A Lovely Weekend in Antigua

Friday night, as planned, Hannah and I cooked my mom's suggested recipe of camp-style ground beef-and-vegetables-over-rice.

'Twas delicious! :)

Saturday afternoon Hannah and I caught a ride with our landlord's son, Guicho, to Antigua, where we stayed the night. We stopped at the Spanish language school where our landlord's daughter, Ana, is the administrative director and where I will be starting classes next Monday. It's in the renovated building of an ancient convent, classes will be outside on a rooftop patio under a trellis of bougainvillea (I finally learned how to spell that!) with an amazing view of the surrounding colonial town and mountains.

Hannah and I rented a room for the night in the building that Ana rents a room in. The room we had actually happened to be the one that another field coordinator, Kristen, lived in for three months and just moved out of recently. The building is really beautiful and old (300 years or so?).


After we dropped off our stuff, we were released upon the town! Which was great. We don't get much wandering around time in Guatemala City, so it was really relaxing and fun to be able to explore a little on our own, with no responsibilities for the rest of the day. We went to Fernando's Kaffee, looked into some shops, then had a nice dinner at El Sabor del Tiempo, an Italian restaurant where Hannah ordered a Greek cheeseburger (whatever that means) and I ordered braised rabbit, which we enjoyed even when the electricity went out. What's better than a candlelit dinner? A surprise candlelit dinner!

After dinner we went back to our room and grabbed some rainjackets. We met up with Kristen and got to see her cute little apartment she rents. The three of us walked to Café No Sé, a really cool little place with lots of foreigners. We hung out there until late, met some other people living in Antigua, ate lots of free popcorn, and generally had a good time.

Sunday morning Hannah and I were awoken around 7:00 by the sound of not-so-distant marching bands. When we got up later and went outside, we found a parade consisting of half a dozen marching bands taking turns playing, stretching down several blocks of street. We narrowly missed getting impaled by a trombone as we walked past.

Our breakfast spot Sunday morning (a nice, slow, 10:00 AM sort of breakfast) was Café Rainbow, which might be my new favorite spot in Antigua. It's a restaurant, bar, and bookstore, with lots of live music and lectures and fun stuff like that. Very much a tourist-and-expat joint, mostly things in English, but we still got to speak Spanish to the waitress. I love Guatemalan típico ("typical") breakfasts (and I'm not allergic to them, generally) which consist of beans, rice, a couple of eggs, and some tortillas. Some places add plátanos, this place had a small salad, and some local white cheese (which I pawn off on someone else). Hannah got some sort of breakfasty sandwich. I'd love to go back for lunch or dinner sometime, maybe catch some live music.

After breakfast we wandered around some more, looked into more shops, braved the gauntlet that is every touristy local crafts market, and enjoyed the beautiful, if hot, day.

We got tacos for lunch at Tacontento. At some point we ended up in the main square and got interviewed by a Guatemalan woman taking a test for her English class. She was definitely a beginner, but it was fun and made us feel good about our Spanish skills.

So, we headed back to Guatemala City Sunday evening. We bought some more ground beef (actually, the package doesn't say "beef" on it anywhere, so we're really just assuming it's beef) since we didn't have much food left in the fridge, but we didn't even get into our rooms before we decided to try calling Pollo Campero ("Country Chicken") and ordering home delivery! I worked through the ordering process over the phone, even though it's hard for me to understand Spanish when it's not in person, and we were all set to get our dinner sent to us.

We realized shortly after we had ordered that we had no electricity and wouldn't have been able to cook anyway. We worried about our ground beef in our dinky little refrigerator and raced the sun to eat our dinner when it arrived less than half an hour later (by motorcycle!). Pollo Campero is delicious. Better by far than Pollo Brujo ("Wizard Chicken").

The rest of the evening we got around with flashlights. We entertained ourselves with podcasts and tried not to think about the unusually high numbers of dead cockroaches lying around outside and the three large spiders Hannah spotted crawling out of our kitchen ceiling.We didn't have electricity until later that night when we had just fallen asleep, when suddenly all of the lights turned on again at once and we had to get up and turn them all off.

This is our last week in Guatemala City! This Sunday Hannah's headed up to Xela and I'm headed back to Antigua to take Spanish classes for a month or two. We're both really excited and ready for this next chapter in our adventure!

