled in to our destination and unpacked. It was still raining hard after dinner and we all fell asleep almost immediately.

The next day the sun was shining and we were on our way to Semuc Champey. I used the local rope swing into the river to wake myself up, we had breakfast and were off. Semuc Champey is a protected park in Guatemala and it consists of these beautiful turquoise pools resting in limetone beds that you can swim in. We paid our fee to get in and walked up to the pools. The pools are a deep aqua marine and very relaxing to swim in. They are a series of stepping down pools until they empty into the river, but that´s not even the coolest part about them. The river that they empty into is huge and the pools only trickle tiny bits of water at their exit, not nearly enough to feed this massive river. After exploring the upper part of the pools you come to where the upper part of the river comes down, but it doesn´t feed the pools. At the upper part of the pools, the river becomes ferocious and ducks under the pools into a giant cave. I had been told there was a giant limestone bridge in this park, what I didn´t realize is that the pools we had been swimming in were the giant limestone bridge. The series of pools constituted a bridge that spanned the river that was underground. I thought that was a really cool way to look at a bridge. There was also an amazing overlook that I will post pictures of as soon as I get back to Xela and get my film developed.

After the bridges, there was supposed to be a really amazing caving tour. There are some caves on the other side of the river from Semuc Champey and for 30Q they would take you inside and give you a tour. This has to be one of the most unique and fun things I have ever done in my life. We arrived and the guide handed us candles to light our way through the caves. We hiked up to the caves, lit our candles and approached the cave apprehensively. The cave is full of water and the first room we came to had the sound of bats echoing off the walls. We waded through the slightly chilly water and took in the totally alien surroundings. Then, the guide stopped us and told us we were going swimming and to make sure to hold the candle up. Swimming in a cave is a totally new experience for me. We climbed and descended a few ladders and swam quite a bit more. The rock formations in the cave were incredible and the guide was skipping around the cave lighting candles so we could see the caves rooms. We climbed up an underground waterfall and swam quite a bit more until we finally came to the jumping room. We all stopped and the guide told us to wait for him as he climbed up a nearby wall. We all watched as he reached a ledge, paused for a moment and then did a perfect swan dive from about 14 ft into a little pool. Naturally, nobody really relished the thought of doing this...except me. How many times in you life are you going to get to go cliff jumping in a cave!! I scampered up the wall after him, he shined his light to where I was supposed to jump, I counted to three and jumped. It wasn´t much different from a lot of cliff jumps I have done, except for the fact that we were in a cave. Most of the rest of the group did it and then it was time to head back. We exited the cave the same way we had come in, but the was one more treat in store for us. We had all carried tubes up to the caves so that we could tube back down the gentle river to our hotel. We hopped into the river and proceeded to tube. There was also one more treat in store for me. There was a huge suspenion bridge across the river that was just begging to be jumped off. I was the only one who wanted to do it because it was about 25 or 30 feet high, so the guide and I stopped, hiked up the bridge,threw our tubes off, and jumped. It was one of the most amazing days I have ever had in my entire life.

Today was another travel day and we are currently in a city called Flores which is a tourist destination that is not far from the world famous ruins of Tikal. Tommorrow, we will hang out here and then head to Tikal in the afternoon to spend the night there amoungst the howler monkeys and the Mayan spirits. We will sleep (yeah right) in hammocks and then get up before sunrise to hike the temple and watch it from the top. Life doesn´t get much better than this. Hope everyone is doing well and I´ll talk to you from our next stop.

Happy Halloween or Feliz Dia de los Muertos

2005-11-01T14:58:00.000-08:00

Ahh Halloween! This was one of my favorite times of the year for me as a college student. We were usually pretty stupid and crazy, but Halloween gave us an excuse to be even more stupid and crazy because we were in costumes. I remember a Halloween where it snowed in Boulder and all the students were out in the streets and sliding along behind cars in their Star Wars costumes. I rememeber a Halloween where we went to this house that had the enitre house decked out for Halloween. There was a giant fountain in the back with red jungle juice flowing down a skull and crossbones. I remember going to a corn maze way out of town where the favored activity of the kids I was with was to take corn off the stalks, strip off the kernels and then throw them into the air randomly to confuse and annoy the people in the maze (don´t worry, we didn´t hurt anyone). I remember going to a haunted house and managing to scare one of the people who was supposed to be scaring me. All of these great memories involve one person who I believe I will think of every Halloween from here on out. Larina, thanks for all the awesome Halloween memories. I always had awesome Halloweens because of her and her friends (even though we lost her the night of the giant jungle juice fountain...that sucked). These last two years have had something missing becuase I haven´t been able to hang out with her.

This Halloween was much more low key because Guatemala doesn´t really celebrate Halloween, which is understandable. I did manage to carry on the tradition of getting dressed up. I managed to find a bunch of randome clothes and made a cape out of a sheet and became a childhood superhero. I went out for a little while but I wasn´t really feeling it because I had to get up early the next day and go to class. I also didn´t drink becasue I have realized that I can´t really rememeber anything that I learn the day after I drink, and I really want to focus on Spanish for the next three weeks. So the Halloween was a little slow, but the Dia de los Muertos was very interesting.

Dia de los Muertos is a very interesting tradition in Hispanic Culture. I first heard about it in my Spanish classes in high school. We would watch videos and have a little fiesta but it never really signified anything to me until now. Dia de los Muertos literally means ¨Day of the Dead¨and it is basically a day where the people celebrate their ancestors (something I think Americans don´t do often enough). The people have a very strong attatchment to their family and there are large tombs where every member of the same family has been buried for hundreds of years. I had heard about the cemetaries here and had seen a few from a distance, but I never had the chance to go view them until yesterday.

The celebration day is actually today and all the stores and banks are closed so people can go to the cemetary. I went to the cemetary yesterday after I got out of the hospital to view the preparations for the day. From what I have gathered, the tradition for the day is for the whole family to go to the gravesite and have a large meal. The food they prepare is called "fiembre" and it is only prepared on this day. The families take their large plates of fiembre with tons of flowers and other gifts and go the gravesite to converse with their ancestors. They believe that this is the day that they will be spiritually closest to their ancestors and so they gather the whole family and have a large lunch or dinner at the gravesite. They leave plates and gifts for the dead and have the meal as a family...including the dead. There is nothing somber about it and the cemetaries are very festively decorated. It is a very happy occasion with kids running around the graveyard flying kites and playing games. It´s like a big family picnic to include the dead. It´s really cool.

As I said, I went to the cemetary yesterday and walked around, took some pictures and just tried to absorb the feel. The cemetaries here are absolutely elaborate. There are huge crypts that are very elaborately carved with inscriptions and other things. They are usually painted bright colors and actually look really pretty. There was a huge building dedicated to family with a stained glass window in the shape of a butterfly and two huge Egyptian pyramids for someone. It was easily the coolest graveyard that I have ever been to. I think we could learn a lot by the way people honor their dead here. I also got the opportunity to try fiembre today. Fiembre is basically a big salad with all kinds of things thrown in. It´s got lettuce, beets, eggs, carrots, ham, sausage, and probably a bunch of other stuff that I don´t really know. It was very tasty, but it actually kind of reminded me of something dead people might actually eat. Everything is very cold, and the tasty is nothing really strong. It tastes good, but it also gives just a hint of blandness. I had a hint that if you heated it up, it would be the most delicious meal you´ve ever had. Maybe it´s just the way I thought about it.

So I have had another realy good cultural expeience down here. I do really miss the candy though. Hope everyone had a great Halloween and an even better Dia de los Muertos. Hasta Luego.

Temblor

2005-10-29T11:59:00.000-07:00

So I was just sitting here at the computer reading my friend´s e-mail and I noticed that the computer started to rock back and forth a little and the ground was shaking a little. At first I thought maybe I was still a little off from drinking last night. It was a very odd feeling, and then I looked at the other people in the internet cafe and realized that I had just experienced my first earthquake. Spanish has two words for earthquake. The first is temblor. This is just the small shaking motion that we felt. The second is terremoto and this is a major earthquake. We are very lucky it wasn´t a terremoto.

The thing that really surprised me about it was how sudden it was. There was absolutely no time to react at all. If that had been a major earhtquake, this whole building would´ve come down on our heads before we could´ve taken two breaths. That is exactly what happened to the tens of thousands of people who died in Pakistan. I´m one small step closer to understanding what happened over there.

Back in School (and don´t it feel good)

2005-10-27T16:21:00.000-07:00

So I have returned to Spanish school this week to try and improve my Spanish. I liked helping people during the hurricane, but it feels good to have a routine and to know what I´m going to be doing tommorow instead of just wanding around with a shovel looking for mud to move. I have changed my plans (yet again) and have decided not to come home. I thought about it for a while and I realized that the only things that I would get when I went home was more travelers cheques (which would be nice) and boots (which would be even nicer). But I realized that the only things I really need are my debit card and my rain gear. It sucks to not have boots, and if I get my debit card, I will have enough traveler´s cheques to get where I need to go. It´s also cheaper to ship that stuff down here (not much) and we don´t have to use another one of my uncle´s buddy passes which he was nice enough to give me in the first place. So it´s not ideal, but at least the next time I got traveling I will know exactly what to bring. Live and learn.

My Spanish hasn´t had much of an opportunity to improve because I haven´t had much time to study out of school. For the last two weeks I have been practicing for a salsa presentation that we did last night. I started taking dance lessons before the hurricane hit and my dance instructor asked me to be in a salsa presentation that she does as an advertisement for her school. I agreed because she is a good person, and I also figured it would be free dance lessons. The hurricane put a damper on our practices, but we managed to put the presentation together and pulled it off last night. It was actually really fun. There is a relatively small group of foreigners here and we all kind of know each other through home stays, volunteer work, and school. They all came out to support me and my partner. It was great, but I am definetily glad that it´s over. Now I can study to my heart´s content and actually accomplish what I came to do.

