The Beach!

I went to the beach with some other teachers from school and two babies! We had a great time. This was for our long weekend in February. Here are Shelly and her baby, Sienna, along with Anita catching some rays in the pool. I loved this part of the pool where you could just sit barely in the water on this ledge.

Our little bartender friend at the swim up bar!!!

Shelly and I with our yummy fruity drinks!

My favorite picture of Sienna, look what she can show her friends when she gets older of how she spent her baby years!!!

Sienna! I got to be a tia for the weekend!!!!

The Beach Resort

We had a long weekend in February, so I went to the beach with about 6 other teachers. We stayed at this really nice resort and didn't even leave while we were there. It was so beautiful, we had nice weather and we just relaxed, swam, laid out, and enjoyed the company. Here are some pictures of the place that we stayed. It is called Cayman Suites in Monterrico, Guatemala. I remembered my camera, my camera batter charger, and left my memory card in my computer. I had to get some pictures from my friend, so that's why I am posting these like 6 weeks late!! ha ha.

The pool literally led right up to the beach.

View of the volcanoes looking the other way

Black sand beaches of Monterrico

The pool with the swim up bar

Gallo, the national beer, seriously owns everything around this country!

Our room was in the building on the right with the sliding door. We literally walked right out to the pool.

Yes, I was sitting there grading papers!!! I'd much rather be doing it there than in my apartment! :)

The pool

Our suite....we had a full kitchen and everything

The living room, with a single bed and a pull out sofa

GO HOME!!!

Tuesdays are my easy days at school. I tend to get a lot done: lesson plans, organizing, cleaning my desk, photocopy requests, blogging, emails caught up, etc. I only have one class, first period. Today, I was sitting in my classroom at about 1:30, writing some lesson plans when another teacher came by. She asked me if I had heard what was going on. I hadn't. She said, well apparently there are some riots going on and all of the kids are dismissed at 2:00. I was like, ok, this is kind of weird. Then we got the following email (I'm including English and Spanish, so you can get a feel for the bilingual nature of our school!!!) from our administration:

(ESPANOL VERSION)

COLEGIO AMERICANO DE GUATEMALA
Community News
Martes 24 de Marzo de 2009

Por razones de precaución, el CAG ha decidido lo siguiente:
Enviar a todos los alumnos a sus respectivas casas a las 2pm.
Únicamente saldrán rutas a las 2 de la tarde para los alumnos
Todas las actividades extracurriculares se cancelan por hoy en la tarde.
La jornada de hoy para Copa Americano está cancelada. No habrá ningún partido.
Sí habrán conferencias de Padres de Secundaria. (2-4pm)
Todos los demás miembros del personal se irán a las 4pm.
Por favor tomar en cuenta todas estas estipulaciones.

Ate.

(ENGLISH VERSION)

AMERICAN SCHOOL OF GUATEMALA
Community News
March 28, 2009

Due to precuationary measures, CAG has decided the following:

Send all students home at 2pm
There will only be 2pm routes for students
All extracurricular activities are cancelled for this afternoon
All Copa Americano games are cancelled this afternoon
There will be High School Parent-Teacher conferences (2-4pm)
All other staff members will leave at 4pm
Please be advised.

So, my master's class for tonight got cancelled (we have to make it up tomorrow) and we all went home around 3:00 today. From all of the rumors and mixed messages, here is my very vague understanding of what is going on in this country. There have been several bus drivers that have been shot and killed in the city. Like, a lot. It has something to do with gangs and either they won't go where the gang members tell them to go or they won't give them enough money or something, but they shoot the bus drivers. So, the president of Guate decided that they were going to stop public transportation for a period of time or something. So apparently there were supposed to be all of these riots going on this afternoon and into this evening. I'm not sure if anything escalated at all or what happened, but nothing has seemed abnormal to me here in my apartment! :) Hopefully everything has calmed down and maybe it was more rumors than anything actually happening. If it does escalate at all, we probably won't have school tomorrow. this is highly unlikely! But I guess in Guatemala, we will never have snow days, only violence days that we stay home for. Kind of sad.

Friends!

Just came across this picture today and thought it was cute! :) Ruth is the first person I met from CAG, as we met in the Dallas airport waiting for our flight to Guatemala. She teaches 8th grade math, so we work together in middle school, but also on various math stuff. I would give you her blog to read, but it's private. ha ha. It has been very fun getting to know her this year working here at CAG. This picture was taken one day when we were out with the kids watching a soccer game. Beautiful weather even in January or February! :)

My Car

No, I don't have a picture yet of my car. That is my next thing I am going to try to do. But the problem is now (this week) is that I am in class from 5-8 every night so it is dark when I get home. I guess I could take a picture in the parking garage but that seems weird. ha ha. This car here has pretty much changed my life and my sense of freedom here. I can go to my grocery shopping anytime I want to, I can decide to go somewhere and leave in five minutes when I want. I have been driving to and from school every day so I can get here when I want to. I can drive to go out to eat somewhere, I can go through the auto-mac at McDonalds (and yes, I have even gotten what I was trying to order). I love having a car here in Guatemala. I didn't think I would want the hassle of it and the costs of it, but it is proving to much more worth it than I had originally thought.

