Yax-ha, Nakum and El Zotz

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THis week has gone so quickly and we are actually already in Mexico (just arrived yesterday night!). Our English teaching job was based in a wonderful nation park with 3 Maya sites: Yaxha, Nakum and Naranja. We were based in Yax-ha to teach a bunch of care takers English. The guys were really lovely and highly motivated but for some of themit was very difficult to grasp the basic of a new language. We even had a student who didn´t know how to read and write and the students didn´t have a book or copies to follow....Hence, we did a lot of one-to one follow ups during the day surrounded by the ruins. It was so much fun to practice and get to know our students that we happily worke all day long. They are also very knowledgeable about the ruins and showed us around. Frankie was playing football in the afternoon on a daily basis and the guys were really fit!

Yax-ha has been partly excavated and also rebuilt and is set in the jungle with many monkeys and birds. There also is a lake with a lot of caymans and as a tourist you can sleep there for free. As a ´teacher´, we were treated very well and were housed with the academics - the architects and archeologists- and not with the care takers. This meant that we had a cook and it was really interesting to meet people from Guatemala from different bachgounds. The lead archeologists kindly took us to the other Maya site Nakum, where the archeologists are excavating at the moment. Their approach is different from Tikal and Yax-ha and they are not planning to rebuild the temples. Nakum is beautiful and pristine and we were allowed to enter trenches etc. what was exciting. At the end they showed us a mascera 5 meters underneath a temple and we took pictures etc. This mascera will be covered again and replicated and even the architects have never seen it.

All in all we loved staying in Yax-ha and extended our stay a bit and they guys all learnt a bit of English.

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