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!