Feliz Cuatro de Julio

Our fourth of July dawned clear and cold in the double bed that Cat and I shared in San Jorge La Laguna. We were with the Ramos family again, spending time with them as they went about their daily business. The boys Pedrito and Danny are both a little bigger than last year but essentially unchanged, while Juan (dad) has been out of work since April and doing repairs around the house to keep himself occupied. Carmela still has her business exporting jewelry to the United States, with her benefactor Sharon. Maria, their youngest daughter, was crowned Queen of San Jorge in a ceremony where she was quizzed on how she would improve the lives of Mayan women and end domestic violence. She spoke passionately about her thoughts on this subject while teaching Cat to make Tortillas on the ultra efficient stove the family uses.

In true USA fashion we spent the fourth of July at the beach, sunning on a broken off dock and swimming in the murky shallows. It was a beautiful but hot day, and Cat and I forgot our sunscreen (my bad!) and had to walk back up the hill, probably about a half mile up a 30 degree slope, then return down. We had a siesta while the family cooked, guacamole, rice with vegetables for Cat, and carne asada for the rest of us !!!

We said our goodbyes, to the family, to the kids, to the town, and walked back up to the house where we packed our things and hitched a ride into Pana on a Camioneta.

The evening of the fourth we spent in San Marcos, arriving via a private Lancha as the sun set over the volcanoes, bringing to an end a beautiful day. San Marcos is a new age heaven (or whatever), with pyramids for meditation, veggie palaces for food and lots of expensive opportunities to spend spend spend. We went to a ¨budget¨place called the enchanted garden, and it was excellent, with hot hot shower and a rainforest in the yard. For dinner we followed the sounds of spirit songs through the darkness, under heavy palm fronds, to an italian place where we listened to the ¨healing¨music of a woman and her harp. A nice dinner of pasta by a real italian guy, plus a bottle of red wine, summed up our day. We passed out at home, unable to even brush our teeth before bed.

This morning dawned gray and cool, but the clouds quickly burned off as we went to breakfast at a place made of recycled bottles and bedecked with tropical plants. Cat´s granola yogurt and fruit towered over my moroccan eggs with bacon (!) and we sat under the flowering butterfly bushes while tropical hummingbirds buzzed around our ears.

Off via lancha once again to San Pedro la laguna, where we will be catching a direct bus to Xela, from whence we go to the school in the mountains out of Colomba, Guatemala, to spend two weeks learning Spanish. Cat´s goals are to learn different tenses, increase her fluency and processing, mine are to learn the past tense and future tense and increase my verb bank...

So far so good! Que tenga buen dia!

Con abrazos!!!

Brian y Catarina