1. I walked into a telephone pole wire last Friday night, with the end result of a badass black eye...cheek...forehead...arm. The women I work with don't believe that I'm that clumsy.
2. I decided that 5 weeks of diarrhea was a good enough chunk of time to make myself go get a stool sample. Then, of course, it took me almost 2 more weeks before actually getting the results to a doctor (or gave the test results to a friend to give to his doctor to diagnose). Today, I finally bought the antibiotics. It's a proud day.
3. In the past, err, month or so since I last updated there have been several things in Xela such as;
A. random helter-skelter protests (sometimes there are secondary students just walking down the street with their colegio not in conjunction with anything else; pretty much all of which are in response to the big government push to privatize education)
B. A music festival in Xela that was all over this 5 block radius in the streets....with some of the worst rock in the world, but an extremely awesome El Salvadorean drum circle that showed up to a dance club and made the bad reggaeton stop just so that they could play. They made me miss the marching band in Providence.
C. Xela's soccer team made it to the finals, which hasn't happened in 11 years. I'm not really sure how winning the tournament works, but even though they lost last night there will be another game on Saturday. We'll see how that goes!
4. I went to the beach with all of my roommates and a smattering of other people for a weekend (about 3/5 foreigners, 2/5 Guatemalans). We rented a house in the middle of nowhere on the coast that we had to ourselves (all 20 of us) and brought tons of food and alcohol (apparently the other staple here, aside from water) to this house. Thus far in my time in Guatemala I don't think I've ever been confronted with such a stark contrast in living situations. We rolled in on this dirt road in a private van at 9:30am on a Saturday morning with reggaeton blasting through the windows past hundreds of small houses without electricity. We must have been going atleast 40mph on this dirt road, kicking up dust, making noise, and drawing understandably annoyed/confused looks from most around us. The house, which was beautiful, was right smack in the middle of the beach. It was the only private house for miles made with solid wood beams/concrete. Pigs, trash, horses, tons of stray dogs were our most immediate neighbors. And there we were, with our little vacation that was so much in contrast to everything around us. I'm not doing a terribly good job of explaining the issues that I had, but hopefully I will be more successful later. It was incredibly beautiful and the water was amazing; although my body has about 200 bites from beach fleas still. Also, I never knew how much my roommates can drink. Wow. Pretty much 40 hours straight of drunkenness.
5. Jeremy and Marlisa come in a week. My visa expires on Monday (so I have to go on the epic travel journey that all the long term foreigners do here...the visa journey...to Guatemala City to renew it). My closest friend that I have here leaves on Tuesday. And the tourist season, which ironically coincides with the worst weather season (rainy season/'winter'), starts right about now. In short, much change to come!