This weekend, I had a lot of fun. ha ha. I had class on Friday night from 5-8. I am taking my third class out of nine in my master's program. After class, I was so tired. I came home and laid down for about an hour, and then met up with some friends who were going out dancing. We had a great time. It was a lot of fun. We went to this place that I had been one time before and might soon become my regular place. This bartender decided he would be cool and make a little fire with the alcohol and he ended up catching himself on fire. Nice, huh? It was a bit scary. Then Saturday I had to get up for class and be in class from 8-1. This class is much better but it is still taxing on the body! ha ha. Then I came home and caught up on some tv shows on my computer and slept on and off until about 6 pm. I met up with my friend Jamie and her fiancee and a few of his friends at this place called the Retro Bar, where they play 80s and 90s music in English and Spanish. It was fun. Then after much indecision we decided to just go back to my house and hang out. We were playing Poker and I guess got a little noisy. The security guard at my apartment building came and rang the doorbell at 2 am and I sent Jamie's fiancee, Guillermo to the door, and the guard asked us to keep it down. Oops. My neighbors probably hate me now. Oh well. I'm probably paying for their electric bill anyway. One of Guillero's friends was celebrating his birthday and this guy is a HULK. Seriously. I have to get a picture of him. He needs to move here (he is from El Salvador) and be my body guard. It was awesome. He's huge. Anyway, they left around 3 and then I went to sleep. Sunday, I woke up around 9:30, went to PriceSmart with Stephanie, bought too much food, went through the Auto Mac for breakfast, came home and put my food away. Then I went with a different friend Jaime to her friend Fernando's baseball game. It was fun. It was at this really nice park and it was fun to be outside at the baseball field again. He also plays on a slow pitch softball team that he's trying to get me to join. I am thinking about it. Then I came home, went to the grocery store with Laurie, and then went to church. I got home and pretty much went to bed after cleaning up a little bit. I have been so tired lately since taking this class.

I will try to get a picture of my car soon to put it on here. :)

Leaving Casa del Mundo

Here is my last batch of pictures from the lake. It was a great weekend. I will know better for next time what to pack and what not to pack, but life is all about learning, right? :) So whoever is my next visitor who I take to the lake, we will have a great time! When you get to the main town at the lake, you have to catch one of these boats (not fancy boats, mind you) to go to the different villages or hotels along the lake. They get very crowded and are hard to get in and out of. Here is Anita waiting for the boat to come. You just have to stand out on the dock and wave it down to come pick you up!

On the boat, we were the only people at first.

Inside the boat, I liked this picture because you can see the guys legs standing on on the dock and sitting on top of the boat, waiting for the people from this village.

One of the villages that we pulled up to so we could pick up more people.

The same village with the boats at the dock.

This hotel looked cool, but we couldn't see the sign to see what the name of it was.

We got to the main town, Panajachel, about an hour early, so we got to go walk around and see the market and the town. It is really cute. I'd like to stay there next time. I didn't take any pictures there though. We also got some yummy tacos from the taco stand!

Casa del Mundo, the hotel

This hotel we stayed at was so cool. It is built into the side of this cliff, so it was hard to get a great photo of the place. But here are some great photos of the views we had and of some places here at the hotel. This will have to suffice! :)

Off our patio our first morning.

Our room was right by this area, called "Descanso." It basically means the resting area. I was happy we were so close to it!

This was looking up from our room where we stayed.

Off to the left of the balcony.

This is looking down. There were all these little levels and areas where you could sit and sunbathe with chairs and some places had steps down into the lake.

Morning number two!

The helicopter flying over. We joked if it was one of our students heading back to the city after a weekend at the lake!

Another hotel off to the left. You can see how they are built into the sides of the cliff.

These were the killer stairs. We about died every time we had to walk up and down them. Anytime to get down to the lake or back up to our room. They were bad!!! There were many of them.

So peaceful and relaxing.

Casa del Mundo, View of the Volcano

This was my first visit to the lake. I am not sure if you have this incredible view of the volcanoes from any place you stay at the lake, but our view of these volcanoes was just pretty much breathtaking. So needless to say, when I got home, I realized over half of my pictures were just different views of the volcanoes! ha ha. So here they are, enjoy! These were all taken from our hotel, since we never even left the place!!

This was from the deck where I was lying in the hammock for several hours!

This was taken from the boat as we were going back to Panajachel to catch our shuttle back to Antigua. Adios volcanes!! :(

Casa del Mundo, relaxing!

This weekend, we had Monday off school for a long, three day weekend. I went with three friends to La Casa del Mundo, a hotel located at Lake Atitlan here in Guate. We took a shuttle from Antigua and arrived on Saturday afternoon. This is about the extent of what we did until Monday morning when we left. Sorry I don't have a ton of pictures, but this is what we pretty much did for two days. It was WONDERFUL!! I do have some more pictures of the views that I will post, but for now here goes!

This was my view for the majority of the 48 hours spent there! :)

Still a little sleepy in the morning. Stephanie said I looked like the chimney face behind me. ha ha.

Anita and I with the beautiful volcano behind us.

Vida and Anita down swimming in the lake. This was taken from our balcony of our room. You will see the killer stairs later that we had to climb to get down that low. I didn't get in the water at all, but these girls enjoyed a good swim. I enjoyed a good hammock, book, and sunbathing!

Seriously, this is about all I did.

We played a mean game of Uno after dinner on Sunday night!!!