10 de Julio

Tomorrow will mark one week that we have been here in Guatemala. As I review the progress of our Spanish so far, I realize that we have gone from hardly speaking to each other to throwing down some pretty good Spanglish. The relatives would be proud. Time seems to pass fast and slow at the some time. When you’ve spent the entire day not recognizing a thing someone is saying to you, time passes rather slowly, however when you realize that you only have five week to figure it out, time passes rather quickly. Andrew and I studied at the lake side this morning. We were entertained every so often by children playing in the sand, bright colored lizards running about, and Baptists getting baptized. In between studies we also discussed plans to set ourselves up for fishing the lake. As of now, the plan is pretty simple. Since we are unable to find any stores that carry fishing material, we are going to offer a price that the little indigenous kids by lake cannot refuse and buy their materials off of them. Actually, since there is something unethical sounding about that, we’ve decided to make it plan B. Plan A is to have the little indigenous children tell or show (if we can’t understand anything they are saying) us where they purchase their materials from. One other exciting thing happened today. Well, exciting for us. This morning I told the owner of the hostel that we would like to stay another week and we were wondering if the room could be cleaned and the sheets changed, all in Spanish of course. So when we returned tonight, the place was spotless and smelled good again! There was also a complementary towel in the bathroom that wasn’t there before! Andrew and I are hoping that we’ll find a television next week.