Mold and Moving

This morning Hannah discovered much to her dismay (and mine) that she has been unwittingly cultivating a flaky white mold all over her fabric toiletries bag. The bag has been hanging from a nail (the same nail that occasionally holds bananas) against the wall right by our front door for a few weeks now. You'd think that the fresh air (well, smoggy city air) would keep the mold down right in that area, but no. Hannah took some bleach cleaner to the moldy bits this morning, we'll see if that keeps it under control.

We really are having a serious mold problem in our hostel rooms. The picture to the left is of our kitchen ceiling. All of the wood surfaces have little moldlets sprouting. I have always been allergic to mold, among other things, so when we're at our hostel I'm sick all the time, and only slightly less sick if I'm taking allergy meds (Loratadine/Claritin) every day. I'm having difficulty breathing, sneezing all the time, and sometimes my eyes are so itchy I feel like being overly dramatic about it all. Even Hannah, who has no history of any allergies at all, is experiencing some snuffliness and general allergy symptoms, which is crazy.

I really appreciate the inexpensive quality of our current living arrangements - this is the cheapest apartment I will ever live in. However, I also hope that it is the moldiest by far. These are the worst allergies I have ever experienced, and I can't escape them.

...Until next Sunday!

August 1st Hannah and I are both packing up and moving out to take Spanish lessons in other cities. Hannah is moving to Xela, and I am off to Antigua.

I'll be living with a host family, getting three meals a day (my food allergies are already all worked out with the family, I've been told) except on Sundays. Monday through Friday I'll walk down the street to Academia Colonial, where I will take four hours of one-on-one immersion Spanish language classes. That's 20 hours a week.

I'm really looking forward to taking the classes, because I know that my Spanish skillz will improve a lot with some structured lessons. I plan on taking the classes for about 7 weeks, but that time frame is pretty flexible. Hannah and I will be far apart for up to two months, which will be really weird. And I won't be able to cook my own meals, which might be problematic, but hopefully it'll work out. The administrative director of the Academia Colonial happens to be the daughter of Hannah and I's current landlord, and that whole family is incredibly nice and helpful, so I'm pretty confident.

Hannah and I just returned from grocery shopping. Tonight's dinner will consist of ground beef, onion, green beans, tomatoes, corn, and whatever spices we've bought in the last few weeks. I think we have garlic (fresh and powdered), oregano, cumin, and basil. We'll see how it turns out.

I won't be in the office until Monday, so I most likely won't be online until then. I'll post an update next week! See you later :)

Fun with Tortillas, Lentils, and Sausage

Yesterday afternoon Hannah and I's neighbor/hostel caretaker came over and taught us how to make tortillas from Maseca flour. As it turns out, you pretty much just mix the flour with water until it reaches a pretty basic baking consistency, then roll some into a ball, smack it into a flat round pancake, and put it onto a hot surface such as our lovely frying pan. Then you watch it and flip it when it starts to burn and it's done when it's not squishy anymore. Voila! Tortillas. We'll be old pros by next week.
Also yesterday I wrote down two different recipes for lentil soup. I sort of combined them to make a simplified lentil & sausage soup over rice that turned out delicious. Also fantastic, we bought the necessary ingredients for the equivalent of less than sixteen US dollars. We're having it for lunch and dinner today, and probably lunch again tomorrow because I made so much.
Thanks to my sister for the idea of cooking lentils and sausage! The only tough thing about it was that the sausage we've been buying is really hard to tell when it's cooked through, because it remains pink even when cooked. It's either pink and raw, a subtly different pink and cooked, or burnt. Any tips?

Holy Frijole, Batman!

Sorry the pictures are all in silly places on this post, I'm too lazy to fix their positions. Enjoy anyway!

Hannah and I have been up in Coban all week, and we just got back into Guate City yesterday morning after spending the night in Antigua with our group of Michiganders (or Michiganians, no one is sure).

We left last Saturday with an experienced field coordinator, Collin, and while he left on Wednesday morning (and normally, we would have as well) we stayed on with the group right up until yesterday morning when we gave approximately 25 goodbye hugs outside the airport.

The week (well, about ten days) was definitely an adventure, filled with fun and laughs as well as some more stressful moments. I should have taken notes (Hannah did, I think, so you should check out her blog), because I know I've forgotten some events, but here's a not-necessarily-chronologically correct record of what we were up to in Coban, Guatemala:

Saturday morning (The 11th, I believe) Hannah and I met Collin at the airport and we waited a couple of hours for our incoming build team to arrive from Michigan. 26 in total, Hannah and I admit to getting pretty attached to them over the next week or so.

