Christmas and New years
Trip Start
Jun 14, 2004
1
14
27
Trip End
Jul 30, 2006
San Ignacio,
Belize
Monday, January 10, 2005
I hope that the holiday season treated everyone well.
I always love when the new year comes because it feels like a clean slate has been drawn. I can leave all the maybe not so great things behind and put all the great things that happened in the keepsake place in my heart.
Anyways, back to Christmas and New Years. I honestly thought that the holiday season was going to be pretty difficult emotionally for me. It was the first time I was away from my family for this special time and those of you who are family or know my family, know that we all have a special kind of bond. I decided that I needed to take charge down here and create a Christmas for the "orphans," those of us who were not going home for Christmas and were not having family come to belize. So we had "Christmas in Cayo" at my house with presents and all
1 the christmas crew
. It was really a great time and exactly what I needed to keep my mind off of not being with my family for Christmas. After the four days of christmas ridiculousness, some of us travelled to san pedro, the largest tourist island off of belize city to ring in the new year. Some highlights of the four days of happiness Id like to call Christmas and the two days of craziness id like to call new years eve:
1. I live directly in front of the Cahal Pech Mayan ruins and there just happens to be trails leading to it from my house. Fantastic, right? Yes, I just walk out my door and ten minutes of walking on my own personal entrance, Im at some mayan ruins. We decided to go up at night, since it was almost full moon. Stacey can throw fire, meaning she has two balls of fire at the end of chains that she does amazing things with. So we went up around midnight and stacey threw fire on the high temple. It was kind of surreal being like, yeah, we are on some mayan ruins, preforming our own show for the mayan gods and thinking about what kind of things the mayan people did to show their appreciation to the gods thousands of years ago. Very cool.
2. Christmas dinner belize style. I decided early on that cooking dinner for eight or nine or ten people in my kitchen would not be fun and not something that i wanted to try and do, so instead we went out to dinner at the Wildside cafe, a vegetarian restaurant
2 lounging on some maya ruins at midnight
. We all know Jessica and Carlos, the owners, pretty well, so i thought it would be nice to support them since they were going to be open on christmas as it was. We went, ate, brian, carlos and tim were drumming for a while. It was very un-christmas like, but at the same time, very fitting for christmas in belize i think. 3. Just spending time with the people i enjoy spending time with the most. I guess the best part of christmas for me was that i was here in belize, without my family, but i was with family. We have all grown so close here because we are each other's support systems that if i had to spend it anywhere but home, it would have been here with the people i spent it with.
Unfortunately during this time we also found out about the devastating tsumani that hit south east asia. katy called us from downtown to let know dominic, who's family lives in thailand and girlfriend was in bali that he should come down and check. It was horrific and terrifying to think about what happened once we all got downtown and realized how serious it was all. Thank god Dominic's mother and girlfriend ended up being fine, but for the first few days we didn't know. As the days progressed after the tsunami and the death toll kept rising, it really made me think about how fast life can be taken away and how we must all live each day and how glad that I am in the peace corps and trying to live my life to the fullest.
4. New years: blast from the past. Being in a bar with ONLY white people. Its loud, and people are dancing badly to badly covered songs, hmmm, surprisingly reminiscent of being back in the states.
New years was a good time, but a little bit of an overload of touristy stuff and wayyyy too expensive for my poor ass.
BUT for the first time in a long time I felt clean and pretty. Strange. I wore clothes that I had practically forgotten about it and put on makeup! I think the last time I did that was for the swearing-in ceremony in august. It felt really nice and made me look forward to being back in the states when i can feel like that all the time.
And in complete belizean style, of course the water taxi back from san pedro broke down and we had to wait an hour for another to come and rescue us. Always an adventure :)
