Kind of like my birthday, Christmas & cinco de mayo in one

I spent last weekend in Antigua, Guatemala which was loads of fun. I met up with Stephanie Fisher who lived in New Canaan and went to GW with me (she was Nick's friend in New Canaan, and therefore was two years ahead of me at Uni). She's an immigrations lawyer now, and is therefore learning Spanish here in Guatemala.

We spent Saturday hiking up Pacaya, an active volcano near Antigua. When we got up to the top we roasted marshmallows on the lava...it was pretty neat!

On Sunday I went back to San Miguel Duenas to visit my homestay family I lived with for the first three months during training. It was SO MUCH FUN, it was the Feria there, so we ate tons of Churros, and rode on rides that were either human powered or powered by what looked like truck engines from the early 1900's...AMAZING. The ferris wheel was going at about 30 MPH, I thought I was going to die, but once I got to the top with Leo (my 11 year old homestay brother) we had a yo yo competition with the yo yo's we won (by shooting actual rifles at cabbage patch kid stuffed animals...seriously that was a fair-ground game) to see who could get the yo yo to go up and down the most number of times while spinning thru the air on a precarious (at best) wooden wheel. He kicked my butt.

On Monday I made it up to the Peace Corps office where I had THREE amazing packages waiting for me. My amazing family sent me everything from butterfingers to embroidered pillows. It was so wonderful. I had to buy a HUGE grain sack from a hardware store to carry it all back home (it's about a five or six hour trip from the office back to my house on chicken busses!) but SO worth it, I've been gorging myself on good books, homemade chocolate chip cookies, english chocolate, Reeses, Butterfingers and salt and vinegar crisps for the past week. So much so that I'm going into Xela tomorrow and Saturday to go to the gym...I need it.

This weekend is our welcome party at The Lake, so I'm really looking forward to that. We're all staying at the same hostel and going out for dinner and going dancing Saturday night. SO much fun.

Also today the Peace Corps Director for Latin America came to visit our site. She and two other PC employees drove up (they were going to a few sites nearby today) and sat and heard about our work (Ferney and I made a sweet powerpoint presentation this morning...some skills are universal) and our site. I think it went really well, they seemed reasonably impressed with our work and our progress so that's nice.

Other than that it's been the same old stuff you know, chasing chickens, kicking gross dogs out of my house, making beans and tortillas (I now make my own tortillas) and hanging out with preggers indiginous women. Not too shabby.