On the Gringo Trail now - lakeside town Panajachel

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  Panajachel, Guatemala
Friday, February 22, 2008

We spent 2 nights in the delightful little town of Panajachel, on LakeAtitlan which certainly is on the gringo trail (main tourist route), and it is easy to see why. Once again, surrounded by massive, sky scraping volcanoes, Lake atitlan is absolutely beautiful. We decided not to strain ourselves to much here, hahaha, not that we have yet, but we just chilled around the town for 2 days and 2 nights.

We are now in Quetzaltenango (pronounced - ket-zelt-tenango) which the school kids here call Xela (pronounced - shall-ah), a nickname which has conviniently stuck, as the full name is quite a mouthfull. The town, as it seems with every town in Guatemala, is surrounded by massive, cloud touching volcanoes which are quite threatning in apperance with the knowledge that half of them are active but is very beautiful and busier then the little town of Antigua.

01 Beautiful sunset in Panahachel

 
All the cities in Guetemala are split up into different Zones (like Autralian suburbs) and the streets are named 1, 2, 3 etc. Avineda (North to South) and 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. Calle (East to West) - Sounds very ordered huh?
We are now in our second day of studying Espanol with our hombres and Esse´s and we are both excited about the prospect of knowing another language enough to have a basic conversation in it. Our language school is great and we have both found that the 5 hours of learning we undertake a day (30m break), flies by and before we know it it is 1 o´clock.

The language school is in zona uno (centre of town) which is great. The taxi drivers call it Gringotenango because there are heaps of language schools here, thus many gringo´s. There are not as many tourists as Antigua which is good but there are a few in zona 1. It is freezing here in Xela so we went to the mall a few days ago after class to get katie a new jumper and we caught, what the Guatemalans call, el microbus, which are effectively a little vans which drive all around zona 1 on specific routes, carrying 10 times the amount of people they should.... Good times! They microbuses have a guy who hangs out the door shouting at the top of his lungs, "parque, parque, parque" or what ever the destination of that microbus

02 Katie feeling crook, early morn on our roof

. We found the microbus great and for Q1 (15c) each it was hard to pass up. We also caught our first chicked bus - appropriately named so, because the locals take anything they want on including cages of chickens or anything they choose not to put on the roof rack. These are the old American school buses with funky paintings and decals on the outsides which was only Q2.00 (30c) each. This wasn´t quite as extreme as we had imagined, but it was a bit of fun to experience.

We were walking along the street in town the other day, on the sidewalk almost holding our noses because of the stench coming from the dirty water pooled in the coblestoned road. When, just like the american movies, a car drove by just as we were walking past one of the bigger puddles, splashing and half drenching us with this stench which smelt like "human poo after 10 curries and a stomach ache" (Hmm.. Yes, delightful!). It was very unpleasent and as such I didn´t have a jumper for a few days, leaving me to freeze in my thin thermals.

Anyway, we have now finished our first week of Español studies and we love it. We get very excited about it everytime when we learn something new. Yeah, we´re nerds! We plan to stay here for another (at least) 2 weeks and we think it´ll be great to talk to the kids at the orphanage in Bolivia.

Unable to put photos on here for some reason. I´ll post them later.

Soaking it all up here in Guatemala.

Joe

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03 Lake Atitlan	04 Collecting Building materials from local river	05 Market shopping	06 Panajachel
07 Market place (Panajachel)

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