Casa Olga Quetzaltenango

... which is more than I can say for any doctor I would have gone to in the states. Crutches however are not free. In fact, they are super expensive. 400 Quetzales, which translates into about 50 buck, which translates into:
--renewing a visa in Guatemala city three times
--buying 80 cheese pupusas fromthe central part
--buying 40 plates of fried chicken and fries
--16 salsa dance classes
--one months rent at Laguna Chicabel
--24 machetes
--seven ...

... to dinner. Lucky for us the place where we decided to eat was
showing a movie..but not just any movie, the Michael Jackson
documentary ¨This Is It¨!! I know, it´s lame, but we were SO excited to
see it! Did ...

Terry and I had a leisurely breakfast on the deck of Shanti Shanti restaurant. Met Jim coming down the road and were informed that he and Rose had been out searching for better accomodations. We schlepped our overweight bags down the stairs ...

... English guy from the school and stayed out until 4am. The drunker we became, the more freely we chatted in Spanish to the locals, played darts etc. After 1am, we had to shut all the doors and smoke inside and when the police passed by we had to turn the music off and whisper! The evening ended when i was talking to a Guatemalan who had fought in the civil war in the 70s and was confiding in me regarding all the people he had killed and how he is haunted by each ...

¡Hola amigos!

I have been neglecting my travel blog writing, time it seems, flies extremely quickly when you are staying in one place. We are still in Xela, having spent 3 intensive weeks learning spanish for 5 hours a day one on one with our Guatemalan teachers. Its been a really amazing opportunity, and the school (El Portal) is a small co-operatively run school literally less than a minutes walk away from our house, which is definitely a good call for ...

Since the power went out around 6 pm last night, and we had had an
exhausting day, we were in bed by 7:30 and were very ready for our
first day of school today! For breakfast, we had porridge mixed with
Cocoa Krispies and Corn Faleks (actually amazing - you should try it
and say it's an authentic Guatemalan dish), and chatted with Maria. She
is wonderful and speaks very slow and clear Spanish. You can tell she's
hosted gringos for 11 years ...

Well I thought I would post something however I have not done much lately. I have been studying hard. It is not easy but nothing worth wild is easy. I am making a little progress

The key word here is little, my teacher tells me poco y poco (little by little I will learn Spanish).

There are a lot of small café's here because of the amount of people here studying Spanish mostly northern Europeans but there are a lot of Americans to ...

... likely be headed
south to Peru by mid-November for some additional travel. By mid
December we hope to reunite in Peru with Machu Picchu being a prominent
stop.



Safe travels and check out our separate blogs for updates.

Grant & Shiloh

... After spending nearly 30 hours with her I´m beginning to pick up a Spanish accent when I speak English (unfortunately it comes less easily when I actually speak Spanish - can anyone from England actually roll their "r"s?).

I have to have conversations with the other female teachers about my "coorrrrleee" hair every break and am now fluent in telling people I get it from my dad and wish I had straight hair. To which they wish they had ...

... audible from the lookout point. The smoke produced from the single, several-minute long erruption was massive. As it raised to the sky, it produced a large, dark cloud overhead. It´s hard to describe the magnitude of the erruption, but we´ll bring home pictures for those who are interested.

So, after witnessing this, we began to continue our journey towards the crater. This journey was to include the following: a descent from our lookout point on ...