The Daily Grind

This week has flown by.  Which is surprising since on one hand it seems like we've done so little, but I guess that is part of the appeal of San Pedro.  Our daily schedule:

7am  Out of bed
While we have a "kitchen" at our hostel, all it really consists of is a gas burner and a couple of well-battered dishes.  From what we have been told hardly anyone living here owns a refrigerator.  Since restaurants serving the backpacker crowd are abundant and, more importantly, cheap, David made a few attempts at simple pasta and that was it.  Neither of us wanted to get up early enough to go to a restaurant for breakfast, so we usually bought some banana bread or a sweet roll from a local woman who roams the streets with a basket of breads every evening to eat the next morning.

8am - 12pm  Class
School here has been great.  Our school was located on a hillside garden, and we each sat in these individual palapas amongst the fruit and flowers that overlooked the lake. In Xela David had not one but two different teachers that he really liked.  My teacher was awesome teaching grammar, but for whatever reason we didn't really click when it came to just talking and practicing the grammar.  This time I am the one who got the great teacher, and boy what a difference did it make.  We didn't actually go over all that much new material (although we did review command forms so now I can tell David what to do which is of course enjoyable).  But we talked and talked about everything and anything.  For example, she could not get enough of the fact that I do not like clowns, which came up when I learned the phrase "creeps me out".  In fact she thought that was the funniest thing ever.  But she was so nice I had to forgive her, even though it was against my better judgement.

We met another couple at school from Hawaii, who are moseying down to Costa Rica and are thinking about moving there for a while (he is a boat captain and thinks he can get work pretty easily there).  This is very dangerous thinking for me to be around, but Costa Rica is still such a distant point in my future I only spent a little bit of time thinking about getting a job at a hospital and moving there.  Now if I run into them again IN Costa Rica, then I´m in trouble.  :)

12pm - 1:30pm  Lunch
Like I said, there are no shortages of restaurants here, and we've been sampling many of them.  It feels a little guilty, because we are eating a lot of American fare, hamburgers and pasta such, rather than the local food like we were doing in Mexico.  But when you can get a plate of beef medalions in red sauce with rice and grilled vegetables for less than $5, it is hard to turn down.  So we haven't.  Yesterday we went to a middle eastern restaurant where we sat on the floor on grass mats and pillows.  There was even a hammock to lounge in while we waited for the food to arrive.  Yeah, we are really "roughing it" here in Guatemala.

1:30pm - 2:30pm  Nap
I've taken a siesta every day we've been here.  Sometimes 20 minutes, sometimes a full hour.  A guy could get used to this.

2:30 - 7pm  Homework
Unfortunately learning a language requires a lot of homework.  The funny thing is, when you want to learn what you are learning, homework isn't a bad thing.  David especially is making huge strides, and we are hoping to get to the point where we can have full converstations in spanish very soon.

7pm - 8:30pm  Dinner
We'd head back to the strip for dinner.  Did we want to go to the place with the upstairs dining room that overlooked the street, or the one with the balcony out over the lake?  Or maybe the little hole in the wall place that was showing a movie and had real fudge brownies with ice-cream for dessert?  This was easily the toughest decision we had to make all day.

8:30-10pm  Lounge
If we watched a movie we might get home later, but we had the penthouse room at our hostel, so right out our front door was a balcony where we could sit and watch the stars and the lights from the other lake towns twinkling away across the lake.  We´d sit here in the afternoons too and birdwatch.

If you feel moved enough by our plight, feel free to contact me for information on where you can make monetary donations to help improve our desperate conditions.