I’m still alive! Jokes about blogging abound in the MayaPedal living quarters (especially after a ’No One Cares About Your Blog’ t-shirt sighting in Monterrico) and I suspect increasingly that these posts are mostly for my immediate family, but here I am. Nonetheless. Listening to music on shitty headphones and surrounded by teenage boys playing weird internet games and searching for Semana Santa photos (?) while humming tunelessly. Behind me is Mateo (also blogging. Ha.) and Allison, a new arrival from the Pacific Northwest. There’s also a family here now– Steve and Diane, the parents, are remarkably chipper for having hauled three small boys (the youngest is 20 months) all the way to Guatemala so they can work on bikes. The other two new folks are Louisa, fresh from a year working at Entremundos in Xela, and Sarah, who’s been on the road for a while now but who fits right in (she sleeps with the rest of us in Bed City, the increasingly chaotic pile of mattresses in the main bedroom).
A lot has happened, and I won’t try to talk about it all. Last weekend Anneliese, Erin, Matthew and I went to Monterrico. We all drank Pepsi from glass bottles and swam in the unbelievably fierce waves, let the black sand grind in between our toes and got on the nerves of the 17-year-old British kids blitzed out at the beach on their gap year. Of course we didn’t call ahead for a hostel, of course everything was booked, but some unintentional reconnaisance found us the perfect secret digs– a free-standing second story palapa, still under construction but with four walls and a thatched roof and enough cross-beams for a someday porch that we could climb up without too much trouble. An anxious sleep with the sound of waves a few hundred yards away, and then a perfect morning– our own seaview hotel room, and it didn’t cost us a dime.
I’m learning a little working in the shop, but mostly it’s the friends I’ve made here that keep me for another day, and then another, and then one more. I was originally planning to leave on the 17th (two days ago), but obviously that didn’t happen. Now it looks like it’ll be the 28th, and then from Guate straight to San Cristobal, in Mexico. I’m bringing Anneliese with me. Because the party just doesn’t stop.
I’m halfway through this trip, now, although it doesn’t feel like it. Sometimes I catch myself thinking things like I don’t ever want to go back, or I’m not ready, or I don’t know if college is such a good idea after all when just living my life is so much fun. But I’ve gotta check myself, focus on the present, let things come as they will. I’ve got months before I have to be in classes again– September is aeons away, I’ve got the rest of this adventure, and then San Diego and Salt Lake City and home sweet Oberlin again, and then a whole summer of who knows what. This trip was the right decision, and I feel happier now than I have in a very long time.
Tonight we’ve invited Carlos and his family over for dinner, which when we add on all of us means we’re making dinner for 14. God only knows how we’ll manage it, but it’s likely to be totally insane (just like every other wonderful thing that’s happened on this trip). Vamos a ver.
Filed under: guatemala
