life @ 13

Yeah, and you thought it was rain

for the rest of this week, until early sunday the 29th, i will be staying in a real house with a real family with a real telephone. if you want to talk to me, i'm very reachable. the number here is: +011 502 9 671-2360, where 011 is to call internationally, 502 is the guatemala country code, 9 is the city code and the rest is the local number. obviously i haven't tried this, so i make no guarntees. i am always at home around 2pm and 7pm, US central time. i have no idea what it costs to call from a cell phone, but from a land line it should be in the ballpark of 0.20/minute. if your work asks why you made a 20-minuite call to guatemala it's up to you to make an excuse

greetings from the land of enough-visible-guns-such-that-the-random-and-frequent-fireworks-are-not-appreciated. besides the title, i'm enjoying this country, and in particular this city, xela. so far i've taken 4 days of spanish (got off to a late start) and am slowly becoming confident in basic communication beyond "how much does it cost." although i had some personal reservations about Paying to Learn, the pace at which i'm learning now is surely faster than it would be were i on my own. my "school", more like "rent a bilingual local for 5 hours a day", is, dare i say it, cool. for the first time in one of my excursions to a local bike shop (i now have some more merciful gear ratios) i was actually able to make decent conversaton with the people, who are constituitevly open and friendly. besides the locals, i met some good gringos as as well. recently i've been exchanging (and pulling) punches with a swiss bloke, most of which conform to the topic "your country is evil vs. is your country on the map?", although the discussion does occasionally extend to "do nationalities sill have meaning?"
It has been nice settling down in one place for a while, and not just because i am too sick to cycle. for guatemala, this city (xela) is very progressive and, though well-earned, anti-gringo sentiment is minimal, as is catering to tourism. my family is cool if a little reserved, although when the equation works out to 3 bottles liquor + 10 people things tend to loosen up. as a side note, the family also has the biggest, shaggiest, smelliest dog i've come across.
i think my trip is starting to bear some sense of purpose. now that i've been asked several times "how long is your vacation" and "are you having fun" i suppose i can try and address. in my mind, this is not a vacation in the sense that i'm taking a break from normal life and returning in a definite amount of time. although i've been a little dissapointed in the experiences so far, this is by all means a journey for me, on which i hope to experience as many different people, ways of life, and ideas as possible. in this journey, the biycle is a tool, and spanish is most definitly a tool. like life at home, it seems that fun is balanced against struggle and hardship -- this is particularly poingnant when cycling against the wind or up a poorly-graded mountain pass. now that i've been if not immersed then exposed to a culture certainly different from mine at home, my mind is slowly slipping into a more evaluation-like mode, and i'm starting to be able to look at my home life from an outsider's perspective.
right now i'm vaguely content to continue my break from cycling, do a little speed-learning of spanish, and generally hang out with the gringos here. but soon, probably this weekend, i'm going to be back on the bike, off the beaten track, and hopefully experiencing at a slightly higher level.