guatemala... finally!

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Hola,
we are finally in guatemala. i dont have long for a long blog entry but ill do a shorty.
we were able to get out exit stamps in mexico next morning and then waited for our minibus to return as we had arranged. It arrived full of more people so the company paid for us to take taxis to the border. once there it cost us $2 US to get the guatemala entry stamp and our minibus to take us further arrived. BUT a bug truck broke down right behind it and we couldnt go anywhere for an hour! finally we found out that the driver can take the bus into mexico and go around another way which takes 5 mins but that the border police were charging him about 100 quetzales, so everyone on our bus put in a few questzales and away we went. ridiculous really.
I sat next to an amazing guy called federico who lives in our destination Panajachel on lake atitlan. He is from argentina but has settles here after living almost everywhere! he gave us lots of advice and many cool stories. But also a bit of a sad one, apparently this beautiful lake is being horribly polluted with rubbish from the 2 rivers that feed it (lots of villages up stream) and sewerage that is being directly dumped there. HE said he and many other extranjeros (foreigners) who live there have been campaigning to clean it up to the government and through the press until they all got issued letters that said basically one more word out of them and they have 48 hours to leave the country! so sad! he reckons they just wanna wait till its bad then the government can come in and clean up and be a hero.
He owns a t-shirt shop here and also builds houses.
Panajachel is mre expensive than we expected because its full of torusits! so that was a disappointment, but we found a cute posada called casa loma run by a nice family so we stayed there. our first night here (we hung out with our new zealand buddies Tam and Brett and german buddy Clemens again) we had dinner and shared it with 2 kids who had come over to talk to us off the street who where selling items to tourists, but we offered them dinner coz they didnt ask us to buy one single thing, they just were interested in us. We became great friends although sadly none of us could remember their long names. They come from another village nearby and spanish is their second language. they speak a mayan language first. Apparently their father left them so thats why they work. He was 12 and had finished primary but wont do secondary and his sister is 6 and will finish primary but will drop out as well. He works a 13 hour day!
After dinner (and finding a working atm) we headed back to the hostel. Dario had also picked up a new amigo called juan santiago (a lot of names start with juan here) who followed us all the way back to the hostel. (he is a middle man, trying to sell tours to other towns, but he just chatted away to dario).
Next morning we set out to find me a decent, and not overly expensive spanish school. there are 5 listed in lonely planet but only 2 are now open (the longest serving in this state) and one of them had moved so took us all morning to go and find them! they were a bit more expensive than we thought they would be so we decided to follow our friend Clem to another town across the lake called San Pedro where the schools are cheaper. We caught the colectivo boat across (35 mins) but had to wait for the boat to fill up before they would leave, so waited 45 mins sitting at the dock.
San Pedro is much less touristy, its great! theres basically one main street that widns up the hill a bit and then there are loads of laneways you can get lost in. We checked out 3 of the many schools here and chose one called Mayab just before the last boat of the day left for panajachel at 5. Its a school where we can stay with a local family (Which we are doing) and im getting 20 hours of classes, 4 hours a day for 5 days.
On the boat on the way back our mate from Japan got on... its a very small world the world of backpacking! and we all got very wet together on the way back, the wind was up so there were waves that we crashed into on this small ferry boat.
We bumped intp the new zealanders again and our friend the 12 year old seller and Dario and I hung out with him for about 2 hours, we bought a few things from him that we needed, like a new little bag for passports and ended up buying him and his sister a few books as we felt it was a good idea for him to practice his reading skills since he no longer went to school. He was so thankfull that when we then went to the super market to buy breakfast for the next day, he insisted on helping carrying things and telling us where things were. He is such a bright and happy child, its so sad that he probably will work 13 hour days his whole life with little earnings to show for it.
He had to continue working so we left him and went and had dinner with the NZ´s. WE had agreed to meet our friend at our hostel the next morning to say goodbye with his sister and he wanted a photo on our camera.
Next morning we waited and waited and he didnt come. We looked for him all over town and we couldnt see him.
We eventually had to give up as we had to catch a colectivo to san pedro because my first spanish class started at 1pm! we waited another 45 mins in the boat till it left at 11.45 and we had to have a rushed lunch of tacos in san pedro before getting to the school (only 5 mins walk) with 5 mins to spare!
Mario is my teacher and he is great! he realised i wasnt as basic as he thought to begin with and adjusted my classes to suit. So right now im learning all the irregular verbs and their rules, many of which i did not know so its great!
I found out he has 2 kids, 4 and 2 year olds and he is the same age as Dario and i am the same age as his wife! scary! but that is normal here. he asked about australia and he thought it was odd that we tend to wait so long to get married. cultural differences 😊
Dario found out that the event for the day (every day the school has some free event or entertainment on for members) was a football match, maestros (teachers) vs alumnos (students) so he went off for the afternoon while i studies till 5pm. At 5 he was supposed to be back so we can go with our host family... abuelita came and had to wait 30 mins before we decided he can get someone else to show him where the house is and off we went. he arrived 10 mins later at the house, very apologetic and sweaty!
The family who are hosting us are hosting another guy (from NZ) called Nick in another room. They have 2 spare rooms just for guests. The family has 8 members, abuelita the grandmother, Elena and Juan the parents, And 5 kids, Tula is the youngest and is 6, then there is manuel, sofi, pedro and one older sister i have not been introduced to yet. Tula wanted to play all night and got a bit annoyed when we said i had to study, but we joined the kids for dinner which was frijoles and eggs with torillas (homemade by abuelita) and played a long game of basketball after dinner, the great thing was that the hoop is so low i can slam dunk!
Next morning (today) we got up early, had brekky (just cornflakes) and Juan, ELena, Dario and the boys headed off to their plot of land, about 1 hours walk away to pick the coffee beans that are ready because they are valuable at the moment and someone has been stealing them. The family is of mayan descent and all of the family speak their own language first and spanish second, so abuelita and i misunderstand each other a lot. They did have a 6th child, but sadly she died 4 days shy of her 1st birthday in october this year. Understandably everyone is still a bitupset about it, so we dont bring it up. It sounds as though (from Tula just telling us yesterday) that the culprit could have been a cough or something that is treatable in Oz, so extra sadness.
I had my class for the morning, more verbs, but in the past tense, and lots of little conversations with Mario, im already improving!
This afternoon Sofi who is 14 made lunch because everyone else is out, we had sausages with an amazing soft vegie salad thing and guacamole with a mountain of fresh torillas! yum! im very full because the drink was a banana smoothie, no need for snacks today!
I am going to do a second entry about the same thing in spanish... apologies to those who understand the language. x

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Photos

Dario carrying coffee
He went and picked coffee with the family we stayed with in san pedro.

Jess studying
Jess´s maestro was named Mario... he´s excellent!!!