The plan as of right now is to stay in Spanish school for another month and try to get another jump in ability and understanding. I also want to continue my volunteer work with the hospital here. After that, I would like to take the month of December and travel throughout Central America. I would like to go to Honduras, Nicaragua, and spend Christmas in Costa Rica. Possibly hitting El Salvador on the way back to Guatemala city. That is the plan as of right now, but as I well know, plans have a way of changing. Hope everyone in the States is doing well, and if anyone wants to come and meet me in Costa Rica for Christmas, I´m sure it would be a good time. Hasta Luego.

Santa Maria

2005-10-22T17:10:00.000-07:00

So today I decided to climb the volcano that dominates the skyline here in Xela. The volcano is named Santa Maria, and it last errupted in the early 1900´s. The volcano is still active, but they don´t think it´s going to erupt for a very, very long time. Luckily, that prediction was true today. I started out with a friend from the school at 5:30 in the morning and we started walking. We managed to catch a minibus to get us to the trailhead and then it was straight hiking from there. I didn´t have much information on the trail except that there was one location where you had to turn left at a row of agave trees, and after that, there are lots of trails and you just have to keep going up.

We started hiking and meandered up through a rural farming community that was just getting their day started. We managed to find the agave trees, they are actually pretty distinct, and we went left. The forest up there is beautiful. It is very verdant green, and just what I imagined Guatemala would be like. Unfortunately, the forest is also very dense, as we were about to discover. We continued up to a cool open space where the sun finally managed to shine through. After the field, we came to a section of trail that had been washed out in a mudslide. This was a pretty impressive mudslide too. There were trees buried in the rubble that I wouldn´t have been able to wrap my arms around. They had been snapped like twigs when the mud came flowing down. We continued up the washed out area because it was the path of least resistance, but that was about to change. The washout slowly turned a rather narrow canyon that had period walls of unstable mud and rock that we would have to climb. The difficulty of each little wall continued to increase until we finally made it over one that we definintely wouldn´t be able to climb back down. We continued walking to the next one and this one proved to be impossible to climb. It probably wasn´t impossible to climb, but it really wasn´t worth the risk when the next wall was probably going to be worse. So now we were in a bind, we were stuck in a little canyon and we couldn´t go forward or back. We started looking for ways to get out of the canyon. Luckily, there was a sturdy-looking vine hanging down from a very large tree above the canyon. We swung around on the vine to test it for strength and it held really well, so we used that climb about 20 feet out of the canyon. That was easily the most exciting part of the hike.

Now we had a new challenge. We had to find the trail. We decided to just start bushwacking through what turned out to be the rather thick jungle. We got completely filthy as we were scrambling around on all fours under trees and through bushes. After about 20-30 minutes of that, we finally found the trail and proceeded to continue the hike. We came to another washout, looked around for the trail, couldn´t find it, so proceeded up the washout. The rest of the hike was rather uneventful. We got to the top and our view was completely obscured by clouds that had swirled up out of the valley. The clouds around here are amazing, it´s like watching one of those time-delay videos where you see the clouds move really fast, except that there is no time delay. We slept and ate lunch on the summit for about an hour, soaked up a ton of sun, enjoyed being out of the pollution, and finally managed to coax ourselves to leave.

The trip down was a little easier and faster. I don´t like going down very much because I have bad ankles that I´m really worried about twisting, it really hard on my knees, and it´s just not nearly as much fun as going up. But we made it down in good time, and managed to catch a bus back to the city where I promptly showered and went to sleep. Overall, it was a great trip and I am planning on doing all the Guatemalan volcanoes that I can. Hope everyone is doing well back in the states. There is a soccer game tonight that I will probably go to so "vamos equipo."

Career Moves

2005-10-20T11:54:00.000-07:00

So as many of you know, I have been debating what to do with my life for the last three or four years. That´s actually the reason that I´m in Guatemala, I don´t know what to do with my life, so I thought I´d come learn another language and run myself out of money so that I am forced to get a job when I get back. I have had several interesting experiences while I have been down here that have made me think about what careers I would like to have.

I know what kinds of things that I don´t want to do. I definitely don´t want to have an office job. I did that for a summer and I hate sitting behind a computer for hours at a time. That rules out all of the highest paying positions and the ones that are easier to get into. I really enjoy the work that I am doing right now. I am just hanging out at the airport and loading bags of food onto helicopters. It´s good physical work, I get to be outside, and I get to watch helicopters take off all day.

I am also enjoying my work at the pulmonary hospital. I haven´t really described this yet because I only just started it last week and I am just now starting to get a feel for it. The hospital is a pulmonary hopsital for tuberculosis patients. I have learned a lot about tuberculosis while I have been there. Pretty much everybody down here has some form of tuberculosis. It´s a bacteria that gets into your lungs and just kinda hangs out there. People with active immune systems don´t have any symptoms because their immune system walls off the bacteria so they can´t do anything. The unlucky 10% who don´t have strong immune systems or people with AIDS get the active form of the bacteria. In this stage, the bacteria is multiplying in the lungs and the patient has a strong cough and is very, very contagious. All of the patients in the hospital are being treated for active tuberculosis, which takes six months to treat with antibiotics. The patients have to live in the hospital for the majority of the treatment, and it´s a pretty boring place. If you´ve ever had to stay in a hospital, they are pretty boring places. The patients mostly lie around in their beds. The rooms are pretty dark because they don´t open the windows. There are three televisions in the hopspital, but other than that, there isn´t much to do. This is where we come in. I work with another girl who coordinates the project and we go to the hospital every afternoon and do activities with the patients. We play games and do arts and crafts and watch movies. The greatest thing about it, for me, is watching the change in atmosphere that we generate. When we come in at 2:30, most of the patients are sitting in their beds, sleeping, or just kinda walking around. Not many people are smiling, and there´s just kind of a somber mood. After the activites, there are many more people walking around with smiles on their faces, more animated conversation, and a generally lighter mood. I have noticed it more witht the women than with the men, but I´m sure it will get better with the men when we can go out and play soccer.

This brings me to the topic of this particular rant. I can´t quite figure out what to do with my life. My first love is flying. I don´t know exactly why, but I just love flying. I thought that almost everbody shared my fascination with airplanes, but it´s just not true. Anytime I hear an airplane, I always look up. Sometimes I´ll notice that I´m the ony one who does it. I know that I love flying, but I don´t think it´s what I want to do for a career because of my other passions. I learned about my other passions in college. I originally went into molecular biology because I had a great AP biology teacher in high school. My original plan was to get through college and then continue with my flight training and become an airline pilot. About halfway through my second year, I realized that I could graduate in three years, so I took that track to further airline aspirations. It was around this time, that I realized that I really loved science. I love learning and studying about science, specifically biological science, and I especially loved teaching it. I don´t think I love the actual physical process of science. I don´t like lab work very much, but I love reading about the results, and I respect it tremendously. The last discovery came with teaching biology, working in the Emergency Room, and with my time down here...I love helping people. I am especially attracted to natural disasters. I was seriously thinking about going down to New Orleans when it got hit to help with whatever I could. When the hurricane hit here, all I could think about was doing the most that I could to help. I really like working out at the airport helping move the food, and although I don´t enjoy the mud digging so much, the feeling that I get afterwords is great.

So, I need to figure out a way to combine all those things. This is why I have been having difficulty for the last few years. I might end up having to choose just one of those things, but I´m going to try to combine them. Medicine seems like a good combination and lately, I have been throwing around the idea of being a Coast Guard flight surgeon. This would allow me to fly occasionally, it would put my scientific knowledge to good use, and there is always the chance that my expertise will be called to the scene of a natural disaster. I would do it for the other armed forces, but there is the chance that I might not morally support what I am helping with. I think I would be pretty safe supporting the mission of the Coast Guard. Anyway, I gotta go, but I would appreciate suggestions from people older and wiser than me on what I should do from here. Hope everyone is doing well and I´ll talk to you later.

The best laid plans

2005-10-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

This week has started to develop into a routine. I have been working out at the airport pretty much every day. Some days are better than others. Some days there are tons of local volunteers there that want to help load and unload the helicopters. When there are tons of people, it´s kinda difficult to find something to do. I want to help, but there isn´t much that is needed, so I stand around and chat in English the whole time. These last two weeks have been really bad for my Spanish education. The good thing abou thaving all those people at the airport is that the helicopters get a ton of stuff done. The seargent that I talk to a lot told me today that they moved 110,000 pounds of food and water yesterday. That is a pretty impressive number. Today was a little slower but it was better for me because there weren´t as many volunteers, so I felt like I had a lot to do.

The thing that is not so routine about this week is the future plans for my time here. I lost my debit card when I first got here and have been using traveler´s cheques ever since. I am starting to run low on traveler´s cheques now, and I was going to rely on my parents to bring down my replacement. My parents have decided not to come to Guatemala because of the current situation here. It is very difficult to travel in this country right now. Many of the main roads here have been washed away by mudslides (a direct result of the deforestation that occurs here). This is making it very difficult to travel almost anywhere in Guatemala. Right now, the ride to Guatemala City takes 11 hours where as before it took 4. The army has been ferrying out American citizens when they return to Guatemala City in the evenings.

So, I need to figure out a way to obtain my debit card and other things. I would ship it, but I have been told before that it is very difficult to get things down here. My friends have shipped things and not had them come for month or more, if they come at all. And that was before the hurricane hit. Now, I definitely don´t trust the system. So, my parents have thought of the option of coming home for a week and getting all the things that I need. I think my parents are hoping that they are going to persuade me that it is too dangerous to come back. But I definitely need to come back. This is, hands-down, the best place to learn Spanish. It´s the cheapest and the instruction is the best. My Spanish has been suffering these last few weeks because I haven´t had school, but I think I could get pretty far if I came down here and had school for possibly two more months.