The group arrived right as the three of us were scarfing down a Pollo Campero lunch (It's a good thing the one item on the menu I can eat happens to be delicious) and then we all left for Antigua, which is a little more than an hour away from the city depending on traffic.

We reached our hotel for the night, Hermano Pedro, which is a very lovely hotel. I dig the open air halls and stuff. Lots of plant matter, makes me happy.

We wandered around a little bit then, and Hannah and I ended up at Fernando's, a very nice little cafe. I got an all-fruit smoothie of pineapple and, uh... strawberry, I think, and Hannah accidentally ordered an espresso, which surprised her a little when they brought it to her. Now she knows what an espresso is.

We also hunted down the Cashew Man, who seems to be always wandering around Antigua peddling various nuts, and if you mosey around town long enough you're bound to come across him. It's 20 Quetzales for a small baggie of yummy cashews, which comes out to about $2.60. Worth it! We LOVE cashews. omg.

For dinner that night all 29 of us walked down the street to Tacotento, a nice chain restaurant with good but sort of small food. The menu is all in what I'm sure would be a cute themed dialect (reminds me of Panamanian Spanish) if we were totally fluent but as is just made ordering sort of confusing. But we got through it, had some good tacos, the group had a lot of fun despite the frustration of trying to figure out who ordered what as it came out of the kitchen.

Sunday morning we had a buffet breakfast at Hermano Pedro's and then climbed into one coaster and one micro bus for the long drive to Coban. Something like 7 hours, I'm not sure. It went pretty well, though, the scenery was interesting and I had my iPod whenever I needed some change of noise. Gypsy orchestras and Gnarls Barkley make everything more epic.

Sunday was the day of the World Cup, and while I am not really into it, Hannah is and so were several other people in the group. We stopped for lunch around the beginning of the game. I should have ordered Kak Ik, but instead I just ordered rice and beans. A lot of the group had trouble getting what they wanted for lunch, which turned out to be a common theme for the week. We had to leave before the game ended and so we listened to the unintelligible radio broadcast instead. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL...

As we approached Coban, I started seeing tree ferns! I love tree ferns! No one else here seems to share my enthusiasm for them. Oh well.
By the way, I'm still looking for a good guide book to Guatemalan plants. How can I be plant girl if all the plants I know are thousands of miles away?

We reached Coban that afternoon and booked into our hotel, Alcazar de Doña Victoria, which was historically a convent and is now a hotel filled with mildly creepy wooden statues of saints. Hannah and I couldn't figure out how to work the lock on our upstairs room, so we climbed through the knee-height window a few times.

That night Hannah and I gave a joint general work site safety speech to the group at dinner and only missed a few minor points. I don't remember if the welcome ceremony was that day or not... it must have been. Anyway, at some point two of the three Guatemalan families receiving our help on their Habitat houses as well as two of the masons came and joined us and everyone was introduced and it was only a little awkward. One of the families was missing due to illness in the family and we would not be building for them, another family had been found and we would be helping them instead.

Sorry, my writing skills are going downhill. This is a lot to write. Anyway...

The first work day, Monday, I took one of the three buses to a site with a third of the Michigan team. Collin and Hannah each went to the other two sites. I didn't take any pictures that day.

Did I mention that Sunday night I woke up in the middle of the night very sick? Sickest I've ever been that I can remember. Ack.

I wasn't feeling very well on Monday, and the next day I felt terrible again and stayed at the hotel. Hannah went with my group since the group she had been with on Monday had one fluent Spanish speaker and a few others with good skills, and we figured they could take care of themselves.

I snoozed and felt sorry for myself and called my mom and then when I was feeling a bit better around eleven I walked down the road to a local little medical clinic. I waited for a while as there were other patients in front of me and then saw the doctor for a consultation (costing as much as a small bag of cashews - 20 Quetzales) and he asked me lots of questions and listened to my stomach with a stethoscope and stuff and then wrote me two prescriptions: one for Perenterol, which is like yogurt in a pill, and another for an antibiotic starting with T or X or something that I never filled out. I did fill out the Perenterol that evening at Farmacia Batres off the main square and got 6 pills to take every 12 hours and that seems to have done the trick.

