Day 2: Yo Fish be Stanky

For the rest of my blog I will not be doing time increments because, well, people here don’t seem to really care about tracking time (unlike the previous ancient inhabitants) and I must say it is pleasant. 

My first night in my home was amazing! I slept soooooo good and woke up to the sounds of, you guessed it, a turkey! It seriously gobbles like every 2 minutes but it is oddly comforting and funny…I have no idea where it is though. After waking up at 6am and rushing to the top of the roof to take pics of the morning I had breakfast and then me and Ozvaldo set out to find Casa Herrera. We got lost… and whoever said the grid layout of a city is “easy” must have meant “a maze”. So after unintentionally getting acquainted with the city we finally found the Casa. Casa Herrera is in a renovated 17th century Spanish colonial house and includes a cobblestone court yard and is what we call “bad ass”. After 2 hours of orientation we exchange our dollars for Quetzals, the national currency of Guatemala, I handed them $200 and received 1,540Q… Twas a lot of cash and henceforth I will call carrying lots of cash “quetzallin”.

So now that I was quetzallin we headed back to our home stays for lunch. After about 1 hour of decoding and eating delicious food, we took off to meet our private Spanish teachers. After a long walk to our Spanish school ,PLFM, I was greeted by my hilarious Spanish teacher, Carmen. She took me on a lengthy tour of the city and through the market. Now this market was HUGE. Anything you could think of at a price you could bargain for! But then we got to the meat section. Oh boy, now this was muy interesante. Raw meat was just hanging around out in the open, no refrigeration or anything! Now I know we are pampered in the states but this was still a little bit of a shocker. Well from afar I smelt a smelly smell. A familiar smell. The smell of fish. Now I love fishing and I have dealt with a lot of fish in my lifetime so when I say raw fish shouldn’t smell like that I mean it is STANKY! But I digress, people like different taste and I respect that. 

Heading back to the school, I said goodbye and then back home. We were greeted with a traditional Guatemalan dinner of eggs, fresh cheese, and bananas in cream. Sooooooo good! After dinner my Casa group decided to go out to an Irish pub called “Reilly’s”. Yeah, an Irish pub in Central America…weird is an understatement. It was trivia night at the pub and apparently the combination of trivia and random bar equates to a bar full of nothing but gringos. I felt like I was back at the states! After a few drinks we toasted to the start of our journey and ,shortly after, headed back to our homes and passed out.