So that is the plan as of right now. I am going to come home on, hopefully, the 27th or 28th. I am going to stay in the States for a week, restock on the things I need, have the dinner with Evan (I lost the bet by one point...I was pissed), and possibly hang out in Boulder for Halloween (that might be a little too much culture shock though). After that, I plan on coming back and studying Spanish in Xela and continuing my voluteer work for one more month. Then I would like to hopscotch from Spanish school to Spanish school through the month of December. I would like to spend a week in El Salvador, a week in Nicaragua, and two weeks in Costa Rica. So that is the plan as of right now. That should run me out of money pretty well, and force me to get a job when I get back. I will also have to start the long process of applying to medical school when I get back. I am thinking about career options as of right now, but I will save that for another post. Hope everyone is continuing to do well and hopefully I´ll see some of you when I get back.

Hell yeah America!

2005-10-15T15:40:00.000-07:00

The US has landed! I saw the first helicopters while I was working in in flooded zone in the city here. The news said that the US had sent three helicopters down to help with the relief effort here. I would see them occasionally and they would really inspire me. They are a heartening sight in country that has been really punished by the weather here. The Guatemalans would come out and look at them stoically. The folks I talked to have mixed opinions about America. Some people are very glad they are here and some think that the US should´ve sent more help. Personally, I´m very glad to see them. With way our military is stretched out right now, with Iraq, Sunami relief, and Pakistan, I´m surprised we sent anything. I have been personally thanking the soldiers who have come down here.

I heard about the opportunity to volunteer out at the airport last Thursday and decided to head out there on Friday. It was actually a fluke that I made it out there at all, because I couldn´t find the right bus, and I had changed my mind about going to the airport. I tried to get out to another city to help shovel mud and the bus went right past the airport. I decided to head out to the airport and talk to the helicopter pilots, help move food around, and watch the helicopters take off. There was a guard at the gate, but the fact that I´m white seemed to be the major factor that got me past the gate. I walked around for a little and then saw a military officer strolling toward the helicopters, so I saddled up to him and started a conversation. He was a really nice guy and was curious about me (I think more for recruiting purposes), but still a nice guy. It turned out that he was actually a colonel and in charge of the whole unit in Guatemala. Of course I would saddle up to the highest ranking officer in the country! Anyway, they put me to work doing a little translating and helping move food around. I not much good at translating because I still have a lot of difficulty understanding what native speakers are saying. I can give instructions pretty well though, so I help out with that.

During the course of my work, there were breaks where I would wander down to chat with the helicopter crews and look at the machinery. There are 11 Blackhawk helicopters in the country right now and three Chinooks. I really liked the Chinook copters. Those are the gigantic helicopters with the double rotars. There is one that parks at the field for the day and serves as the gas truck. They bring a massive amount of fuel with them to fuel the five or six Blackhawks that fly about 2000 pounds of food and water per trip to villages that have been cut off by the landslides and other things. The Chinooks can carry 15,000 pounds. The colonel was saying today that they moved 80,000 pounds of food and water yesterday. That´s a pretty impressive number, and I gotta say I´m pretty impressed with the military and what they´re doing here. I have heard interesting things about the other aid oraginzations in Guatemala and how disoganized they are at helping distribute aid and some of the futility of what some are doing. I would say that the choppers that are here are doing the best and most important work for the country. It´s really great to see what American military might and technological prowess can do when it´s used to help people. Hell yeah America!!

Today was an especially interesting day. I got out to the airport really early to help with the preparation for the choppers. They came flying in in formation. If you´ve never seen a Blackhawk, they are pretty intimidating pieces of military hardware. I was hanging out down near the airfield and they came flying in and stopped to hover over the field. They kicked up this cloud of dust the swirled around their rotars and made them look like giant, deadly, black insects. They have these huge tanks on the sides for more gas and from a distance they look like missiles. If I saw that rise up out of the jungle or behind a hill I would want to run for my life. I wanted to run for my life when I saw them come in for landing, and I even knew they were on my side. They didn´t move quite as much food today because one of the helicopters was dedicated to flying a general around to check out the situation down here. The general flew with the ambassador to Guatemala and I got to meet him. He seemed like a very nice guy. The other interesting thing that happened today was for my friends. Alot of people are trying to get out of Xela while it is still possible. The roads between here and Guatemala city are having a lot of problems, so I suggested that they go out the airport and see if they could hitch a ride on one of the helicopters when it returns to Guatemala city in the afternoons. It´s no skin off the army´s back, and they ARE American citizens. So four people went out and negotiated with the army and managed to hitch a ride on a Chinook that was returning to the city. I was jealous, but happy for my friends because they are some of the coolest people and I´m sure they are having ball right now. The Chinooks are also really cool to watch take off and bank around, and it gave me a cool feeling to know my friends were on there.

The experience has made me seriously consider joining the military, but I will save that for another tirade on this blog. Hope everyone is doing well and please send aid money somewhere. There are a lot of people suffering in the world right now and they need our help. New Orleans, Guatemala, Mexico, Pakistan, Sunami affected areas, you pick it. Take care of yourselves.

Estoy Enfermo

2005-10-12T15:48:00.000-07:00

Hey Everybody,

Sorry I haven´t been on here for a while. I´ve been doing a lot of sleeping lately because I´ve been feeling a little under the weather. It started on Sunday after I finished working down in the flooded neighborhoods of the city. I thought it might just go away, but I blossomed into a very nice fever on Sunday night and then just a feeling of crappiness from there on. Here they call it "gripe" and it sucks. It got a little better on Tuesday, but it´s been hanging on ever since then. I took it really easy on Monday and Tuesday, but today I decided not to let it stop me. I once asked one of my good friends who travels alot how she stands being sick all the time, and she told me that "it´s only physical." It can only break your spirit if you let it. We had some more flooding from an afternoon storm yesterday, so I went back out and volunteered my time. I decided I wouldn´t go into the flooded zone again, and so I went to the local shelter and helped sort clothes for a while. They also sent me to some interesting places to help out. There are a lot of people who need help in Guatemala right now. There are a lot of people who need help in the world right now. I am going to meeting right now about helping to load stuff onto the American helicopters that came down. Hope everyone is doing well, and if there is any time that you were thinking about donating money to any organization anywhere, NOW is the time to do it. I can´t remember when we´ve had so many natural disasters in such a short period.

Inundacion

2005-10-08T15:28:00.000-07:00

That´s the word for flooding in Español. These last few days have been very interesting. I think flooding is just about the worst thing that can happen to a personal space like a house or apartment. It pretty much destroys everything. I might even go so far as to say it is the worst natural disaster that can happen to a human community. It strikes without much warning, destroys just about everything in its path, and poses huge health hazards both during the actual storm and afterwords. These last few days have given me new insight into the plight of people in New Orleans. Our city escaped relatively unscathed from the storm. There were a few neighborhoods that were flooded, but most of the city was fine and the power and water were back on the next day. I can´t even imagine the scale of destruction in New Orleans. An entire city flooded for two weeks. Millions of people evacuated and services only just beginning to be restored. It´s horrible.

I have been working in the mornings for the relief efforts here. Basically, I just meeet a group of students at the school and we hike down to the neighborhoods. Some of the students were worried that there might not be enough work. There is enough work there for 1000 people for 2 or three more weeks. I have dedicated one of my pairs of jeans to work down here and they are now absolutely filthy. As I described before, I don´t have any boots, so my tennis shoes are completely destroyed. I come back from work entirely caked in mud. One of the minibusses wouldn´t even let me on because I was so filthy. I feel good though, and there is still a lot more to be done. It´s amazing to walk into these houses and see the destruction. Basically, whole rooms filled up with water during the storm, and huge, heavy pieces of furniture floated on the water and got deposited very unusual positions. There is always a mess of clothes, food, and paper being slogged around on the floor. The houses here were built to withstand a lot of water. They have high retaining walls, but once the water got past those, the whole house was inundated. Now, it is very difficult to get the water out because of those retaining walls. I spent an hour today, just shoveling and sweeping water around.

Hope everyone is doing well and I´ll talk to you tommorrow.

Hurricane Stan

2005-10-07T16:31:00.000-07:00

After a really amazing weekend, we have had a really crappy week

From the looks of news on the internet, it looks like word of the flooding and damage down here is just starting to hit the States. Unfortunately, I don´t remember exactly, but the rain started here on either Monday night or Tuesday morning. I remember having class and my teacher and I thinking that this was very unusual weather, but I just took it as normal Guatemalan rain gone slightly haywire. I hadn´t heard about the hurricane that was bearing down on the Yucatan peninsula. The rain started to get worse in the afternoon, and I was really starting to miss my raingear. I woke up Wednesday morning and there was no power. Apparently, during the night, there had been some really bad flooding in the city and around the country. We didn´t know that yet. I went to school on Wednesday despite the driving rain, and the school annouced that we were not going to have classes that day. There was driving rain in the courtyard and there was no power to provide light to read by inside. This was a situation where I was glad to have roomates. We all went out and bought a bunch of supplies and games for a day or two couped up in our house. We even had a little alcohol. Looking back, I realize how very fortunate we were. We spent all of Wednesday in the house studying and playing games and eating a lot. The electricty was very erratic, but the water was still working and Doris cooked us some good food.

Yesterday, it was still raining, but much lighter, and we had school in the courtyard. After the first session of classes, we learned just how much damage this storm had done. There are 6 teachers at the school who live in an area of town that was completely flooded. They lost almost everything they owned. It was a shock to me because I personally knew two of the teachers who were affected. I resovled to try to make every effort to help them. It was nice to see the whole school rally around the teachers. We organized groups to help each teacher and planned to go down to the affected area the next day. I wanted to get out and help that night, so I met up with one of my friends here and we went with a group down to the municipal center in Xela, where they were having people gather who wanted to help. They loaded us up on a truck with about 30 Guatemalans and we were off to see what we could do in the neighboring communites. We got to a little suburb on the outskirts of town where some houses had fallen into the river. We wandered around for a while and couldn´t find anything to do. All the people had left and taken their stuff with them. Thirty people can do a lot of work, but they can´t pull a cement house out of the river. Now we had a problem though, it was getting dark and we had to get back to Xela. The truck that brought us left, so we just started to walk toward the highway. Eventually, a truck came and picked us up and we made it back in time for dinner. It was an interesting experience though.

