around the world in 180 days

            We are learning spanish poco a poco, which means bit by bit. This is my favorite spanish phrase because it almost always makes people smile, and, as two people have told me, it is a sort of philosophy of life. Everything in life is poco a poco, bit by bit, and it is a good way to approach tasks that might otherwise seem overwhelming: poco a poco.

             Today Ana had a big party with many of her family members. She paid for all the food and Anna and I went to the market (which was much smaller today) and picked up all the food. Ana´s sisters and nieces cooked all the food and everyone, a good chunk of a huge Guatemalan family, ate it. They have the best guacemole here, by far. I suppose it has something to do with the fresh, tree-ripened avacados.

            All of the food here is delicious. We eat traditional ethnic Mayan food with Ana´s family. There´s a lot of rice and beans and tortillas, which are smaller and thicker than the tortillas you´re probably thinking of, but everything is wonderful.

            I´m delighted at how welcoming Ana´s family is of us, two Americans who speak less Spanish between the two of us than Anita, Bartola´s 2 year old granddaughter.They think we´re crazy, I´m sure, and they probably make fun of us, but they´re generous and friendly and genuinely interested in us.

            Tomorrow we go to pick coffee with Ana. It should be a good time. We´re trying to decide if we want to go to Tikal, which is a huge site of Mayan ruins. It´s supposed to beautiful and the mission will set us up with a package deal tha includes lodging, airfare and a meal, but it´s $200 each. We´ve talked to people who have been there and they say it´s gigantic and beautiful and totally worth the price, but we´d sort of be blowing our budget on our first stop. Is this a precedent we want to set? Will we find an excuse to blow our budget everywhere we go? We want to make sure we get our full 6 months. I´m leaning toward just going, but there are a lot of other things to consider as well, like how Ana feels about it. I don´t think she´d care, but it´s tough to tell sometimes. Ana is fluent in english, but sometimes it can be hard to understand her, and this has nothing to do with the words she speaks or her accent. Oh well. These are good dilemmas, as far as that goes. If we could all have problems such as these, right?
 

Buenos Nochas!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 10:28 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.