hot bath adventure

Yeseterday, we went to the hot baths outside of xela with a group from the school. we rode in a small "bus" which was really a 15 passenger van, though we had about 20 people in it, much in the style of the Peruvian buses. out in the village where the hot baths were, we had to drive down a steep mountain where there were houses literally entirely upside down because of hurricane agatha. it was pretty crazy and sad for the people who had lived there! when we got to the bottom of the hill, we had to cross a bridge and immediately on the other side of the bridge the van got stuck in the mud. we all had to get out and it took about ten people around and hour to get the bus out of the mud hole. half of the village turned up. the kids were watching and older kids were trying to help get the van out of the mud. one of the students had to drive the bus so that the driver could help push. it was pretty crazy. eventually we got the bus free and went to the baths. because of the hurricane many of the rooms were closed and we had to share in larger groups than we would have liked. the water was very hot and extermely clear. it was interesting. little else is going on right now. today was pretty uneventful for me, but cj went with her teacher to see a show at her grand childrens´school. they were doing some songs and dances and cj got to talk with some of the kids and see the school. it sounds like it was pretty exciting. i worked more on learning verbs. i do not have the ability to remember the meaning and conjugation for 50 verbs each day. five perhaps, but not fifty. so i have not retained the majority of what we´ve done. i was able to successfully get cj and i tickets for a shuttle bus to lake atitlan for tomorrow after school. right now, i´m trying to get a reservation at a hotel there, but the hotel´s reservation page does not work, and with no phone access and very little access to the internet, it is not easy. i am really hoping that they will have written me back in the time it takes me to do this blog post, but i´m definitely not holding my breath! either way, i´m sure we´ll find something. i´m looking forward to going to the lake, and i think cj will like it. it sounds similar to crater lake in oregon, but the guatemala version so much crazier i´m sure. we´ll see. there is a lot of tourism there so it´s possible we´ll be able to update while we´re there, but i´m not sure. if it´s expensive or inconvenient we won´t do it, but if there´s something close and reasonably priced we will try. otherwise, we´ll update on monday.

tuesday july 27

today has been fairly uneventful. we got up, had fruit for breakfast, and went to school. cj studied the parts of the body, and i worked on regular and irregular verbs. i think we did about 100 verbs today so you can imagine how little i´ve retained out of it! during the mid-morning break, cj took pictures. after class we went home and had lunch- rice and lentils, and cj played a little bit with our host sister. she made her some buttons with her button maker. at around 2:30 we went out and went to the bank and then went to the same coffee shop where we got some dinner on sunday night and had some iced coffee. cj enjoyed it but of course she was having a bathroom emergency in about 30 seconds. we worked on homework there. i have a lot of spanish homework tonight, more work on verbs and also on interrogative sentences. fun stuff! some of it is fairly straight forward and some is quite counter intuitive.
this weekend, we´re thinking about going on a trip to lake atilan and tomorrow we´re going on a trip in the afternoon to the hot baths, so there is a good chance i will not update unless we leave much later or get back much earlier than i would anticipate.
today on our way to school we ran into another person from our school, emily, who as it turns out lives in washington heights and is roommates with marissa torres from hamilton heights! pretty crazy! it´s strange how things like that happen.´
the pictures attached to this post (sorry that they´re sideways, but i´m frankly pretty impressed with the fact that i was able to get them to upload from my camera to the computer directly and post them in the blog in the first place!) are of cj having her iced coffee at the coffee shop this afternoon and her this morning standing in the doorway of the room where i have my classes, with the central courtyard behind her. the school is built around the center couryard with many tables surrounding the courtyard and many little rooms where a couple of groups (student and teacher) will have classes. tomorrow i´ll see if I can do a picture of her at home in our room if I can get the blog to cooperate and if i end up updating. little else to report right now!