Today was also an interesting experience. We met at the school to go the affected neighborhoods. We had about 50 students from the school, and we all piled into busses and went down there. The streets were caked with mud and when we got to the house of one of my teachers, it was completely flooded. We worked the entire morning cleaning out her house and I am going back in the morning to help clean. I am planning on taking this whole week off of school to help with the relief efforts and also to start my volunteer job at the hopspital. I´ll let everyone know how it goes. Hope everyone in the States is doing well and take care of yourselves.

Lago de Atitlan

2005-10-02T16:15:00.000-07:00

>Warning: This is going to be a very long entry because I had a really amazing weekend

Sorry I haven´t written for a while. There have been some interesting goings-ons here in the last week. The most intersting is a little mini trip that I took with my roomates to Lago de Atitlan. Lago de Atitlan is a little known paradise smack in the middle of the Guatemalan mountains. It is well-known to people who have traveled or lived in Guatemala, but the rest of the world seems to be completely unaware of this really amazning place. It´s like a Lake Powell stuck right in the middle of a third world country.

The trip started being planned last Monday or Tuesday when my roomates and I started to talk about taking a trip. We decided to go to Lago de Atitlan and started asking other people at the school if they wanted to go with us. I have three roomates and we eventually accumulated 10 people. I talked to my housemom, Doris, and she gave us an entire trip intinerary. She told us to start off in a small town on the west side of the lake called San Pedro. This place had cheap sleeping and a lot of activities to do in the day. We were then going to visit other places on the lake and end up in the largest town called Panahachel on the East side of the lake. We were then going to go to the largest market in Guatemala on Sunday in Chichicastenango. This last step eventually got scrapped because we wanted to spend more time at the lake.

Now we had our trip all planned and we were off. We gathered everybody right after school and took a microbus to the terminal station. If I haven´t mentioned it before, travenling in this country is really, really easy. There are all these little vans that drive all over the city to destinations and it only costs 1 Quetzale or about $0.17. This got us all to the terminal and there we asked for the bus to San Pedro. We were put on a chicken bus and waited only about 10 minutes before it left. It´s good to get to the chicken busses early and get a good seat so that you´re not the person who is stuck as the fourth person in a seat designed for 2 little kids with one quarted of one of your butt cheeks on the edge of the seat. The ride went well up until we were the last ones left on the bus and they dropped us off on a corner in the middle of a corn field. It actually wasn´t the middle of a corn field, it was the intersection of two streets. The drivers told us that there would be a bus to take us to San Pedro in 5 minutes. A bunch of people came up to us and tried to give us rides, but we decided to wait, and sure enough a bus came along in 5 minutes. Like I said, traveling is really easy. The second bus was quite a bit more exciting than the first one. This bus had to descend into the crater that is Lago de Atitlan. My first clue to the ride ahead was a very non-descript sign saying´"curvas peligrosas" for those of you who "no hablo espanol" that means dangerous curves, which would also be a very adept description of some of the women here. Almost immediatly after the sign, the road dropped precipitously and we were off. We were getting thrown around curve after narrown curve, fighing gravity and traffic. Just as the girl next to me was about to be sick, we dropped through the clouds and the lake emerged. I don´t really have the words to describe how really loevly this lake is. Imagine Lake Powell with three towering volcanoes surrounding it and verdant, green vegetation everywhere. It was awesome. We were still being thrown around in the bus but we were nearing the town. We arrived in San Pedro with absolutely no idea where to go. There were all these little kids waiting to guide us to a hotel for a commission. We told them no and proceeded to wander right toward the hotel. It´s kinda a small coastal town and there were really only two directions to go. We went to the hotel San Fransico. This was a really nice budget hotel with amazing views in the upper rooms. We stashed our bags and proceeded to wander around the town.

San Pedro is a smaller town known for it´s hiking, it´s very inexpensive Spanish schools, and drugs. Our first encounter with the drugs was a local guide near the beach that we wandered to. He was the most stoned out of his mind person I´ve ever seen in my life. All my friends just thought he was laid back, but I don´t think they´ve seen many hard-core stoners. Boulder was like a stoner zoo. This guy was the definition of a stoner. He actually spoke pretty good English though, and we talked with him for a little while about what to do in the town. We then wandered down a path and it started to rain really hard. Those of us who had brough umbrellas pulled them out and the others got soaked as we made our way to a little cafe called "Munchies." Besides the obvious name, the place also gave off a strong flavor of stonerism. There was Bob Marley and easy listening music in the background. It was pretty funny actually. Nevertheless, The food was really good and we had a great start to the trip. After dinner, we hung out for a while and then went to see if we could find some nightlife on a Friday night. We wandered down to a bar that had free salsa lessons. I had two interesing things happen to me that night. The first was when I was walking to sit down at our table. There was rather abrupt end to the planks that composed the deck we were on and I managed to step right through it. I proceeded to fall and the only thing that saved me from careening down the steep slope into the water was this flimsy little rope that caught under my arm. I am very thankful that was there or I might not be here writing this entry. The second thing happened while in the bar dancing. I felt something soft land on my neck and I reached up and grabbed it off. It turned out to be a little centipede, and I didn´t think anything about it until my neck started to itch. It turns out that little centipede packed quite a punch. The back of my neck proceeded to react rather violently and also anywhere that I managed to touch after scratching it. It wasn´t too painful though, but it was rather interesting that just touching a bug down here could produce that reaction. Imagine if it had bitten me.

The next day we were planning on getting up and going hiking on one of the volcanoes that surround San Pedro. We had to get up really early anyway, and we managed to see a spectacular sunrise over the lake. We had to go to a local guiding company and ask them if they had any trips that were going out that day. We got there and they had already sent off their trips up the volcano for that day. They were willing to take us up one, but it was going to cost 75Q per person. That was too much and we decided to just go get breakfast. So, we went to this little cafe right on the shore and sat in a garden and watched the sun rise and ate eggs with fruit. There is a kind of security that comes with traveling in large groups, but there also comes a lot of indecisiveness and difficult decision making. It is difficult to get everyone together. We had the hike planned and now that that was off, we wandered around like chickens with our heads cut off for about 3 hours until we had to check out of the hotel. We decided to rent a boat to take us to all the destinations on the lake. The most incredible thing about these boats is that it costs about $10 per person and we had the boat for the whole day. The driver took us wherever we wanted to go and waited at the dock for us to come back. We piled onto the boat and off we went.

Our first stop was a little town called San Marcos which is also on the East side of the lake. Before we went there though, we wanted to do some swimming, so the driver took us to this rocky liitle outcropping that had rocks we could jump off into the lake. The jump was kinda scary, not for the fact that it was really high, but more for the fact that if I got injured I was a very long way from good medical help. My roomate and I jumped off it anyway though, and swam around in the lake for about a half hour. The water was perfect temperature and it was amazing to swim a little, tread water and watch the clouds move past the mountains. That´s probably another thing that I haven´t mentioned about this place. The clouds seem to hug the mountians here. Something about the weather patterns here dictates that there are always low-lying clouds drifing below the summits of the volcanoes. It´s a really beautiful sight when a cloud comes billowing up into a valley. This is what we saw while swimming in this warm mountain lake.

After swimming, we were off for San Marcos. San Marcos has a reputation of being the tranquil, yoga-loving, pot-smoking capital of the Lake. We arrived at the doc and hiked through some really amazing foilage. There are some yoga centers there that we pretty nice. It felt kind of artificial and touristy though. We broke through the touristy section and came upon just one more of the amazing things that the people here are capable of. The whole town had gathered together on a Saturday afternoon to help build...something. There were men digging trenches, kids carry rocks to rock pile and women walking around with sacs of dirt and fertilizer on their heads. It was a really amazing sight. There wasn´t much else to see in San Marcos so we were off to Santiago.

Santiago is a little pueblo tucked away in an inlet of the lake. It was pretty amazing boating into the inlet and seeing all the farms climbing the sides of the volcanoes. The town of Santiago has a small market with many souveniers and other little trinkets. We walked up the hill and decided to have lunch at a nice little restaurant that the guidebook recommended. Unfortunately, while we were waiting to be seated, my friend got her purse pickpocketed by a little Mayan girl. She only lost about $25 bucks and it could´ve been much worse. After lunch, a group wanted to go see the hospital here. The hospital had a rather interesting story, it had been shut down during the civil war here while the towns around the lake were being ravaged by the army. It recently re-opened with highly qualified doctors and machinery. I ended up staying in the market looking for souveniers and gifts. The stuff in the markets here is very eye-catching at first, but as you walk around, you realize that all the stores have mostly the same stuff and it is of questionable quality. It is very fun to barter though. I like trying to haggle in Spanish over the price of something. After an hour of bartering I only ended up bying a little bag and a cool little wooden puzzle souvernier of Guatemala.

