Blogs from Central America Caribbean - page 1916

'You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy!' Time to change that. The vacation is over. Fun times now yield to longterm consideration. The blog is wide open to readers that may, or may not, appreciate my humor. Yes humor. Opinions and comments expressed do NOT nescessarily reflect those of management! In other words, I, Jake Snow, realize, that people will form an opinion of ME, by what I write. So, I have 'retracted' previous entries, and APOLOGIZE for ANY negative conotations implied. This may be too little, too late. Damage (opinions formed), already done? Cannot change that. Life goes on. Update in the blog will change. I am getting 'back into' my photography... even if it is with a small digital camera. As ... read more

Another early morning and nice walk to the Dive Center. Today was Independence Day for Honduras so there was a large parade that I had to walk through in order to get to the dive center. The parade was fun to watch though and I got some cute pictures. We started the day off with our theory. Tobi figured we should take it easy in the morning (no diving), since they had all been at the BBQ the night before, drinking quite a bit. We watched the last couple videos, did another chapter test and then broke for lunch. First Jeff and I went to drop off my backpack at the new hotel I was now staying in. We switched since Margaritaville had reservations for the weekend. We booked at a place called Holland's Inn, which ... read more

It was independance day in Costa Rica today. And a very peaceful independance it was too. Flag displays and school children marching down the street at night with lanterns and playing drums. Independance was peacefully declared for Central America by Guatemala (i think it was), and Costa Rica has not had an army for the last 50 years, so the country has an incredibly peaceful feeling (There is even a university of peace!). Just imagine how much money they save on military which they are able to put into education and health etc. No wonder ticos are well educated with good social systems, even if they don't have much for development. We have fallen in love with so many people in Santa Teresa (and other places in Costa Rica!). i know you guys won't get the ... read more

Thursday morning I woke up to a clogged toilet. I realised I had done it the night before. I still haven't got used to the fact that we don't flush toilet paper in the country. I think I forgot to mention that before in any of my earlier entries. You are simply meant to throw your used toilet paper in the trash can. All bathrooms will have these for that reason. So after I asked in my best Spanglish for a plunger (I was able to say everything except "plunger" in Spanish), I fixed the problem (without even waking Chris!) and was not able to go back to bed. It was about 6am, so I decided to sit out on the porch of the hotel at a table and continue in my reading of my diving ... read more

Well the last 2 weeks have been pretty mad. Much drinking and dancing. It's been great but I'm starting to think that the big nights or the hangovers in the morning have been impacting on my ability to learn Spanish. I've made a great little group of friends from all over which I've been having a ball with. The only problem was that we basically ended up in a bar every night. But the salsa clubs were great. Basically you would walk in and guys would ask you to dance. And the best part was that most of them didn't try anything they genuinely just wanted to dance. It was a lot of fun but difficult because Guatemalian men in general are really short & I mean maybe my shoulder height short, so some of the ... read more

The day began on the bus up from Guatemala City that had been our bed for the night. Just before we reached our final destination of Flores, an island town in northern Guatemala, the bus stopped by a minibus parked at the side of the road who it turned out was offering free hotel drop-offs (the bus station isn't on the island). We took that offer, and also paid for a ride to Tikal from the same company, which was obviously the idea. But it all worked out extremely well - we had time to make ourselves feel human again after the overnight bus trip, and before we knew it we were heading to Tikal. Tikal is a site of Mayan ruins, of what were once pretty magnificent temples and such like, in the middle of ... read more