Finally at School

It has been a very hectic couple of days. we got up on sunday morning and went to the bus station in guatemala city. we took a taxi and at some point while we were driving around down town approaching the bus station a whole bunch of guys ran over the the cab and started pulling the doors open and asking the driver a bunch of questions. he was pretty unphased but seemingly told them to go away. while i understood nothing of what they were saying, i don´t think it was anything threatening or anything, more like they though we were stopping there and wanted to carry our bags for tips or something. it was strange and kind of unnerving though. when we got to the bus station, the woman at the desk, who spoke no english, told me that they did not run buses to xela, despite the fact that the schedule i had listed about six each day. so i managed to ask here where to go to get a bus to xela and she gave me directions in spanish to another bus station. so cj and i got to walk a few blocks through downtown guatemala city to another bus station on sketchy directions. luckily when we got there they did indeed have buses to xela. unfortunately it was ten in the morning at the next bus was at three o´clock. so we had a nice long wait at the bus station to say the least. while we were there we met a woman named mina who was guatemalan but who had lived in minnesota since she was a girl, i believe, and who was also taking the bus to xela because her daughter is studying spanish here and doing volunteer work. so we hung out with her which was nice because she knew a tiny bit about guatemala city and spoke fluent spanish. we went to mcdonalds and had fries. mcdonalds is pretty much the same everywhere, of course. we almost had our bags left in guatemala city because we didn´t know that after we checked them and got claim checks we still had to go behind the locked door and load them onto the bus ourselves (who wouldn´t assume that, right) the rest of the bus ride was fortuantley uneventful though i was worried because you´re not supposed to travel between cities at night here and i was afraid that our bus would break down as it did in peru and as it does here pretty routinely. but we got to xela in one piece. unforutnately we did not get here during office hours for the school so we had to check into a hotel for the night. of course at this point it was about eight oclock and we´d had nothing to eat or drink but a bottle of water and some fries. so we went to a really cute coffee place across from our hotel where we had some kind of chick pea vegetarian dish, bread and hummus and i had an iced coffee. oddly, i wasn´t even hungry and frankly am still not. interstingly mina and her daughter were at the same hotel, though we did not get to chat. we went to bed early, and got up this morning at seven and wandered all over xela with our luggage looking for the school. fortunatley, we only had to get directions three times and got there at approximatley the right time. we had our orientation and cj did very well in an hour long discussion about the history of guatemala and the program, discussing the civil war, the role of the cia and united fruit in everything, etc. i´m sure she was captivated by every word.
then we had our first classes. my teacher is very nice. she doesn´t speak tons of english which at times makes things interesting. we´ve had to look things up. i think today i´ve pretty much covered what i covered in my two years of high school spanish, though i certainly wouldn´t say i have it all down cold or anything. mostly, we focused on the verbs estar and ser which are forms of ´to be´. i´m still having trouble simultaniously remebering when to use which verb and which conjugation. cj has been working on colors. we both have homework.
when we finished classes at 1 o´clock we were taken to our host family by the mother of our host mother who lives next door and who is hosting some students also. our host family is very nice and both parents speak a lot of english. there is a girl who is about five who cj played with a bit this afternoon. it was cute because they were speaking to each other in languages that the other didn´t undrstand a word of but acting as though they did. and of course, cj is still being cj and trying to see how much she can get away with. so we´ll see how that goes. right now she is working on homework, both her spanish homework and her reading, journaling and math. we went into the town center today to pick up some things from the store and to get money at the atm. as we were walking down the street we ran into someone else from our school, maggie, with her host sister and nephew who were showing her where to go to the store and the atm. that was nice because it meant we could tag along and her host sister was able to show us some conventions we didn´t know like using a locker at the store for cj´s backpack. maggie speaks even less spanish than i do, which is kind of comforting because most people here seem to be far more advanced that we are, at least at an intermediate level. cj is the only kid here right now, which is probably good for her because he means she´s on better behavior, at least so far. they have excellent coffee here, unsurprisingly and i´ve had several cups today at school. it´s pouring rain now, and i don´t know if we´re going to go to go get some coffees and hit the atm again (we used the other money to pay for our classes this week) of if we´ll go back home or just hang out here for a while longer. since it´s raining right now, we´ll probably just hang out here. i can get another cup of the great coffee they have. we had dinner with our host family probably around 730 and then we´ll probably go to bed early because we´re both quite tired.
sorry that this is long and kind of stream of consciousness and not entirely chronological but everything is a bit blurred together right now. also, the keyboards here are bizarre so that´s why there are no capitals and some other punctuation things are kind of funky. it´s just faster to write it this way so i am. i´m just grateful that my weird alt 6 4 thing is working well enough to get the little at symbols to pop up on every 10th try or so. i´ll try to write more tomorrow and perhaps post pictures. there is a usb thing in here, so perhaps i can get some pictures uploaded if i remember to bring the correct cord. we´ll see.

In Guatemala City

We´ve arrived in Guatemala City! Both of our flights were nice and CJ was excited that we again got to sit in first and business class. On our Dallas to GC flight they served us chocolate cookie ice cream with chocolate sprinkles in it that CJ especially enjoyed.
When we got into GC we didn´t have to wait long at all in customs and immigration but it was a madhouse reminicent of Lima when we got out. We eventually found our shuttle guy who took us to the hotel (and was playing the Beatles). It was pouring rain when we got here.
Our hotel was absolutely packed with a big group checking in when we arrived, so we had to wait quite a while to get our keys. Our room is both nice and has some strange issues. It´s very big, has two nice beds, a balcony, kitchentte, a bunch of minibar stuff that you could buy and had a huge bathtub, but there is lot of mildew in the bathroom. I showered and there was not a ton of hot water, but enough so that it was tolerable. CJ has done pretty well, though very distracted and sometimes fussy. We will go to bed soon, I hope. She is writing in her journal right now. I´m hoping we sleep well, and then we need to change some money and find our way to the first class bus station to get to Xela. It´s supposed to take about four hours. I´m hoping we can be there by about mid afternoon. I´ll be very glad to be done with luggage for a while!