We met back at the boat and were off for Panahachel or "Pana." Pana is the largest city on the lake and it is full of tourists and very wealthy Guatemalans. The city had kind of an odd feel to it. You would walk around and there would be large American-made SUVs driving around with Guatemalan teenagers in them. We went to what seemed to be a nice little hostel next to a sort of carnival thing. The place had nice rooms, and free water and towels. I didn´t think anything of it until I tried to go to bed. I was pretty tired from waking up really early that morning, and I needed a nap that afternoon. So I layed down in my room and attempted to fall asleep to the sounds of screaming children on the carnival rides. I was almost asleep when the church next to the hostel decided to ring its bells at 7pm. The loud gonging sound in my head prevented me from getting any sleep so I went and found an internet cafe and learned that a Volcano errupted in the neighboring country of El Salvador. That night was a good dinner of pasta and garilc bread and then it started to pour, so we decided not to go out.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. We woke up late on Sunday and just kinda hung out around the town. My friends did some shopping. I was lookign at trying to do some paragliding. It only costs $60 here for about 2 hours, but I decided against it because I am on a limited budget here. We returned to Xela on a chicken bus at 4pm and there was a cool little festival happening in Xela. I wandered around and sampled all the food I could. There were these fried things with sugar on them that were extraordinarily good. The rest of the night was spent catching up on all the studying that I didn´t do that weekend.

If anybody ever gets the chance to come to Guatemala, you definetily have to go to Lago de Atitlan. It was an amazing place and very cheap. The whole trip cost me about $50-60 with two nights stay and 5 meals. It was awesome. I am back at school now and it´s kinda funny because half of the people who went out to San Pedro are thinking about trying to move out there for Spanish school. There are some very nice schools out there and they are a lot cheaper than here. I loved San Pedro, but I am going to stay here because I have a good group of friends here, I like the school, and there are probably more meaningful volunteer opportunities here. So that was my weekend. Hope everyone back in the states is doing well and Hasta Luego.

Slacker

2005-09-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

So I have been a horrible slacker the last couple of days. I barely get my homework done and when I do it is of questionable quality. The reason is that I have been taking lots of dance lessons and trying to practice a lot. I found a great girl here who is willing to go out with me at nights and have me step on her toes and just generally screw around. It´s really been helping me practice the moves though and I think it will only be another year or so before I don´t make a complete idiot out of myself. It´s amazing watching the dancers at the bars, and how much farther I have to go. They have been doing it since they were little though, so that is some consolation. I really enjoy it though.

I was also a slacker today in the fact that one of my friends here invited my teacher and I to watch a movie with them in English. My teacher loves movies and I figured it would probably be a good gift to her since she´s had kind of a rough week. So instead of having lessons for two hours, we watched a movie. I feel kind of guilty, but I was just thinking that movies are almost as important as classroom education in college. There are many times when people are in social situations and they just start to quote movies. One of the most often quoted is "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." There are many others, but if I happen to be caught in one of those situations and I have no idea what movie someone is quoting, it makes me feel very left out. Many of my more intelligent and talkative friends get by just fine without seeing movies, but it sure is a nice crutch for me. I recieved my initial movie education from the girl I dated freshman year. She loved going to movies and so we watched a lot of the older ones that kind of defined the group of kids that I was in college with. It was great and I am ever indebted to her.

There was also one interesting moment that occurred today. I was showing my new roomates how to get up on the roof of our house. We were up there observing the street below and a herd of cows came moseying down the road. They were not very healthy looking, but I guess my expectations are probably a little high. The cows wandered down the road and all the street dogs came out and started barking at them. That was something I probably haven´t mentioned yet. There are thousands of dogs here. They all live on the street and wander around and eat anything available. I had never really understood why Bob Barker always asks people to spade or neuter their pets at the end of every "The Price is Right" show, but now I understand. The dogs didn´t seem to bug the cows very much, but it made for an interesting scene. The icing on the cake was when the local herd of goats showed up and tried to cross the road where the cows were grazing. This proceeded to drive the street dogs even more nuts and the view just turned into this scene of mass, urban, barnyard chaos. Throw in some chickens scattering to get out of the way, and it was one of the most unusual and funniest scenes I have ever witnessed.

I am now done being a slacker. I am going to crack down for the next three hours and memorize a ton of notecards and do my homework. Hope everyone is doing well and hasta mañana.

Boring Weekend

2005-09-26T14:19:00.000-07:00

So I had a pretty boring weekend. I went out on Friday and met a very interesting individual from New York. I don´t know what it is about people from the East Coast, but most of them seem to be able to talk your ear off about just about any subject. He´s a really nice guy though and he had lots of great stories. I also met another couple from England who were a riot. Have you ever met those people that you just seem to click with. This was just such a couple. They were a riot and we sat and chatted for about an hour at the bar. It was really fun and I hope I see them again.
On Saturday, I went shopping for boots. As I said before, I somehow managed to lose my boots in the move from Steamboat Springs and then managed to never pick up another pair before I left for here. So now I am sitting in my wet tennis shoes, wishing I had a pair of boots. I found a really good pair, but I don´t currently have the money necessary to purchase them, I need to go to a bank.

We also went to the local city market. This was a very interesting experience and it´s like nothing we have in the States. The market is a loud, smelly, closed in, cacophony of people, animals, food, and busses. It was great. It was like plunging into a foaming sea of humanity. They seemed to have a lot to buy, but it was a lot of the same stuff. After about a half hour of wandering around, we weren´t really coming across anything new. They have separate sections of the market. There was a food section, a used clothes section, an electronics section, and a tools section. We made one pass all the way through one side of the market and emerged at the central bus station on the other side. We then plunged back in and promptly got lost. We wandered around for about a half hour looking for an exit, and then gave up and just decided to try to go in the same direction until we emerged. I was looking for boots and handicrafts. They had some boots, but you couldn´t really find a size bigger than 9 US. We eventually found our way out.

After 5 hours of shopping for boots and other things, the only things we ended up buying were these little pieces of fruit. There is an interesting story behind the fruit buying. Here in Xela, there are two distinct types of people. There are actually a lot more than that, but these two groups are fairly easy to identify. The groups are the local Mayans, and everybody else. The Maya are very interesting people. For one thing, they all wear this very distinct clothing. It is very brightly colored and very beautiful. The other amazing thing about these folks is the women´s ability to carry anything and everything on their head. This morning, we saw a lady carry a bucket of water on her head and walking around like it was perfectly normal. I have seen women carrying huge bundles of...something. I could practice for a year and never be able to do that. It´s incredible. The other interesting thing is that most of these people speak the local dialect called K´iche. I have never actually heard it, but most speak a combination of Spanish and Kïche. This leads me to the fruit story. I walked up this little Mayan girl selling these very interesting looking fruits at the market. They looked like strawberries that had all these spikes all over them, and I had no idea how to eat them. I asked her what they were called in Spanish, and she gave me a sort of frightened look and said "Niche." I repeated the word and then asked her how you ate them. She continued to look at me in a scared way, and then looked at her mom. The mom gave a little laugh and showed us how to open them. We bought two and then had a hell of time getting them open. I thought about it later and realized that she wasn´t saying "Niche" she was saying "Kiche" as in "that´s the only language that I speak¨
I thought that was pretty funny and went off thinking how dumb I really am.

Hope everyone is doing well and much love to family and friends.

New Traveling Friends

2005-09-22T13:12:00.000-07:00

Hola Everyone,

So I have posted two new links that I think everyone should check out. The first is a blog by my amazing and talented friend Bryn who is currently one of the only white women in Sri Lanka (I got that from the blog). She is on a grant from CU to do renewable energy work, which is quite a bit more admirable than just going to Guatemala using savings because I don´t know what to do with my life.

The other is a website created by my current (soon to be departed) housemate Mette. She is also amazing and talented and has traveled to more places than I think I´ve even heard of. She has a bunch of cool pictures on her website and probably some cool stories. I haven´t had much time to look at it, but I think it´s safe to say that it´s pretty interesting.

Yesterday was not as interesting as it probably should have been. It started to rain around three in the afternoon and didn´t quit until about 9 that night. I have been having a hell of a streak of bad luck when it comes to water protection on this trip. A couple months before the trip, I realized that I had lost my nice hiking boots and I never managed to pick up another pair (that was not really bad luck as much as bad planning). Also, I had my rain gear all laid out and ready to pack in my big bag, but I was thinking about taking a smaller bag, so I did a test run in the smaller bag, but realized that I was going to need the larger backpack. Well, I accidently left the raingear in the smaller backpack, and I didn´t realize my mistake until I was lying on the floor of the Atlanta airport at about 4am in the morning. Again, not so much bad luck as my mistake. The last thing was pure bad luck. Right in the middle of the downpour yesterday, the Eagle Creek travel umbrella that I brought with me decides to irreparably break (the thing is a piece of junk for anybody who is thinking about buying a travel umbrella). I got soaked on the way to the house and had to dry out for a few hours.

I had to go out last night to tell friends that we made plans with that Mette and I weren´t going to make it out because of the rain. I have no rain gear at all now, so I got all decked out in my crappy travel shorts, warm hiking shirts, my Chacos and a hat. I figured the lower half of my body was going to get wet no matter what I did, so why try to fight it. I borrowed an umbrella from my housemom and started the hike to the school. About two minutes after I walked out the door, I was soaked. The streets were small rivers of water, but it wasn´t very cold, so I was doing ok. The school is 15 minutes away and low and behold by the time I got to the school...it had stopped raining.

I managed to have a beer or two at a bar (in my shorts and hat). I also had my first real moment of fear for my life last night while I was walking home. As mentioned in previous posts there is a large gang problem in Guatemala and there are bands of kids that roam the streets at night looking for a fight. I was walking home alone and there was a group of about 20 men standing under a street light. Most of them had clubs and one of them had a pellet gun. At first I thought they might be the local neighborhood watch. Xela has groups of men that hang out at night armed with clubs and dressed in ski masks. These are actually the good guys and are there to combat the gang problem. They wear ski masks so that the gang memebers will not know their identities. I have seen them before and never really worried about them. This group was different though. They were not wearing ski masks and there were just so many of them. One of them also had a pellet gun and was harrassing a street dog with it. They worried me quite a bit. I weighed my options: a white gringo in sandals and shorts armed with an umbrella against 20 men with glubs and guns. Not good odds. I figured it probably wouldn´t do much good to run. So I just tried to appear like I knew where I was going and get past them as quickly as possible and if they started to chase me then I would run for my life. I made it past them without incident and was talking with my teacher about them today. Apparently, they were the local neighborhood watch and I guess they don´t wear ski masks sometimes. Certainly scared the crap out me though.

