Back in Guat!

Buenos Tardes!

I´m posting this message from a little internet cafe blarring some sorta Spanish music as the enlace crew are taking in the sites of Guat city,zone one. The city is divided into zones based on the date they were built. After yesterday´s day long van ride back from El Salvador (filled with much singing,laughter and intense heat) we are excited to begun plunging into the culture of Guatemala.

This morning we learned about the history of this city from an incredibly passionate university proff and then spent an hour or so in our first Spanish clases. Divided into 4 groups we sat in little rooms with teachers who only spoke Spanish and were pretty happy to realise that we´ve already picked up a few words and phrases over the last week. THere is no better motivation for learning a language than to spend 5 days tryign to communicate with others through charades and translators. After the lessons we loaded back into our van that many of the students now call home and headed here to zone one.We are spending this afternoon walking around the oldest part of this city and observing the differences betwn guat and el slavador. Its raining buckets outside and we all feel like quite the tourists decked out in our brightly coloured rain coats and newly purchased umbrellas... funny how the warning that it would rain even though it was sunny outside this morning didn´t seem possible until a giant black cloud rolled in as soon as we had to get out of our van.

I have so much more to write but times up and I need to run back out into the rain to meet up with the others before we tour the palace belonging to one of the dictators of guat city built during the 1940´s. We are learning so much and look forward to sharing everything with you once the internet is back up at Semilla! The rest of this week will be spent in Spanish classes, and learning tours, focusing on the disparity of the riche and poor...something that we are starting to see more and more of as the palm trees and colonial style building fade into the background and we start to see the life of this city. This weekend we will be heading to Chichi, where we will be visiting a market place, spending time with some local famillies and to the excitement of all...checking out those myan ruins we keep hearing about.

In short...we´re having an amazing time and can´t wait to share our experiences with all of you..

adios!