On to Guatemala

Well, I am now an international criminal, but we will get to that later on.

Right now we´re at Rosa´s beautiful house in Guatemala City. Rosa was a foreign exchange student who stayed with our mom and grandparents in New York in the 1970s. They have communicated ever since and her and her family agreed to be our host for two days in the city. They took us out to Antigua today, which is one of the two big tourist cities in the country, and we went on a bike ride around a coffee field. Rosa´s daughter Maria´s 2-year-old son, Diego, got the fortune of both getting a horseback ride and a bike ride. Fortunately I did not crash when he was on my bike! But their family has been so nice to us and we are grateful for being their guests.

Our return trip to Bajamar wasn´t as great as the first as, unfortunately, some people tried to use us for money AND we got there too late to see the traditional Garifuna dancing. We did get to see some of the locals dance that way later at night, though.

We also saw the ruins at Copan, which is on Honduras near the Guatemalan border. It was amazing the detail the Mayans put into their sculptures, temples and everything else. It is similar to the painstaking detail people put into churches, etc., that we´ve seen, so intense sculpting for religion seems to cross all cultures. We did learn some pretty intense things about the Mayans, including what transpired on their ¨Ball court¨. At first we thought this game -- which is played between two slanted walls and one where a winner is declared as the player/team who throws a rubber ball at several sculptures of a macaw´s head the most times -- was just for fun, BUT turns out that, in big games, the losing player/team was sacrified. Glad our modern day games don´t end like that, because I would have been dead a long time ago.

I have to say, I loved Honduras for the 1.5 weeks we were there, but our ¨frontera¨experience soured me on the whole country. I was forced to pay a fine of 3200 lempiras ($160 bucks) because a portion of a yellow immigration paper had gotten torn off when my passport was in my bag. It is in Honduran law that if that paper was ¨lost or damaged, any national or foreigner has to pay half of the minimum wage for a month.¨Unfortunately this didn´t occur in Nicaragua, where the minimum wage is just $75, but the damn paper was oversized for the passport and I didn´t fold it up like David and, apparently, everyone else in the world. We didn´t even have nearly enough cash to pay the fine, so if it wasn´t for an extremely nice man from Luxembourg (sorry, we lost your e-mail so I can´t write and say thanks), we would have been trapped in Honduras.

We´re off to Lake Atitlan tomorrow, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful spots in the world.