I won´t be writing anymore this week. I am out of internet time. It will be a pretty boring weekend. I am going to just hang out and study on Saturday and then I am going to hike Santa Maria with a couple other people from the school. Hope everyone is doing well, go check out the new links, and I´ll talk to you later.

World Happenings

2005-09-21T14:20:00.000-07:00

Hola,

So I feel connected to the western world again after about an hour of internet browsing. There were a couple of interesting stories that seem to be happening right now. The one that peaked my interest in America was the Robert´s confirmation hearings. It sounds like he´s sailing through without a problem. I guess I didn´t really expect any less, but I´m very worried that he´s going to turn into another Scalia once he gets on the court. He is being very evasive, and it´s scary because he is probably going to be on the court for the majority of my life. I also don´t agree with Bush´s decision to make him chief justice. I think Bush should´ve promoted one of the sitting justices before nominating someone who hasn´t really earned it yet, even if it would probably be Scalia.

The second story the caught my eye was the stuff going on in Iraq. It doesn´t look like much has changed over there. There was a very dramatic moment for British forces a few days ago, but the most revealing part about that incident was that there were two rival Shiite militias that were battling it out. These are the guys that are supoposed to be building a new government and they are having internal squables. I have a bad feeling that Iraq is going to sink into a civil war even if we do remain there.

The third and final story that really caught my eye was much closer to home. Recently there was a large incident of gang violence in Guatemala city. I have heard about the gang problem down here, but we don´t see any of it because we are in a tourist area. The gangs are made up of mostly disenfranchised street kids who look to the gang memebers that we deported from California as leaders. Apparently there are two major rival gangs here that are in a state of constant warfare. This incident was special because it involved a jail. A group of kids broke into a jail and shot about 10 members of a rival gang who were being detained. It was a really horrific event.

I apologize for not including links in this blog. Somehow my setup is different and I can´t figure out how to make text a hyperlink. I will work on it for future posts.

Things are going pretty well down here. My knowledge of Spanish is increasing quickly. I remember when I first got here, I looked around and I couldn´t indentify a single thing in spanish. Now, I can look around and identify two things, but I am picking it up quickly. I am also starting to be able to understand my teacher when she speaks. It´s a new skill for me to develop. I have never had to concentrate as hard as I do to try to understand what peole are saying Spanish. Sometimes, my mind just gives up and I can´t concentrate anymore. That happened today. It was after a break and I came back and sat down and tried to understand what the teacher was saying, but my mind just wouldn´t concentrate. I started to write all kinds of weird words in my notebook, and we eventually just had to stop and take a walk. Learning a foreign language is definitely difficult.

Other than that, I have been hanging out with my housemate Mette alot. She is leaving on Friday and leaving me as the sole occupant of the house that usually has about 5-8 people. It´s going to be very lonely, but hanging out with her has been fun. I am also taking salsa lessons through a local dance school here. It´s a lot of fun and I´m learning a ton, but I have trouble with the timing. Mette danced for two years, so she has been helping me practice and get the timing right. I will get the chance to use my newfound skill tonight at the dance club. It should be very interesting and entertaining...for the people who aren´t dancing with me.

Hope everyone is doing well. Hasta manana.

Newsday

2005-09-20T14:02:00.000-07:00

Hola Folks,

No blog today because I am going to use my limited internet time to check up on news in the United States and the world. I haven´t heard anything about the latest hurricane and the Roberts confimation hearings. Hope everyone is doing well and I´ll check in tommorrow with many political opinions and news.

Guatemala es Muy Bonita

2005-09-19T14:25:00.000-07:00

Hola,

Sorry about the rather short entry. I don´t have free internet through the school on weekends so I don´t want to use it, even though the internet here only costs about $.50 an hour. I have noticed that I have become a lot cheaper since I got here. Things here are very, very inexpensive. You can get a great meal from one of the more expensive places for about $6 and some of the cheaper ones for about $3. Right now, my biggest expense by far is the school. I am only paying a $150 a week for that and it includes all my meals, my homestay, five hours of classes a day with my own instructor and five hours of free internet access a week. This is by far the best place to learn Spanish if you´re on a budget and if you don´t mind the occasional intestinal parasite.

This weekend was a very good time. On Saturday, I went with my housemate Mette and two other students from the school to Lago de Chicabal. This is a lake that is about a 20 minute bus ride and an hour hike from Xela. The lake is absolutely beautiful. It is inside an old volcano crater and you get a really great very of it from the rim of the crater. We started the hike at 6:00am in the morning in Xela. We took a taxi to the bus station and I had my first chicken bus ride. It wasn´t as bad as I´ve heard it can get. We told them where we wanted to go and they told us where to get off and there was a sign pointing us in the right direction. I was a little nervous about using the bus system, but it was a cakewalk. The hike was fun. A little boy who must´ve been about 6 caught up to us and showed off his English numbers and a few words. He was carrying a machete and headed off to do work in the fields. It made me sad that he couldn´t play on a Saturday, and it made me realize how fortunate American children really are. I worry about making career decisions while he worries about where his nxt meal is going to come from. We all gave him some food before we headed off to the lake. The trail was really steep the whole way, I don´t think Guatemalan´s have a word for switchback. The lake was really cool and there was a really neat tree that stuck out about 100 feet over the water that I climbed out onto. That was the coolest part of the whole trip for me. The rest of the day was spent sleeping and studying.

So was most of the next day. Sunday is a pretty slow day around Xela. I tried to do some shopping, but most of the stores were closed. I managed to pick up a few things I needed, but not much. That night was dinner at one of my friend´s house. Greta is the coordinator of the spanish school that I go to and a really good friend of Andy´s. She invited me to dinner and cooked lasanga. It was really good. I also set up dance lessons with the teacher who is a friend of Greta´s. I am actually headed there right now. Hope everyone is doing well and I´ll talk to you later.

Los Ameobas Son Malas

2005-09-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

This is going to be a quick post because I am paying for this internet. I will not have free internet on the weekends so I will probably not be posting very much. I will also probably be trying to travel as much as possible on the weekends. Like this weeknd, we went to a nearby volcanic lake that was really cool. It was a really short bus ride and the hike was great. I used to be a little apprehensive about trying to get places, but this was a cakewalk and I think I´ll be just fine from now on.

In other news, my housemate was diagnosed with ameobas and he has been really, realy sick for the last few days. I can feel my stomach rumbling but I think everything is still functioning normally, Hope everyone is doing well and I´ll talk to you next week.

One Week

2005-09-16T14:10:00.000-07:00

I´d like to start this entry off by celebrating the fact that I have been here for a week now and I am doing really well. Nothing too horrible has happened and I am having a very good time. The school and homestay are great and the people I´m meeting are very nice.

Two nights ago was the big party for the Independence Day festival here. We started out by going to another soccer game. This one was much bigger than the one last time. Everybody had Thursday off because of the holiday, so there were thousands of people at the game. It´s kinda nice, one of our teachers organizes seats for us before the game and we have pretty good seats to watch the game. He brings all the fireworks and they were especially big for this game. This was the big rivalry between Xela and Guatemala city. If I thought the fans were crazy last time, it was nothing compared to this time. Unfortunately, Xela (the city I´m in) got absolutely smoked. It was 4-1 and the game was not very fun to watch. There were a few amazing plays, and I am still a big admirer of latino soccer players, it just sucks that Xela lost.

Afetr the game, we all crammed onto a minibus and went to a place in the city called Temple Minerva. During the early 1900´s, the president in power (I don´t remember his name) decided to try to recreate Athens in Central America. He built all kinds of marble temples and other things to try to beautify his city. Unfortunately, he did this at the expense of other public services like schools. The Temple Minerva is a remnant of this period. It is a huge open air space covered by a giant ceiling supported my massive marble columns. It´s actually pretty cool, and I was surprised to find it in a place like this. There was a concert in the park next to the temple and we were trying to find our friends in the crowd. I´ve never seen acrown like the one in the square. The people were packed so close that you couldn´t even move. It was amazing. It was also quite dangerous for gringos, so we quickly got out of there. It actually wasn´t a very exciting night after that. We went to the bar and had a few beers and then I wandered home.

The next day I had clases. My teacher wanted to work because they get paid double to work the holiday and so I met her at the school about a half hour late because I woke up right at 8. We then wandered over to the main event of the day...the desfile or parade. It´s a parade of all the high school students in the city. I had no idea that it was possible to have that many students in a city. The parade seemed to go on for hours, and we didn´t even stay until the end. It´s amazing what Americans can get away with here. There were thousands of people watching the parade, and our teachers just led us through the crowd out into the middle of the parade and we watched the parade from the middle of the street. I thought somebody was going to shoot us, but nobody seemed to give it a second thought. It was very odd. After that, we went back to the school and studied for a little while. School ended at 1 and since everything was closed for the holiday, there was nothing to do, so I went home and slept. I didn´t do that much last night except hang out with my roomates and play games.

Today was much more studying, and nothing is really open, so I´m going to study a little and then go out tonight. We are thinking about going hiking tommorrow so I´ll have to take it easy. I also feel a little bit of a sickness coming on. It´s probably from hanging out with all these other sick people. Anyway, hope everyone is doing well back in the states and have a great weekend.

Impressions of a city

2005-09-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

So you may be wondering why there are a few comments that have been deleted on my other posts. The reason for this is that these comments were advertisements masquerading as comments on blog. I have no idea how they found me, but I don´t particularily like them, so I have deleted them.

