Guatemalan weekend - Sunday

Saturday night had ended kind of badly at 3am with Kelly being sick, so when my alarm went off at 630am I was not looking forward to a long day of busing back to Ocotepeque. Kelly and I had to leave b-c we had to teach today, but everyone else got to stay at least another day and enjoy the lake :( All in all, however, the day went quite well:

7am - boat left to cross the lake
9am - took a "collectivo" group minivan (but we were the only ones on it) to a town called Las Encuentras where we planned to catch a bus to Guatemala City
1030am - after waiting and waiting for that bus, we were standing on the side of the road and truck pulled over and honked to us. We hadn´t even been looking for a jalon, but this guy saw us and offered us a ride. The Peace Corps people had told us that girls often have an easier time jaloning, which I hadn´t believed before, but it seemed totally true. We got to ride in the cab of the pickup truck, and chatted with the guy Luis in Spanish about Guatemala and his store in Antigua. When we got there (which was on the way, even tho we needed to go to Guat City eventually), he showed us his store where he refinishes furniture. He had some beautiful stuff, and it made me wish I had a real house to put nice things!
11am - bus to Guat City
1230pm - bus from Guat City to Esquipulas. We had thought there would be a direct bus at 130, which would have been so much faster, but there wasn´t so we got stuck on this one that stopped at every single town alog the way
5pm - taxi from Esquipulas to the border
6pm - bus from the border to Ocotepeque, finally arriving at 630pm, 12 hours to the minute since waking up at the lake (which now seemed like a world away). Our Sunday night tradition is to come home and get hamburgers and licuados (fruit, milk, sugar shakes) in town, and then we showered and promptly went to sleep.

This was a long day, but the whole way home whenever Kelly and I started to feel grouchy, we just took out my camera and reviewed all the crazy pictures from the weekend, and then we realized that it was worth all the buses to have seen the sun set over the lake, to ride horses and see baptisms, to eat and eat and eat, and relax in a hammock for hours at a time.

All in all it was definitely the best weekend so far. Now we´re trying to figure out what´s next -- Thursday is Independence Day here, and, like in the US, they´re apparently making a big 4 day weekend out of it b-c there are no classes Thursday or Friday!! So if we want to, Kelly and I can take off on Wednesday to go somewhere else exotic. Alternatively, we could stay in town and go to all the local festivities, and Carol´s son Dany is having a birthday party in the mountains on Friday at some fancy place with a swimming pool, which could be fun. AND, the Peace Corps group that leaves at the end of the month is having a big crazy farewell party on Saturday in Santa Rosa, which is about 3 hours away, so we could go there too. There are so many things we could do .... I´m leaning towards relaxing on a beach, but the thought of getting on a bus again is somewhat revolting. As they say here, vamos a ver ... we´ll see ...