¡Hola todas!

I am going to warn you now that I am not really going to be concerned with my spelling or grammer. The keyboards are not only slightly different, but they aren´t always what they say they are. The other day I couldn´t find the question mark for the longest time and finally I found it when I pressed the parenthesis button!



Anyway, the trip to Guatemala went well. There were about seven of us on my first flight and about 15 of us on the second flight. Our director picked us up in the airport in a big bus. The ride to Quetzaltenango (my city) was about 5 hours of winding roads through the mountains as the sun was setting ´Que bonita.´ When we got there my family picked me out right away because our pictures were on the wall in the school. My picture was when I was eating all the goodies at Theresa´s wedding... What a good first impression, eh?

I have a very nice family, I have a mom and a sister. My sister is my age and is very nice. She also has a boyfriend that is around quite a bit, and let me tell you, PDA is not a problem here! We have a pet chiuahua named bonbon who is very obnoxious but will sometimes be nice and sit on my lap. Our house is nice, my room is on the second floor and is plenty spacious. I am one of the few people who have hot water in their showers, I only have to light a pilot heater before I shower. I also live directly accross the road from the school, and that means I get to sleep in!

It is fairly cold during the morning and night, but is completely manageable (it is definately not
-30 like you guys!). The natives complain about it a lot more than we do. My school is nice, I have class outside in the courtyard. I sit at a table with my professor, Ingrid. I will have her for 3 weeks and then we will change. She is a good teacher, but she is pretty strict. That´s alright, it will whip me into shape! When I am spoken to I can understand basically everything, my problem is when others are speaking to each other they talk way too fast for me to comprehend. We have class 5 hours a day and we get a half hour break. During the break we go accross the street and get chocolate covered frozen bananas, pineapple, or strawberries for 2Q. (that´s less than a quarter). I get quite a bit of homework. Our directer had a conference with all of the teachers and basically told them that they need to assign us more homework than usual. All together I haven´t had any problems (knock on wood) everything has gone smoothly.

The other day a large group of us got together and climbed ´la muela´ it was a decent sized mountain. It was so pretty! We were way up above the clouds and towards the top it was more like rock climbing. I was very content that day! Don´t worry, I got some good pictures too.

Another day we went to las fuentes (fountains) georginas. They are natural hot springs within the mountains, it was very beautiful and fun. The other night we got a salsa dancing lesson, I only stayed for a little bit because I had a lot of homework to do. Other than that, I´ve just been exploring the city and adjusting to everything.


I hope all is well in Minnesota, stay warm!

1-8-09

Hasta luego,
Angela