There isn´t much to tell today because all the fun activities are tonight. I had my thrid day of Spanish lessons and the stuff has sunk in less. I didn´t have a lot of time to study all the words that I wrote down on my cards last night, so my pace of learning has slowed down a little bit. Everyone around me seems to be getting sick. Doris is sick, Jennifer, Mette, and Mary (housemates) are all sick, and so is my teacher.

Since there is not much to tell, I´m going to fill this entry with my impressions and descriptions of the city that I find myself in. The first thing I want to say (which I know a friend of mine will be very interested to hear) is that the food down here is awesome. I have yet to have a bad meal. Doris´ homestay was recommended to me by several people back in the states and she is an amazing cook. She makes us three meals a day, and there has yet to be a single thing that I didn´t really like. The food around town is awesome too. The first place I ate when I got here was a little bar that seems to cater to foreigners called Tecun. It serves some really amazing pizza. The second place that I went to while I was down here was a little place way up on the hill and out of the pollution called the Alchemista. I got a combination platter with all homemade nachos. It was delicious. And the last place that I have gone out to around here is a little bar that serves one of the best sandwiches I´ve ever had. It was melted Brie cheeze with lots of different vegetables. I´m gonna have another one and try to figure out how to make it when I get home. There are also a bunch of little stores around town that you can buy food at. These have been hit or miss for me and I have mostly used them as a snack place or a desert place. So far, the food has been absolutely great.

The city is defenitily different than anything that we have in the United States. I live in small part of the city named zona 1. It is the main tourist and business hub. There are a bunch of Spanish schools and small businesses the cater to tourists. There are also a handful of really large banks and the central square is in this neighborhood. Most of the streets are a mishmosh of building materials. There are some really rough streets made completely out of cobblestones that I would never be able to take my car on, and there other streets made out of smooth asphalt. Some of the cobblestone streets are even a little treacherous for walking. It makes me glad for the road repair crews in the United States. The cars are also completely unregulated here. There don´t seem to be many traffic or pollution laws except, "get to where you need to go as fast as possible." They drive right next to you on the road, and I think my biggest fear so far is being hit by a driver who is not paying attention. Almost every single building is made out of cement, which seems a little odd to me, because wood is a major export here and there were a ton of trucks carrying wood that we passed on the highway. Wood is also probably warmer during the winter months. I guess all that wood gets exported. It can get pretty cold down here. There is no heat in the houses and the nightly temperature can easily drop below freezing. The city is at 7,800 feet right in the middle of a green mountain valley. It also tends to rain a lot, but I have been lucky so far. It reminds me a lot of Colorado. It will rain for 10 minutes and then stop, I´m probably jinxing myself for the game tonight.

That is a fairly good physical description. As I walk around the streets, the first thing that I am struck by is the number of little shops there are. There are shops everywhere! Every single building you pass has a shop in it. There must be hundreds in about a seven block radius. They sell paper, shoes, food, accesories, you name it. It is also unusual in the number of people who live in their shops. There are usually little apartments in the back where the family lives. It is a very interesting set-up. The people here are very interesting. Everyone I´ve met has been very nice and courteous. I feel very safe walking around alone in this part of the city, even at night. I still can´t communicate very well, but most people are very understanding and helpful. I am still on guard, but it has been lowered a fair amount since I´ve been here.

One very striking thing about this city is the children. These kids are desperately poor, and yet they seem to be the happiest kids I´ve ever seen. They also have a ton of freedom. I have seen little children running around the streets on errands and riding the busses. A lot of them work in shops and there are a fair number coming out of private schools around here in the afternoons. There are a lot of children in my neighborhood that will play in the streets until 10pm. They run around and scream and are just generally happy. It gives me a feeling of security, because I know that there probably can´t be much violence or trouble in a neighborhood that has that many happy kids. I had an interesting moment last night when I was coming home for dinner. There were three little kids playing the bed of a pickup truck that seems to be permanently parked across the street from our house. They were all climbing up into the truck when I arrived and one little girl called out "Thank you" in english. I think it´s the only word they know. I told them they said it very well and then I taught them how to say "you´re welcome". I don´t think they understood, but they were very entertained by my trying to explain what the words meant in Spanish. The kids here are really great.

Tonight is the big party for La Festival de Independencia. I am going to a soccer game with people from my school and then there is a big party a little ways from my neighborhood with bands and all kinds of fun stuff, so I should have more stories from that when I get on here tommorrow. Hope everyone is doing well and feliz dia de la Independencia.

Bailamos!!!

2005-09-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

Hola,

So I had my second day of Spanish lessons today and I think some of the words are starting to sink in. There are some words that I knew when I got here that I no longer have to think about before I remember them. I just need to get that way with ALL the words. I am also starting to get to know my teacher better and that is making the lessons pretty fun. I have to do a ton of memory work for this. I wrote down about 100 words in my notebook yesterday and went and made flashcards out of all of them. That used up all my flashcards and made a nice little pile. I wrote down about 200 words in my notebook today and that will take a bunch more flashcards. At this rate, I´m going to have the entire Spanish language memorized in a month, and a pile of flashcards as high as the house I´m in. There is no way I can keep up this rate though, and I don´t actually have all the words memorized, but I´m working hard.

I also had my first (free) dance lesson today. It was free because the school paid for it and it was basically just and introduction. I am probably going to enroll in dance classes while I´m down here. They cost $3 and day for an hour of instruction. That´s a small chunk of change, but it is good excercise and something I´ll be able to take back to the states. The dance lesson went ok. I have a lot of trouble feeling the beat. I´ll be the first person to admit that I have some rythm problems, but I should at least be able to feel the basic beat. If I relax, it´s no problem and I can do it without thinking, but the more complex moves in salsa require the guy to be able to feel the 3-count beat without a problem. So I need to work on that.

I managed to find my book to read before I go to bed. There is a book called "Silence on the Mountain" about the Guatemalan civil war and Mayan extermination that Americans have hardly ever heard of. It seems pretty good so far, but I won´t give it my official recommendation until I finish it. Other than that, I still need to find a soap dish, a laundry bag, and a small Mayan alfombra(rug) for my room. Best wishes to everyone, and hasta manana.

Doris no es Gloria

2005-09-12T14:26:00.000-07:00

So I finally got moved into my homestay. There was a lot of waiting around because the boss wasn´t in the office when she was supposed to be, so I had to kill an afternoon. I studied a little bit of Spanish and met up with Andy for his last day here this week and we talked about politics. I have heard that Andy can get pretty involved in political discussions and you all know that I can, so we talked about health care policy and the political landscape in America right now. It was a very good discussion, but I think I have a tendency to be a little overbearing when I start to talk about policy. This fact was impressed upon me because Andy had a sore throat and could only talk a little and I was talking a lot. I listened to myself and found myself saying some things in rather annoying ways. So I will need to work on that in the future. Luckily, I am a long way from being able to talk about politics in Spanish, so I am safe from making a complete idiot out of myself here.

My homestay is a really nice place. I got the recommendation to stay with Doris originally from Suzy, but I lost the name and I thought I remembered it as Gloria. So when I talked to the school down here, I originally asked to stay with Gloria. Luckily, there was not Gloria down here to live with and they stuck me with Doris. Doris is this very lovely little hispanic lady who loves to converse with her students, and cooks very good food. She lives with her son Mario and they have a huge house that is about 15 minutes from the school. That is pretty far and the school doesn´t usually have houses that far away, but Doris is just so good, they couldn´t give her up. Mario came and picked me up at the school and we walked to the house and attempted to converse. I am getting a little better at understanding but now I am having difficulty finding the right words in my brain. We got to the house and I met Doris. She gave me the tour of the house and taught me the rules. I´m not allowed to have more than one shower a day, and I have to fill up my big water bottle at the school because water is very expensive for her. I also have to turn off the lights when I leave. All-in-all not too bad for great food and a warm place to sleep.

My room is very simple. I have a bed with a small stand next to it and a lamp. I have a dresser and small desk and a chair. That´s about it. I have all my clothes in the dresser and I keep my backpack on the desk. I hung up the flag I got from the soccer game with duct tape and my room looks pretty cozy. All I need is a book to read at night, a bag for my laundery, and a little soap dish. Everything is closed this week for the Festival de Independencia, so I need to get the stuff next week. The festival is a huge party that the city throws to celebrate independence day. They have a fair with rides and a big party Wednesday and Friday night. Should be really fun.

There are five other people in the house. There is a rather shy german girl, a rather loud American girl, and a couple that seems to snore in harmony during the night. Ít wasn´t because of the snoring, but I didn´t sleep very well last night. I just don´t sleep very well in new places. I need a night to adjust. But I was up, and I´ve never heard sounds like those coming from the other room. I´m surprised they actually had their noses in the morning. They are all very nice, and we all lamely attempt to converse at the dinner table. Doris doesn´t allow anything but Spanish in the house. It´s great for our education, but it sucks for our social life :)

I also had my first day of classes this morning. There was an orientation, and then I met my teacher. She is a spunky little hispanic girl named Fabiola. She is very energetic and laughs a lot, which makes the conversation a little easier, but I am still pretty far behind on everything. We went over the basics today and made a plan for the week. I met a few of the other students here. The most interesting one was a family practice doctor who is down here to learn Spanish because he sees 3-5 native Spanish speakers a day. We talked a little bit about medicine, and I was surprised to learn that he is a staunch evangelical christian, but he also is a big fan of a single-payer health system. I think he is a little surprised at himself. I have classes for 5 hours a day with a half hour break, and the time just flies. I need to go home and learn about 100 words that we went over today. I am looking for index cards to put them on, but all the stores are closed, so I´ll just have to make due. Hope everyone stateside is doing well, and hasta luego.

