We can't seem to ditch this place. Not that we would want to, since Xela has everything we're looking for. Except for vacant apartments that aren't made of particle board and plastic bags. We arrived yesterday, from the Mountain School, and after meeting up with Ryan (an amazingly smooth procedure- he emailed where he was staying, we emailed him a time to meet, and then we stuck to the plan. Harder than if we had cellphones and cars, I guess, but much easier than smoke signals or pony express), we searched out our favorite watering hole(s). Fun having a "favorite" anything in a city 10,000 miles and two international borders away from home. Today we've been looking around for more of a permanent place to stay here, with no good luck so far. Yoga House and Sabor de India are full, as are the other gringo haunts. However, we have run in to about a jillion acquaintences and friends, on the streets, everywhere, including a group of Kansan catholic college girls who miraculously found themselves at the Mountain School this past week. Just for some background, this is a school founded in an area formerly dominated by Marxist guerrillas and currently dominated by people either slowly starving to death working in miserable conditions for slave wages on plantations owned by the rich, or barely not starving to death by organizing themselves into various cooperatives and communes. Everybody remembers scores of people from their towns or families that were disappeared during the civil war for being accused of supporting the guerrillas, or simply for walking home from work too late at night. In short, a school in an area of fairly progressive political leanings. In roll the Kansans, with their huge wheeled suitcases full of fancy clothes and grooming products. Overhearing one conversation about local news, they mentioned "we don't think about politics back home, why should we think about it here?" They were most captivated by the beauty pageants reported in the papers (every Sunday paper is full of models in bikinis- this way the evangelical men can get some girly pictures in the guise of "news"). They complained about everything, all week, including the food they were served and the spanish instruction they were receiving, and left early Friday before graduation. They weren't horrible people, just exhausting, and now they have positioned themselves at strategic intervals all over Xela so that it is impossible to walk more than a block without running in to one of them and having a strained conversation through a fake smile. That is the general trend here- it is becoming more and more gringofied the closer we get to the summer season.
The Mountain School finished up awesomely. We had a few more adventurous pickop rides to Colomba, through the most incredible mountain scenery, including one ride in the rain where Nana and I were hanging on to the outside bar in back, standing on the slippery round back bumper, me feetsies clad in my new Brasil flip flops (I had to throw the last pair out after buying them at the Chichi market- awesome leather flops with colorful patterns woven into the footstrap- after we discovered in Antigua, with the sisters, that none of us had stepped in shit, it was just the way my flops always smelled), as the truck caromed down the winding, pot-holey mountain road. The bed of the truck was filled with campesinos coming home from work, standing like sardines huddled under the tarp that was keeping off the pouring rain. By the end my hands had clawed up around the bar so that one of the guys had to pry my fingers off for me. Mariam also had a watery adventure when they lost the path on the way back from a remote waterfall they had hiked to. Luckily Jorge had his machete and blazed a new trail down the steep mountainside until they popped out on the highway.
We're now planning our visa-renewal trip to Mexico, after which I think we're going to meet Ryan in Coban, check out the cool stepped river their before heading to Tikal, and maybe returning by way of Lago Izabal (we missed the north side of this lake on our last trip east). There is also a six day trek from Nabaj to Todos Santos in a few weeks, and Todos Santos might be a nice place to hang out for our last few weeks doing some last minute volunteering.
Miss you all. I'm admitted to UC Davis, which really just confuses things, so we'll have to find out a few more specifics before we know where we'll be living when we get back.