hi! my favorite people!

ok, there's been a lot of questions about where I am going for the next few weeks, so here's some help. For starters, I'll be in Guatemala, smallish country south of Mexico, surrounding by (that), and, well, see map. I feel like such a blogger. but whatever, it's good for you to know.




I'll be spending my weekdays in Quetzaltenango, but because that takes me so many edits to write and because I'm not sure anyone else actually uses it, I'm going to call it Xela (Shay-La). Once I get there I'll let you know if I'm wildly inappropriate in my assumptions. Xela is the second largest city in the country, although coming from New York I don't really know how that will feel. The population is only around 300,000. There'll I'll be studying with an intensive language-study program (www.hermandad.com) during the weekdays, living with a family that doesn't even know I exist yet, and hopefully spending my free time thinking of, seeing and doing everything pleasing I can. Like volcanoes and thermal spas and monkeys. I really really hope I see at least one monkey. Those are some neat creatures.

And in between the daily spanish classes, where I expect to become a master of a language not necessarily native to the country I am visiting but obviously less so to me, I want to experience something outside of my daily culture of buses that run over people (true, I've seen it) and stinky air and banks on every corner (true I've seen that too). But this is really a test because I might be so busy exploring and loving my life that I will forget to blog, or you might be so busy exploring and loving life that you will forget to read it. Either way, what difference does it make to contribute another tiny potentially-lost element to cyberspace? Aren't we a culture of too much information? I'd hate to be known as someone who didn't contribute...

yea! a trip!