life @ 13

first off, apologies to those who didn't make it on my email list. i would have considered you the Lucky Ones, but apparently not everyone agrees. if you were slick like me you would have set up an autoresponding email that said something like "strangely enough, after giving this school XXX dollars they couldn't afford to pay the rent on my email address, so they sold it to the highest bidder. you can now reach me at YYY. Darien Little of the class of 2006 does not want your Love Letters." but, since you're not as much of a computer geek as i am/was/maybe will be (unless you are bill stube, (by the way, i've been wearing your gym shorts every day, thanks)), so long as you forgive you are forgiven.
not surprisingly i've been moderately sick for almost the entire trip, but sunday i ate a bad banana or three which cost me 16 hours of sleep, as well as an extra day here in touristy flores. which, at about $11/day, isn't all that bad, moneywise.
yesterday was mostly a waste of a day, which is a good thing. i had a nice juicy post ready, but the daily power outage occured at the wrong time.
today i finally visited the tikal ruins, my first official visit to a Tourist Attraction, and my first time riding the Bus this trip. like most attractions, tikal is a lot of hype and a little delivery. i took a 5am bus which unfortunatley arrived 20 minutes too late to watch the sunrise from the top of temple 4. i felt much less safe on the rich gringo bus in a poor country than as a lone unshaven cyclist with rotten bananas and empty bottles in the basket in a poor coutry. less comfortable as well.
the ruins are impressive, but not exactly in a worth-a-day-trip sort of way. of course i stayed for 11 hours, until the last bus left, but a good portion of the day was spent napping in the shade and hanging out with people i met in cancun.
i'd like to buy some native arts/crafts/linens/etc. here -- they're cheap and beautiful -- but postage is almost prohibitavely expensive. the book quotes $115 for 12 pounds, which means it's probably $130 now. $10 for the goods, $130 for postage. $3 for a hotel, $1.50 for dinner, $.80 for an hour of internet, $0.20 for 5 oranges, $130 for postage. el salvador (probable next country) is much cheaper, but my legs don't seem too keen on hauling much crap around.
all of you seem to enjoy mentioning (complaining about) the cold weather in the northern US, and, trust me, i thouroughly enjoy recieving your complaints. 3 weeks down here and i haven't even seen a drop of rain, much less the thermometer dropping below 65.
two weeks ago today i started cycling, which means i should be in better shape now than i was two weeks ago. so tomorrow i should be going at least twice as fast as i did last thursday.
tomorrow i'm heading down to poptun, possibly staying on some sort of work/study/eat/sleep ex-hippie tourist farm, which sounds interesting, if not entirely guatemalan.
finally, as if i didn't remember (and i almost didn't), many of you reminded me that i was born 23 years ago today, albeit several parallels to the north. if anything, birthdays are always a reminder that Girls keep better calendars than Boys. thanks for the emails, of course i appreciate them. hopefully i won't get a speeding ticket and 3am prepress errors (unlikely) this year. guatemalan postage stamps will be gladly accepted as gifts.
if you're bored and reading this (inside the dept. of redundency dept.), check out this guy's site: http://www3.utsidan.se/corax-e/ . after tens of thousands of words describing his travels through china, his description of travelling throgh central america was "i travelled through central america."