Well... um, yeah

So we rolled into Xela around 5 pm after a 7 hr bus ride through some seriously formidable mountains. Good thing these guys don´t get any snow because wow. Just figured out during that sentence how to accent my letters (I´m typing on a keyboard de español, after all). Every one of these keyboards is a little different, but this place has nice computers (running Vista) and a decent price so I think I´ll try to frequent it.

It´s hard to remember all the things I wanted to say now, sitting at a computer. Feels farther away than the Xela just outside the door.

So...um, school begins at 8 and runs til 1. My professor keeps calling me "sueño," which means sleepy. This is because I´m yawning all the time. I mean, it is several hours of Spanish, after all. Also, I took likely the hardest Spanish exam of my life this morning; it was a placement exam and whew, boy, did I ever bomb that thing.

This town, though, like Guatemala City before it, is gorgeous. It sits at around 12,000 feet, inside a huge volcanic crater something like 3,000 ft across. Like I said above, the roads leading up to Xela are a winding twisting beautiful mess. I think we took the Pan-American Highway, but I can't find out for sure -- but once you reach the summit, the road drops down as sharply as it twisted up and you find yourself looking at a huge sprawling plane ringed in gargantuan mountains with looming Santa María and smoking live Santiaguito to the south. (Sorry, I´ve been reading my travel guide a lot.)

Yeah, but all that happened two days ago. Feels like I´ve been here for a month or something - there´s just been so much around us. There´s the host family, the trips around town, and going out last night all to talk about. In the span of two days, it really does feel like a lot.

My family is good, mom - you´ll be glad to know that. There are two grandparents (los abuelos), a mother named María and her two children 4 yr old Luis and 8 yr old Deborah. All are pretty cool.

Anyway, I´m running real close to the 45 minute mark, after which I´ll have to pay another, oh, quetzal for the time. Which is something like 20 cents.

La manaña primer (The first morning)

So there´s a guy here...his name sounds like Atan but it´s Ethan in English. Anyway, he´s adopting his second little Guatemalan child. The boy just burst through this room actually, we´ve been hearing him all morning. The man is returning to Jerusalem this morning, so it was very interesting to speak to him. He is from France originally.

The shower here is sort of a little can with a small heater wired in that drops warm water straight down. They gave us each towels and soap. The place is beautiful.

We catch our bus in about thirty minutes I believe. Also, the shot of the night city from last night is now a shot of the two volcanos outside Guatemala City with the town beneath. I like this place.

¡In Guatemala!

We just arrived in Guatemala City and I´m having worlds of trouble with this keyboard. The shift key is different, like very old keyboards in the states, and the @ symbol requires a key stroke. The keyboard is ççç ... muy diferente. I keep making a funny symbol when I want to capitalize things.

The place here is amazing. Very old, stucco-like building. I gave the man one US dollar and he gave me a half hour of internet and two quetzales in return. I don´t know how that translates. We get breakfast in the morning, which is pretty "dulce", which means "sweet".

Tomorrow morning we hop a bus for a four hour ride further into the mountains, to our town Xela. I´m really excited.

Más explicación

I thought I would add a little more to clarify.

I am leaving for Guatemala this Monday. While there I will be attending a Spanish language school, Minerva, at www.minervaspanishschool.com/, and volunteering with a Fair Trade org, Kuchub'al. Click the links to visit their Web sites.

Also, the city has its own Web page apparently. See it at www.xelapages.com/.

I'm going to try to post the photos I take on Panoramio. This site lets me post photos for you all to see, as well as tagging them to Google Maps, so you can see where I took the photo as well. Should be pretty cool; my profile is here.

I meant to add some photos here of the Guatemalan region, but got impatient with it. I'll try to get something up later, or you can visit some travel sites like Lonely Planet to see a little of what Guatemala looks like.

Hello, folks. This blog, as said above, will contain information about me as I move through Guatemala. It might become more, we'll see. For now it's a place where those who care may look up to see what I'm doing while I'm gone.

Feel free to comment on my posts if you'd like to respond.

Oh, and P.S. "Una casa en la playa" means "A place by the sea," which really has nothing to do with Xela, as the town is located in the mountainous highland region of Guatemala, nowhere near either of its ocean coasts. I just thought it sounded nice ... and Spanish.