Life´s a Beach. at least for a day.

Ok so I´m going to try to keep this entry short.

We didn´t end up going to Coban because little Joshua was sick so we just hung out in Xela for the weekend and then went to the beach with our maestros on Monday. I was sad for Sarah that we didn´t get to see her city but the beach was really fun and we definitely needed a break. And it was my first time seeing the Pacific Ocean! It´s very similar to the Atlantic, at least in Guat. anyway. Other than our little excursion to the beach, we´ve just been trucking along in Spanish class, becoming really good friends with our maestros, and getting ready to move to our communities.

Tommorrow we are going to Yajabcu Signup to meet my new family and to have a chance for everyone to see where I will be living this year. I am so excited! And also a little bit on the nervous side. . . Jaime (my maestro) told me that I will probably have to, or at least be asked to, kill a chicken. I´m not really sure how I feel about that but I suppose I will just have to see what happens. Anyway, so we will be spending the weekend with my new host family, going to my new church, and I, at least, will be completely overwhelmed with all of the sights and sounds of my new home. That means, folks, be prepared for a really long entry next week!

Silly girl, rabbits are for food!

Many an event, both humorous and other, has occurred since I last wrote in this here blog. Saturday was Guatemala´s independence day so the entirety of last week was spent going to parades and concerts, setting of fireworks, and going to the fair. Our teachers took us to a parade Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday and let me just say, one was enough! A Guatemalan parade, at least in Xela, consists of almost every student from almost high school in the area (and there are a zillion) marching down the street in their school uniforms, led by girls wearing really short skirts and high heeled boots semi-salsa dancing with sticks that have bells on them and followed by sad little marching bands that could rarely carry a tune and were completely overpowered by xylophones. The first parade was cute, the second ehh, and the only thing that saved me from pulling my hair out during the third one was the excitement of the crowd (this one was actually on independence day and there were masses of people lining the streets and rooftops). Still, if I never hear a xylophone again in my life, I´d be A-ok.

Friday was really cool. We went on a field trip to a town called Momostenango where we visted a family of rug-makers. Their house was awesome, and very earthy and serene and close to what I imagine pioneers living in years ago. They told us/showed us how they sheer the sheep, clean the wool, spin the yarn, dye the yarn, and use this cool machine to make the rugs. AND they let us try! That´s right, I spun yarn and helped to make part of a rug! It was so cool! It´s pretty much magical how they make yarn, if you´ve never tried, I suggest putting it on your list of things to do before you die. The machine just pulls the wool into yarn like ¨Presto! There´s your yarn!¨ It´s crazy! They also had a big cage full of rabbits so I went over to pet them and one of the little boys walked by so I asked, ¨Are these pets?¨ And he said, ¨No, they´re rabbits.¨ So I laughed to myself and asked, ¨So, do you, um, eat them?¨ And he looked at me like I had a monkey growing out of my head and said, ¨Uh, yeah.¨ Everyone got a pretty good laugh out of that one. So then we we did a little shopping and ate a fabulous lunch of freshly made tortillas that were cooked over an open fire, cheese and beans. And the señora let us try our hand at making tortillas!!!! That is definitely a skill that non of us even came close to mastering during our afternoon in Momo but it was really fun! Friday night the maestros made dinner (thank heaven we didn´t have to cook this time!) and it pretty much blew our attempt out of the water. Then we went to a concert and watched fireworks as we rung in independence day.

Sunday we went to Samantha´s church and it was really cute and welcoming and the sermon was really good. It´s really fun to see where everyone will be living and working this year and it makes me really excited for the coming year. Sunday night David and Jeneanne invited us over to their house for a fantastic dinner and it was so nice to have familiar food. . .lasagna! My fav!! Yesterday we went to the fair with the maestros and had a really good time even though the rides were a little on the sketchy side. I think sketchy rides are more of a fair thing, though, and not a Guatemalan thing and kind of add to the overall excitement. On one of the rides my friend Jairo looked at me and said, ¨You have a deformity in your eye.¨ I was like, ¨Huh? No, that´s a freckle.¨ Then he asked me if I ever got made fun of at school for it. It´s a tiny little imperfection in my left eye, no cause for jokes. Maybe you had to have been there for it to be funny, but it was.

So that´s all I can think of right now. Oh yeah, just a word of advice, never tell a foreign host mother you like to eat anything that comes from the inside of an animal, such as liver. There´s a story behind it but I´ll just leave it at that.

We´re going to the Xelaju Super Chivos soccer game tomorrow. Should be fun. Then a trip to Coban this weekend to visit where Sarah will be living.

Must get going now, I´ve got a lesson in churro making.

Clouds and Ketchup Spaghetti

So let me preface this entry by saying that apparently I didn´t do a good job of spreading the word about my haircut. I got about 7 or 8 inches taken off and am now the spitting image of my kindergarten picture. I´m still not sure how I feel about it but it´s easy and will grow so I guess I can´t complain.

Alrighty, so this past week has been really busy. We have class everyday for 5 hours. That´s five hours of making forced conversation with the same person. It´s really not that bad actually and my teacher, Jaime, and I take lots of breaks for coffee and to kid around with the other groups. We also took a field trip to the cemetery and one to a glass blowing factory, both interesting in their own way. Every afternoon we have an activity planned through the school like salsa lessons, political lectures, or visiting nearby towns. The salsa lessons are by far my preferred activity and, apparently, there´s no dancing in Yajabcu Signup so I´ve got to enjoy it while I can. We went on a hike yesterday to see a sacred Mayan lagoon. It was a 5 hour, almost vertical climb in the clouds to the top of this old volcano and when we reached the top it was so foggy/cloudy we couldn´t even seen the lagoon! Our teachers claimed that it was fog but we were definitely in the clouds.

Funny story of the week: So as kind of a tradition at the school, the teachers and students take turns cooking dinner on Friday nights. This past friday was our turn so we went to a little tienda (store) in search of ingredients to make a good old fashioned spaghetti dinner. We got lots of noodles, sauce, bread, sausage (couldn´t find ground beef so we improvised), and even bought some cake mix for desert. Then we went back to the school and started cooking only to find that the sauce that we bought was actually ketchup. So being the good cooks that we are, we unsuccessfully added worsteschire sauce, salt, garlic, oregano, and who knows what else to make the ridiculously sweet kethcup taste more like tomato sauce. It was revolting. So then we added an absurd amount of garlic to the bread in order to balance out the sweetness of the spaghetti. That also proved to be a bad idea leaving us with both horrible spaghetti and gross garlic bread. So then we were left with our cake to save the night. And who can mess up boxed cake mix? We can. Soon after preparing it and sticking it in the oven we read the box only to find that we were baking icing and not cake. And as delicious as the final product was, it did´t really help to save our dinner from going down in history as a complete dud. The teachers were really nice about it though and some even asked for seconds but I think next time we should just order Dominoes.

(I would just like to state for the record that I am actually a phenomenal Guatemalan chef. Thus far my host mom has taught me how to make smushed bananas, deep fried with beans and cheese inside, hamburgers a la Guatemala and empanadas, which are my specialty if I do say so myself.)

So that´s all I got for ya. No school tomorrow because elections were today and they need a day to rest. Gotta love it!