All of the Lutherans were very concerned about me that evening, when most of us (I think some other peeps were feeling a little green around the gills at that point, too) trooped down to a little indoor-ish soccer field. More than half the build team plus two Guatemalan masons played a great game. The rest of us, including myself, watched from above and took pictures until it got too dark (Hannah has the pics I took with her camera).

The next day I went back to work on a different site than the one I had gone to; Collin left Wednesday morning, which is normal for the field coordinators, but Hannah and I opted to remain for the full experience.


I went to a site in Carcha, about 15 minutes away from Coban. The father of the family there has relatives in Chicago and visits them and took English in school and so spoke English about as well as I speak Spanish. The masons at that site all spoke a Mayan dialect with some Spanish words thrown in.

That night the team had reservations at a nice restaurant in Coban called La Casa D'Acuna. It was lots of fun and really good food; I had a sort of a cooked salad with chicken and macadamia nuts and olives and onions on it. A lot of the group ordered pizza.

The next day we left the work sites an hour early to take a tour of a coffee plantation a block down from where we'd had dinner the night before. It was pouring rain and we were all still in our dirty work clothes. The plantation is gorgeous, hard to believe that the town is right on the other side of the wall because suddenly you can see for miles and it's very green, especially with the rain. I tasted some ripe coffee beans off the bush - sweet, fibrous.

Friday was the last work day. By then I had very tan arms and very sore muscles. We ate dinner again that night at La Casa D'Acuna because the group had enjoyed it so much and the hotel meals were getting a little boring.

It was pouring rain again on the way there and I, lacking any sort of protection from the rain, arrived soaked through.

I had another salad. Twas delicious, and several people commented on my bravery. I figured the restaurant was nice enough to get away with eating the uncooked salad, and it was.

On the way back it wasn't raining so hard and a group member had lent me a poncho, but the road was flooded in one place and we had to go around the block and then walk along the narrow, unreliable sidewalk for a while and hop across a wooden plank to get back onto the road when we could.

When we got back to the hotel, I enjoyed the tortilla I had sequestered in my sweater. I have taken to hoarding food, particularly tortillas, in case there's nothing I can eat at my next meal. So far I have had food every time I didn't really need it and had nothing when the hotel forgot to make me lunch on Saturday. Luckily I was with a group of generous people.

Saturday we went to Semuc Champey. The road there was an hour and a half of tight turns and half an hour of very rough unpaved road, also with tight turns. Our tour started, unexpectedly, at some caves. The caves were beautiful and epic but also frighteningly dangerous and very hot. The group contained 100% good sports, though, and we made it back alive.


We had lunch at Semuc at the trailhead, and Hannah and I ended up purchasing some ill-fitting swimsuits because we decided we really wanted to go swimming.

This is a spider devouring a fly:


Part of the group took the hike up to the lookout, where they saw a fantastic view and a monkey. Hannah and I and the rest of the group walked down to the river, which consists in that area of a huge rapids going into an underground tunnel (Like the Rogue River in Oregon, but way bigger) and a series of something like 30 pools going overland downhill, terraced and perfect for swimming and jumping. It was a lot of fun, and definitely worth it after all.


We drove back, even more exhausted, that evening, had dinner, and slept hard, though our laundry was still missing. Did I mention that? The hotel lost our laundry. Mine turned up the morning we were leaving, and Hannah's was found a day later and will be returned to her via another Habitat group staying in the same place in Coban.

Sunday morning we left Coban, drove hours and hours, got a flat tire on the way there, got back to Antigua, wandered around town a little, shopped, and then went to Santo Domingo for dinner.

Santo Domingo is the nicest restaurant I have ever been to in my life. Holy cow. This is an appetizer:

I had the Guatemalan Dish, which was three pieces of delicious beef, some rice and beans and platanos. I ate all of it before I realized I should have taken a picture.

Yesterday morning Hannah and I rode in one of the two buses taking the group back to the airport in Guatemala City. We said goodbye to all of them there at the drop-off point. We made sure to get everyone's facebook info and such. We miss them already! :( It's impossible to spend ten days with a group of such great individuals without growing a little attached.

