This is Flores. Flores is a town in the Petén region of Guatemala. It is a beautiful, beautiful place but there are so many tourists. Me no likey. It´s extremely expensive to Guatemalan standards and the food is terrible. However, one must go through Flores in order to reach San Andrés, the quaint town Chris and I have called our home for the past week.

A great big ¨THANKS¨ to tio Chris and tia Lisa, who recommended the EcoEscuela de Español, where Chris and I have been taking one on one Spanish classes. We´ve been living with a local family, the most reputable host-family in the whole town! The people in this town are the nicest I have ever encountered: genereous, hospitable, and patient with our spanish. We have been making the effort, thanks to our teachers and our host-family, to speak almost exclusively in Spanish. It´s actually quite difficult and bizarre for me to write this in English. Ahh! My brain hurts!
Here´s a typical weekday for us in San Andrés:

2:00 am: we are awoken by a young, crazy rooster who lives on the roof next door and hasn´t yet been trained to only call with the sun.

3:00 am: the same

etc.

6:00 am: wake up, push-ups and sit-ups, shower if there happens to be running water that day, complete any last homework that may be lingering, eat breakfast cooked by Marta, the matriarch of the house, approx. 70 years

8:00 am: lessons start at school, located one block from our house. there are five students including us, all from the states. we´ve befriended two of them. my teacher is Elga, 30 yrs old, a sweet woman who is defintely a bit of a cut-up. we spend a lot of time conversing, which is my greatest challenge. she also teaches grammar, or should i say, reminds me of proper grammar rules, since I´m discovering I remember much from high school.

12:00 pm: return home and eat lunch.

Afternoons: we typically visit lake Petén Itzá ( a huge monstrousity of a lake) and go for a swim. There is a dock about 5 minutes from our house. very refreshing.
sometimes a siesta. always homework, always in front of the fan in our bedroom.
the school offers optional activites each afternoon: traditional cooking with a local family (we learned how to make tortillas), restoring and cleaning the nearby beaches or paths in the local park, and visiting an animal rehabilitation center in Flores. that was cool. We saw monkeys, guacamayas (a very colorful bird), and many trees used for a variety of things: traditional medicine, marimbas, etc.

7:00 pm: dinner

After dinner we head to our bedroom to do homework, or hang out with the family, or meet up with our new friends at the local cantina.

--------------------------------------------------

And now, a look at our only problem we´ve encountered on this trip thus far: the weather. Right now it´s 97 degrees; this has been typical for each day. It generally cools off around 8 or 9pm and doesn´t get unbearable again until around 10am. Both Chris and I have dealt with some nasty heat stroke. It took me about 5 or 6 days to acclimate to the weather in the Petén region (which by the way is North Guatemala, if you´re interested). Before I got acclimated (it´s now only been 2 or 3 days), I could only stomach about 1/4 of the ammount of food I normally eat. It was pretty miserable. Now everything´s okay, we´ve learned that we have to either swim or take a cold shower in the afternoons. To put it all in perspective: I have to say we´re doing pretty well when our one major problem is drinking beer fast enough for it to stay cold.



This is the view from our bedroom deck. (yeah, we have it pretty good. it´s unusual for visitors to have their own floor and own deck. we share it only for laundry-hanging space.) La Casa de Marta y Rolando is a wonderful one. It is constantly bustling with people coming and going, lots of children running around, and many animals. They have only 1 dog and 2 birds, but at any given time there could be 3 or 4 more dogs; they like to drop in at any time. This, of course, does not include the many villages of insects, lizards, and toads.

Here´s a shocker for many: I´ve been eating red meat since our arrival to Guatemala! (I can now picture my brother doing a celebratory dance. He used to try to slip meat in my food as a child.) The food here is all very good, lots of assorted meats, rice, tortillas, soups, eggs, plantains, and fruits. Not many vegetables.

I promise to be better about my blog. The town in which we´re staying doesn´t have internet.

Love to all!