Pretirement

Long time no posting, right? Last time I posted I was in Guatemala. I spent close to a month there and had lots of adventures. After a month of circling the country, I settled in Antigua for a few days to take some Spanish lessons and look for volunteer opportunities. Shadie, the guy in the black tshirt in the first photo, was doing the same. Now a lot of people asked why I was taking lessons when I could already get by. The simple answer, I guess, is I wanted to learn how to cuss better.

I ended up taking lessons with a nurse and single mother of three. In three days the only expressions she taught me were old sayings about how it’s bad to be friends with sinners. My favorite was the vaguely threatening, “If you walk among honey, something will hit you.” Shadie had better luck. His teacher taught him things like cerote and pajas (meaning “turd” and “bullshit”, respectively). After a chance encounter with one of his teacher’s friends, Shadie got invited up to a farm outside of town to hang out for the weekend.

We had big plans and six of us from the hotel were going up there to camp on the farm for the weekend, but in the end, all but Shadie and I thought better of it. Actually everyone else went out to the farm too and decided after seeing it that the whole thing was sketchy. But for toughing it out and being brave in the face of certain sketch, Shadie and I were rewarded with the little gem you see pictured above.

Luis Felipe and his friends own the farm. It’s not much. Mostly a shack and some open land, a couple of trees, one smart dog and one lazy dog. But when the sun went down and we got to drinking, Luis’ neighbor came by to see what all the commotion was. As you can probably guess, he stayed for a while.

holy crap we did so much diving! i found out that yellowfins are really beautiful, curious, brave, and confident fish. too bad for them they taste amazing. i saw a ray, a lobster, lots of pretty stuff, some dolphins, and SHARKS. they were nurse sharks. they were as big as me. they swam up to check us out but they didn’t want to be petted so i didn’t press the issue.

now i’m open water certified and i have a tshirt to prove it. belize is super expensive and has only american products. they don’t really sell produce. even fish was expensive on the island. how is fish expensive on a reef island. there’s a lot about belize that doesn’t make sense. but the beaches are out of this world beautiful and stewed chicken beans and rice is four bucks so there’s good and bad.

after my first shark decided not to eat me, i bought a necklace made of shark bones. that’s tempting fate a little bit, i know.

i went to a barber for the first time in like four years. getting your hair cut kicks ass. he gave me a great fade and edged my whole head with a razor blade.

conni and i left yesterday for guatemala. we’re in flores, a city on an island in the middle of a huge lake. it’s an hour from tikal, one of the big three mayan sites. the cool thing to do there is go with a tour service at 3:30am. they pick you up in a van, drive you to your site and take you up to sit on some pyramid’s steps to watch the sunrise. we have a ton of spooky pictures of old temples rising up out of jungle and mist. show ya later.

tired now. conni isn’t. that’s annoying. we got here at 10:30 last night, and the most helpful taxi driver ever took us to the only working ATM in the city, woke up a travel agent so we could book our morning trip to tikal, and found us what must be the best $6 hotel on the planet. today the hotel clerk, who moonlights as a travel agent, sold us our tickets to palenque. there are more ruins there and it’s supposed to be a great place to stay. so we’ll stay there a few days, then back to cancun for Spring Break Round Two! yeah! bye!