Vamos Equipo

2005-09-11T13:38:00.000-07:00

Or "Let´s go team,"

I had the great opportunity to go a soccer match last night. I have been hanging out with Andy friends for last day or so. They were going to the soccer match between Xela and the neighboring city of Antigua. It was a very interesting experience. We managed to sit (stand actually) in the roudy section and I learned all kinds of new Spanish words for cursing at people. These fans were ruthless. They made fun of the players, they insulted the refs, and called the goalie all sorts of unsavory things. It was pretty funny though and the game was really good. If you ever get the chance to go a soccer match in a latin american country, I would highly reccommend it. Those players are some of the best athletes I´ve ever seen.

There were a few things that were very different from the soccer I have seen on TV. The first was that every other steal was a slide tackle. These guys were running at each other and just taking each other out. It was really fun to watch. The second thing was the injuries. After the slide tackles, these guys would sit on the ground and act like they were in tremendous pain, the fans would yell "Espero Muerta" or "I hope he dies", and after the yellow card was pulled out, they would get up and jog away. It was very amusing. The last thing was the number of heavily armed guards that were patrolling the field and the barbed wire to prevent people from going onto the field. The game ended in a 1-1 tie and the guards had to rush out onto the field after the game in order to prevent a fight. There were also all kinds of cool souveniers going around and I picked up a flag for pretty cheap. It was a very fun experience.

Today has involved meeting more people and moving into my home stay. I will start to establish a routine this week. I´ll let you all know how things go with Spanish lessons. On a side note, losing the debit card won´t be such an expensive mistake after all. I met a girl who is going back to the states for a few weeks and she has offered to carry my debit card and my rain gear back with her. I just have to make sure it gets shipped to her when she is in the states. So that was lucky. Hope everyone is doing well.

I Made it!!

2005-09-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

And the adventure begins!
After a grueling 20 hours of traveling, I am finally in the lovely city of
Xela, Guatemala. The trip was relatively uneventful. I left Denver at 12:40 am on the morning of the 9th. I was put into first class with a jump-seating United pilot. He was a really interesting guy and we talked about flying and Guatemala. Turns out he´s been here a couple times. I managed to get some a little sleep on that flight, but I was still tired when I got to Atlanta at 4:30am. I now had a 6 hour layover to attempt to sleep away. I went to my gate and there were several people already there attempting to sleep. I say they were attempting to sleep because CNN was blasting on the TV telling us how bad Hurricane Katrina was in a mind-boggling number of ways. I lost my headphones somewhere already (just one of many things that I would lose or misplace on this trip) so I had to go purchase another pair and a travel pillow to sleep on the floor with. I managed to get another hour of sleep on the floor of the
Atlanta airport. They changed the gate on us, so I hiked over to the new gate and made a friend along the way. His name was Brian and he was going to Antigua as a start to his travels. I offered him a ride to the bus station because I was getting picked up.

On the flight to Atlanta, I was again put in first class (standby is the only way to fly...as long as you´re going to a third world country that no one really wants to get to.) I sat next to a very nice lady who start my Spanish education. Her name was Hilda and she was born in Guatemala, but immigrated to Salt Lake city and became Mormon. We chatted about life in Guatemala and what I should expect. She ended up giving me the name and number of her brother-in-law so I could call him if I was ever going to Tikal or climbing the volcanoes. Like I said, she was pretty cool.

Customs was a breeze. They asked me bunch of questions, and when they realized that I didn´t understand a single one, they stamped my passport and off I went. I picked up my bags and Brian and I met Raquel to take us to the bus station. Brian got on a chicken bus to Antigua (they call them chicken busses because of the chickens that are being transported on top, they leave behind an amusing trail of feathers every time they pull away from a stop). I was waiting for the first-class bus to Xela, but it didn´t show up. So we went to the original bus station and inquired about it. It turns out there was a protest along the road that was blocking traffic along the route. I had to wait for the 3pm bus, which would put me in Xela at 7pm.

I had a couple hours to kill and Raquel suggested that I spend them in a pizza cafe around the corner. I walked over there and ordered pizza and water. and setted in. My first impression of Guatemala was the smell. The vehicles here spew out a noxious mix of smoke that gives the city a very distinctive smell. Traffic is also insane here. The people drive like they´re possesed by the devil. For some reason I wasn´t very worred, I think because there´s nothing I can do about it and that is what´s accepted here. At the pizza place, I met a very kind 60 year old pizza delivery boy. He continued my Spanish education and impressed me with his english skills. There was also a very interesting moment when I was eating and studying Spanish in which a man went by the store. This wasn´t just any man though. He was an amputee and missing his right leg. He didn´t have a crutch to support himself so he would scoot his body along the pavement using his three remaining limbs. He caught me staring at him and gave me a warm smile. I smiled back, but I was amazed. It takes an incredible person to have an injury like that and still be able to smile at a complete stanger. These are really amazing people. The sad part about that is how much his life would be improved if he just had a crutch, and how much over again if he had a prosthetic limb. Americans are a very fortunate bunch.

The bus ride was uneventful. It was hot and crowded, and I met a pastor named Pablo. He spoke very little English and it was difficult, but he also coninued my Spanish education. Everyone has been very helpful and patient with teaching me words and phrases. I don´t remember 90% of them, but if I repeat them enough, I seem to retain them. There was an anxiety producing moment at the end of the bus ride. I was arriving into Xela after dark and I was told not to be out in this city after dark. I also now realized that I spoke no Spanish. I´m very good at getting my point across and I can ask questions, but I don´t understand a single word that people are saying back to me, and they quickly realize I don´t speak. I was also worried that the taxi driver was going to take me for a ride and take all my bags and money. The taxi driver delivered me to the correct place though, and the proprietor of the hotel greeted me with a warm smile and recognition as the friend who was supposed to meet Andy there. Andy is my friend from High School that lives down here. There were also many other English speakers around the hotel, so it was comforting. She showed me to a simple room that costs 30 Quetzals per day, which is about 4 dollars. Money goes a very long way here.

I got all unpacked and rested and met some peace corps volunteers downstairs who were going out that night. Andy showed up and we went out on the town. We went to this very good bar and then to several dance clubs. The beer here called gallo (chicken) I had a really good time, because meregue dancing is a lot like swing dancing. I don´t quite have the rythms down yet, but it was still fun. I also met the lady who teaches dance classes around here and she led me through some salsa dancing. It was an interesting experience to be led around by a little lady who was half my size. She was a really good dancer, and I did ok, but I have a lot to learn. Dance lessons are every night for $3. I haven´t decided what I´m going to do about that. I also got hit on by a very, very drunk Guatemalan girl, luckily her friends rescued me from her, and hopefully from herself.

Today generated a crisis of fairly big proportions. I got up in the morning and Andy had to leave to go back to work in the city where he lives. So we were working on kind of a time crunch. I had nothing to do, but he made some plan for me. Well, to carry out these plans I needed cash, so he took me to the ATM and showed me how it worked. Well, I had to dig around in my inconviently placed travel pouch to dig it out, I got the cash, but I forgot to get the card back from the machine. So we left and went and he put me on a bus to get to the market. I was juct getting out of the bus when I realized that I had forgot the card. I figured it was going to take me while to get back to the ATM, so I finished the small amount of shopping that I had to do and took a cab back. The card was obviously gone, and I tried to check with the bank to see if anyone had turned it in. Again, my lack of Spanish hampered me greatly, but I got the impression that the bank didn´t have it. I talked to Andy, and he advised not canceling the card because the machine probably just ate it, and I could get it back in a couple days, but it´s not worth the risk to me. I put a lot of money in my account before I left, and it would be very possible for someone to steal that. So I called the credit card company and they cancelled the card. I´m not worried about cash, because I have enough right now to last several weeks and I have a lot more in traveler´s cheques. My parents are going to send me the new card when they get it. It kinda works out because I also left my rain gear behind in the rush of packing, so they are shipping that out to me too. It´s a $30 mistake, but it could´ve been a lot worse. This wouldn´t be an adventure if I didn´t have little hardships like this. On a side note, I´ve also lost my Nalgeen bottle, but that was to be expected because I´m really bad at keeping track of those, and I couldn´t really have used it anyway since I have to buy bottle water. I just shouldn´t have brought it. Also, if you are traveling to a foreign country and you need a travel pouch, plan on putting vital things in there and then never touching it again. It is a pain the butt to dig out anything from this pouch and the fact that I have to do it marks me as a tourist even more surely than having a wallet the bulges out of my pocket. I now have only vital things in my travel pouch and my decoy wallet has become my actual wallet.

Other than that, I went to a really nice cafe above the city to study Spanish for a couple hours and have hand-made nachos. After I finish this, I am going to a soccer game with Andy´s friends and then meeting up with Andy tonight. I gotta run to get to the place where I´m supposed to be now. Hope everyone who is reading this is doing great and hasta luego.

Jackson Hole Trip

2005-09-08T07:37:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to post some photos from the trip to Jackson Hole with Eric. I had an awesome time. Thanks again May family.

Welcome

2005-09-07T20:08:00.000-07:00

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to my weblog about my trip to Guatemala. This will be an in-depth record of my adventures down in Guatemala. I don't know if it's such a good thing to have a permanent record of this trip because I might never live it down, but it's better than sending hoards of e-mails to everyone that fill up your in-boxes. Now you can check up on how I'm doing whenever you want, and it will give you a good idea of what day-to-day life is like down there. If you want to talk to me, just e-mail me or post a comment on here, and I will probably get it within a day.

Today is Weds, Sept 7th and I'm getting all packed up to leave. I dislike the packing stage of a long trip, because I almost always feel like I forgot something of dire importance. The feeling becomes excruciating when the moment when I am just walking out the door because I know that I still have the opportunity to get.....whatever it is that I'm forgetting. I'll just have to rely on all the great advice my friends gave me about traveling abroad (thanks Bryn, Kris, Larina and Suzy).

I also want to send a big thanks out to the May family. I just got back from a trip to Jackson Hole, where Eric is living, and we had an absolute blast. I will post pictures from the trip tommorrow. Hope everyone who is reading this is doing well and I'll talk to you next time from Guatemala.