cantaba cantabas cantaba

Maybe it would be better for my spanish if I stopped reading or writing in english, thinking in english whenever possible for the rest of the month.
This blog would then suck indefinitely and I would feel ridiculously dumb. Obviously it's possible to know two languages at once, but which one do you dream in? Do they come together when you're sleeping and make a beautiful bilingual baby?
I woke up with the worst throat malady of my life and it dissipated in half an hour tops. Central America is full of wonders. I was thinking about it, and I realized I know pretty much nothing about South America at all. At all at all.
We boated to the adjacent panajachel in what could be described as the perfect opposite to a booze cruise. More like a boat being smuggled from Cuba, and then it was raining (which it actually doesn't sometimes in the morning) and the waves were punching the boat every few seconds in it's boaty face. How many wave punches can one smuggleboat take?
Pana is mostly made of bracelets, and those headband things people with dreds wear.
And so, perpetually damp, with awful hair, we distributed medical supplies to the local hospital and had killer chiles rellenos for dinner.
Instead of picking out bracelets for everyone specifically, I'm just going to buy like 10 different ones that I see along my travels and people with access to my arms can choose one they like.
I found one of those bracelets that has little wooden tiles with pictures of catholic saints, but one of the pictures is actually one I used to have in my room with an angel taking care of two children as they cross this absurdly difficult terrain of a broken bridge with nails and missing planks in a thunderstorm and foxes everywhere and their mother is dead and one of them has no teeth and they don't have toothbrushes or shoes or hands.
So, happy fourth. If you are my mother, please feed my turtles. I forgot to ask you to do that before I left.
My best to everyone at home, take care of yourselves and write me if you can.
kele

Pues, todo es bueno

Oh man. I wish every last one of you were here with me. There is just too much natural beauty for me to take in alone. Even my camera is like "Nooooooo. It's way too green here for that."
On the whole, I am well-fed, ill-prepared, and taking shots at mother nature.
My favorite part of all of this is when I get a conversation going that's so easy that I breeze through it like cotton candy. Oh como estas? muy bien, muy bien. Granted, that does not happen very often.
Being at this place we're staying at in the nighttime hours is exceptionally like being at a socialites party, only people have much cooler stories to tell, and they help you translate pablo neruda whilst in the middle of a roaring (gnarling?) poker game.
I love this Pablo Neruda book even when (sometimes because) I can't understand it all.
But seriously guys. Namma is having hip surgery. Whether you know her or not, send her a well wishing. Gramma Namma, across from Danielle's house, provo utah, 846something.
I have aqquainted myself with a couple of girls helping me to find a better homestay location and one girl who runs an after school program I can help with. Que bueno suerte.

I have absolutely no concept of time here, since it's always cloudy and feels like three in the afternoon. Tropical birds are making these absolutely crazy noises that most birds wouldn't even dream of making in polite company.
Going with Nino (who is awesome and doesn't speak English) to the preschool in an hour.
Score.
I've been taking pictures, but. Failed monumentally in bringing along a cord for it, so you'll just have to google Guatemala to see what I mean. It was a gigantic loosery thing for me to do.
Managed to pick up some hair gel that is really just a non-adhesive, seemingly non-hair product gel. Miraculously have not needed to go to a hospital yet.
Hasta luego.

Estamos aqui

First post of first useful blog on the subject of my increasingly interesting travels to a strange and wonderful place.
I've just been walking to the pre-school, to find that the owner was working elsewhere at the moment and spying on what the children were eating in an unexpectedly covert nutritionalist way.
I've been talking with a man named TS who's been helping us understand a few oddities of the culture and particularly, what he's been trying to do in order to make sure the children at that particular school aren't being fed insanely cheap junk food.
He suggested that I could be an observer while the mothers of these children go to the markets to buy food, because then I could report back to the nutritionalist agenda.
It's sort of not what I came here for directly, but any way I can help is at least something to do.
I'm realizing now that I brought very little in terms of entertainment for my downtime besides 501 Spanish Verbs, the book, King Lear, and my iPod. We're staying at La Posada for now, enjoying some stone-wraught bungalo comfort. By tomorrow, I need to decide whether I want to stay in an apartment or with a host family for the rest of my time here. I'm on the fence, because a fortress of solitude would be nice, but it would be very isolationist of me, and have a lot of privacy, which, who needs?
The host family option would be wonderful for my Spanish, and the possibility of my getting sick from lake water contamination seems the same unless I was super diligent in boiling my water for everything.
The humidity is awesome, I brought all the wrong clothes, and so far I've met at least two really great people, so all is well. I'll try to update this once every few days, or when something notable happens. I'd love to hear how everyone else is doing, so feel free to email me at corinthiandiosa@gmail.com.
See you all later,
kele