Hostal Via del Lago San Pedro La Laguna

This past week was the final week for Marissa and Jenny and I to stay together in Xela. After a farewell dinner of Pizza and Chinese (comedy un-topic) with the New Zealenders at the house, we left to spend a final few days together at Lake Atitilan. It was great to get out of Xela. This town is getting way to small, and least the part of town that I live and work in. Everyone knows everyone, everyone is all up in my biznuss. As I have said before, I am living in Lawrence, but ...

The past few days have been hard, but great, and we are getting ready
to leave San Pedro on Saturday. Probably our favorite thing while we've
been here has been just sitting around and chatting with Maria. It's
been great practice for us to chat in Spanish, and it's also been great
fun trying to explain various things to her... prom, football
(americano), and Halloween - Susan drew a pic of a pumpkin and a ghost,
but it didn't really help (shocker). We thanked her ...

Well I've now been in San Pedro over a week and am pretty content with
life here.

I landed up getting a lift from Antigua
with a girl I had met from Guatemala City who I had randomly bumped in
to in Antigua the night before. It
turned out she was going to San Pedro for a couple of nights with her
mates the same day so managed to get a lift down with them. The journey
there was a bit of a white knuckle ride as it was dark, very foggy and
none of ...

Not too much news today. We just wanted to post a few photos. For
breakfast, we had delish Bisquick pancakes, which Susan was delighted
about bec she knew her gift of New York maple syrup would be well used.
One big event - we showered! Well, Susan did already, and Teddy is
planning to tonight. We were wondering how long it would be socially
acceptable to stay in our homestay without bathing, and we decided
today was probs ...

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 ...

... be in a rundown pool hall decorated with Italian themed maps and posters run by a gay couple with a taste for mid 90s rock and that my night would have ended gathered around a karaoke microphone belting out Radiohead and Hotel California with a random sampling of the world´s gringos. It really wasn´t my plan...funny how things are working out.

Nice as that all is, hopefully I will be back in the sticks soon.

... or the value as it would have cost me a flat rate of $50.

Doing 7 hours a day of Spanish plus 2 – 3 hours homework, tarea, started taking its toll and by Wednesday I was beginning to lose my voice, which made practicing my Spanish a bit difficult. However we managed to whip through the past and future tenses of the most common and regular verbs, which I now have to learn. I quickly came to the realisation that I had been in denial for years, and that I was in ...

... 8211; Gringo really refers to Americans and not all whites, although for years the vast majority were Americans, this has over the years changed and there are now probably more Europeans, Dutch, Danish, Germans, English over here than Americans. So Gringo has expanded to encompass all. There are many stories of where the word originated and the most popular is it started during the American-Mexican war, when Mexicans, not knowing much English would shout “ ...

... they gave us a really long answer back and we didn't quite know what they were saying. Eventually I gave up as the family were talking Spanish amongst themselves so I headed off to bed about 9.30pm. We sussed out the toilet situation (self flushing with a bucket of water), brushed our teeth and hopped into bed - hoping that miraculously we know a **** load more Spanish in the morning. We did manage to suss out that we were having breakfast at 8am tomorrow.

... first month in San Pedro, we pretty much caught up on every film we were either too poor to go and see while we were saving for this trip back home in Australia, or missed while we were in any of the non-English speaking countries we’d been to in the past 12 months.







The movies, all pirated would often have the backs of heads or chairs from the cinema they were illegally filmed in, or ...