We then went back to our hostel and gathered up all of our dirty laundry, which fit into a duffel bag and two backpacks. Our landlord's wife picked us up and took us to their nice apartment, where we laid around and watched TV and used the internet for several hours while waiting for our clothes to be done. They took us back to the hostel afterwards, and we walked to Paiz (grocery store) to buy food. We tried to get a taxi to pick us up when we were done shopping, but the line was busy and even a woman selling candy at a little kiosk who happened to be related to a taxi driver couldn't get us a taxi, so we walked all the way back with our heavy groceries. I guess it's really only about ten blocks or so, but it's stressful to walk in this city.

Last night we cooked up my speech & debate coach's recipe, Rice and Beans for Lazies, which turned out delicious and we're having it again for dinner tonight. Yay for leftovers!

Our landlord is letting us borrow his little DVD player and some DVDs, so if we can get that hooked up we should have enough evening entertainment to last us the rest of the week.

Now Hannah and I are in the Habitat office, and I have been working on this blog post for hours. I think I'm going to have lunch now (we're going down the street to get Pupusas) and then I'll come back and add the photos. Phew.


Here you go! <3

Mysterious Fruit and Panajachel with Irish People

*UPDATE: This fruit seems to be a passion fruit!


Above is the mysterious fruit I purchased in the supermarket the other day (the same place and day I got those freak bananas!) I thought it was labeled "Asian pear" but Hannah tells me I was reading the wrong label, so while we knew it was definitely not an Asian pear anyway, it also was not mislabeled, I'm just a dork. Anyway, if any of you know what it is, do tell! It was yummy.


Right here is some proof that Hannah is capable of cooking! She's been helping me out with cooking meals and I abandoned her for the past few days while I was in Panajachel with a team and she was stuck in the city and had to fend for herself. Sounds like she did pretty well, though, and it's not like we're cooking anything fancy but, you know, it's food.

So, on Monday peeps in the office told me I was leaving the next day with a field coordinator to meet a build team from Ireland who were supposed to have come in a day or two earlier but had gotten stuck in Spain and then had to spend the night on the marble floors of the Mexico City Airport.
We picked them up in the morning on Tuesday and they were all in good humor, excited to be in Guatemala, ready to head out. They use words like "thanky" and "bloke", and my personal favorite, "wee".
Their accents can be pretty hard to understand, at first it was harder to understand than Spanish. One man had a particularly strong accent (he also speaks Gaelic, apparently, but I think that's unrelated). Anyway, I had a great time with them and in Panajachel. Panajachel is a big tourist spot as it's right by a lake.
Here are some pictures from the work site I was at:



Here is a familiar plant I found at the work site in Panajachel: Plantain! Not the banana kind, the... other kind. I hadn't seen it elsewhere in Guatemala, but here is a somewhat trampled specimen.

And here is a picture taken from the lakefront in Panajachel:

Mutant Banana from Planet Guate

Just purchased from the supermarket for my lunch: Siamese Twin Bananas!

Some Pics from the weekend

Here is our dinner being cooked:

We just bought a new pan today at the grocery store to replace the crusty scratched up dented one we were using.
Here is our completed first home-cooked meal:

That's canned mixed vegetables, chicken, potatoes, and an orange.

To Rabinal and back again (very long post)

*UPDATE: Did I mention that Hannah and I had a run-in with a tarantula in our room in Antigua? Yeah. Hannah hyperventilated while I caught it in a Pollo Campero paper drink cup and took it outside. We were both extremely jumpy for the next several hours.


Hello again! It's been several days since I had access to my laptop since I left it in the Habitat office for safekeeping while Hannah and I were off on our first build team excursions. Let's see what I can remember from the past week:

We spent Friday in the office getting orientations on Habitat work.

We met some other Habitat workers.

My allergies were really bad, but they're getting better as I get better at finding food to eat. The thing is, traditional Guatemalan food (i.e., beans, rice, corn tortillas, meat, fruit, the occasional vegetable) is almost entirely edible to me, but a lot of places serve wheat/milk/sugar-filled American food. But I am getting better, I'll be fine. I have a lot of supermarkets to choose from.

On Saturday Hannah and I were dropped off at the Oakland Mall, which is ENORMOUS. We wandered around and glanced into high-end American and European stores. Everything is high-tech and shiny. Overwhelmed, we had lunch in the food court and watched a World Cup match.

