Food, Family, Friends, and Spanish Follies

Hope you enjoy the new pictures! I just finished eating dinner with my host family and Bron who is from Australia and my housemate until she leaves on Sunday. We ate popino, a traditional soup of Guatemala. The soup was outstanding and included potatoes, chicken, and another vegetable similar to a potato. All the food I have had has been wonderful and is varied. I ate the best orange and pineapples today-the fruit is fresh all the time here! Antigua is also world famous for its coffee and I guess I'll need to ease into the coffee routine. My family is the best and Bron and I talked William and Lolita into dancing the other night. It was fun to watch and then William brought out the wedding picture of Lolita and himself. I am understanding more and more of the conversation around the dinner table each night which is encouraging and we all laugh quite a bit! I have posted pictures of the volunteers that have started with me. Aviv and Maya are from Toronto, Susan is from Seattle, and John ( I call him Don Juan) is from the United Kingdom. There are all super interesting people and I will really enjoy my time with them. I will be travelling for six months with Aviv, Maya, and Susan and we will leave John in six weeks to our displeasure. Each of us attend Spanish class each day and each day consists of one on one instruction with our teacher. I continue to enjoy working with my teacher, Silvia. So far, only two major Spanish follies: Aviv, Maya, Susan, John, and I went to the market the other day and I actually told a man muchas tortoise, I meant to say muchas gracias (thank you very much)! I wondered why I said tortoise, who does that? Everyone just laughed. Then, I was trying to describe to Silvia how excited I am to work with the children in the school. As it turned out, I used a word to describe sexual excitement according to Silvia. This is not good coupled with working with kids but Silvia thought it was hilarious and I made sure I knew the correct word to use for excited :) Overall, I could not be happier right now and this weekend it is off to El Salvador to visit some friends or hiking an active volcano near by. I hope everyone is doing great and until next time...

P.S. The volcano pictured above is El Volcan de Fuego. It is active and you can see it emitting smoke in the picture during the day and night. The other pictures consist of us travelling to school, getting ready to go to the market (mercado) and pictures of cathedrals built by the Spanish.