At 7:00 pm Saturday evening Luis dropped us off at the airport to meet up with Lauren and Kristen, two Habitat field coordinators, and wait with them for several flights to come in containing Habitat build teams from the US. Hannah and I waved Habitat signs as our groups trickled out of the airport, dazed and confused.

Hannah went with Kristen and I went with Lauren and their respective build teams.
My group went to Hotel Aeropuerto to spend the night. The next morning we took two private buses (my group contained 17 people, plus Lauren and I) approximately four hours away through valleys and over mountains on windy roads to the town of Rabinal.

My build team happened to be from Seattle, with a few people from Portland, which was great. I even got to chat with some of them about this year's Northwest Folklife Festival! My team was also led by an older woman with a lot of Habitat experience. She used to be a clown, apparently, so today (they are still in Rabinal) I am missing a carnival put on my her and the other team members. The team is varied in age, a few 14-16-year-olds, some middle-aged parents, and some grandparents. I love hearing all their stories, they are a great team and I plan on attending the goodbye dinner in Antigua this Saturday.

My beloved G9 camera seems to be shorting out somewhere between the lense and the screen, so I can see photos after they're taken in the preview, but I can't see what I'm pointing the camera at or how focused it is or anything :( I do have a viewfinder, but it's not very accurate. Help!

The road to Rabinal was ridiculously scenic, mountains and deserts and forests (Pine trees! Pine trees!) with lots of brahma cows, horses, mules, donkeys, black-headed vultures, and dogs, all in varying degrees of health.


Lauren and I stayed with the team in Rabinal from Saturday until Wednesday morning.
We all had Breakfasts at 6:00 am and Dinner around 6 or 7 pm every day at a restaurant called Angello's, and the restaurant spoiled us by bringing us hot lunches (chicken, rice and beans, tortillas, mangoes, and limeade) to the work sites every day (Apparently most build teams usually receive only crappy white-bread-and-some-jelly sandwiches for lunch) by motorcycle.

On Saturday evening at dinner we all gathered together for a welcoming ceremony with the team and the two families were were going to be building with/for. It was a little awkward but we had lots of eager Spanish-speakers and semi-speakers among us so apparently it went much better than it often does.

I went to both work sites, one on Monday and the other on Tuesday.

The first work site was about a kilometer away, so we walked. It was way out at the edge of town, and all day we were avoiding being run over by brahma bull-drawn wooden carts (EPIC!!!) hauling sand from the river into town to be sold. There were also a lot of little floppy-eared gray pigs, mules also drawing carts containing people and materials (Sometimes reeds, sometimes firewood), horses carrying people around town, and dogs.

I have divided dogs here into several categories: recognizable breed, mostly recognizable mixed breed, totally unrecognizable, Yellow Dog. I like the Yellow Dogs.
Some dogs here are pets, many are guard dogs, and way too many are starving, beaten strays. Not many cats.

People on bicycles and motorcycles also passed by a lot (we were on an unpaved, muddy road) as well as a few tuk-tuks, little three-wheeled golf cart things used as taxis.

At this work site I also saw a small tarantula (caught in a jar by some kids) and a rattle snake (being caught in a sack by adults, to be killed and used as medicine).

The second work site I went to on Tuesday was slightly less than a kilometer away in the opposite direction. Tuesday was much hotter than the day before, and I pinkified slightly but today it has just turned to tan.
There were a bunch of ducks at this site, all busy eating fallen mangoes and stalking flies like cats... except they're ducks, so it was hilarious.
There were also a lot of really crazy bugs on the trees at this site, I saw two very large well-camouflaged spiders that hardly moved all day and dozens of black-and-yellow ladybug-like beetles in various stages of their life cycle.

Some team members took to calling me Plant Girl. It's that obvious, apparently. Unfortunately, I know little to nothing about Guatemalan plants, so while I speculate much I have very little actual information and if anybody has a good book to recommend to me, please do so!


I worked hard at both sites, if I do say so myself, and I got really good at whipping out 20-foot-long rebar towers. I have the blisters to prove it.


Wednesday was Lauren's 25th birthday and the evening before our team surprised her with cake and ice cream, and in the morning, fireworks.
Last night Hannah and I stayed at another Habitat worker's very nice place in Antigua, and we had dinner and then went to a bar with a really great Cuban salsa band.


Right now, I'm back in the Habitat office in Guatemala City, utilizing the internet while I have nothing in particular to do.