Slacker.

I am totally failing at blogging. I really did mean to keep up with it in Momostenango....And I did have access to internet...But at the same time, I was walking around a town with basically one other gringo outside our group, the town's festival was completely up and running with the main attraction, and we all were hanging out with the coolest kids and the coolest famiy ever...So I have my excuses.

I actually don't remember what I last talked about, so I'll just talk about everything in Momostenango that pops into my head.

First off, the town festival. The festival happens around this time every year, and really is just a celebration for Momos. Every day there were dancers, live music (both full-on bands and the traditional Guatemalan music, Marimba), and amazingly colorful costumes. Unfortunately, most of the pictures I got of the festival are on film... So those will take a while to put up. The dancers all wore these fantastic wooden masks of different colors, some being human faces, and others being monkeys, deer, and other animals. The girls wore the traditional Wepeal for Momostenango.

A Wepeal (I'm probably spelling that wrong) is the traditional clothing arrangement of Mayan women in Guatemala. It is comprised of a poncho-like top with amazing weaving all around the shoulders and neck, sometimes all the way down to the waist. The top is covered by a wrapped skirt and beautifully woven belt. So beautiful.

Michaella and Ingrid, two students at Instituto K'amawanik' (which means Friendship in K'iche')

Okay, so the greatest part of the festival? Fantastically insane people dangling from a rope 40 feet in the air, and making their way to the ground doing insane tricks...only hanging on to the rope. Also, they were wearing monkey costumes and masks. CRAZY! It's the main feature of the festival, but it only happens every two years... In other words, we lucked out.

Other fair attractions: steamed corn with chile sauce, ketchup, mayo, and cheese; extremely old men playing marimba and flute; the traditional red wepeal of Momostenango, which isn't worn that often anymore because of how difficult and time-consuming they are to weave. In other words, sweet!

Then, there was hanging out at the school, of course. Instituto K'amawanik' is full of the most amazing, eager, and sweet students I have ever met! We got to set up the six new computers, which, by the way, came out in the states 2 weeks ago....Doug has the sweet hook-ups. We dropped off over 80 new kids books, which are now the new school library for kids to borrow and bring home to read to their siblings. A lot of students don't even have books for kids at home, so if these get 'lost'...They're getting lost for the best of reasons. PLUS, there was Frank & Luisa's gift of $100 Australian dollars worth of school supplies (which means a TON of school supplies) --they were put to use almost immediately for the kids to write letters back to the sponsers and donors in the states.

Most of the school, just missing some primary school students.

All the girls wanted their picture with Pedro....

The Girls's Basketball team! They totally kicked butt at a game we got to watch!

Peter and I have the great fortune of being kids on a budget, so we got to stay with Abraham and Feliciana's family. Their house is just above the school on a hill, and the view is amazing. Their yard is full of corn plants and beautiful flowers, and Feliciana has a great round kitchen with a wood stove where we learned how to make tortillas again.

Feliciana is the smiley-est woman you will ever meet!

Her food was....hmm...indescribable? Tortillas, beans, hard-boiled eggs, amazing sweet tea, tomalitos (mini tomales), tomato-scrambled eggs... I could go on forever. So, after delicious dinners, we got to listen to Abraham play his accordian, sing songs in K'iche', and play with the collection of kids that live with Abraham.

Doug and Abraham.

Abraham's son, Jairo, and his family also live in the house, and his sister Lidia and her family was staying there during our visit. That means we had six extremely cute kids to play with all evening. In fact, the youngest, Lemuel, is one-- and we got to see him walk for the first time ever!

LeLe!

We lucked out to be with Abraham and the gang...Our group hiked to a hot springs that is used in their village as the Mayan baths, which was both surreal and hilarious, seeing as we are probably some of the only gringos to have ever even seen the place. The water was extremely hot, but they run natural cold water in through pipes for washing hair and cooling down. Because Mayan tradition is extremely modest, all us girls got to wear traditional smocks for bathing. Such a cool experience.

On Thursday we also got to visit another hot spring-- only this one was much more public, with a pool, private baths, etc. The drive down was a little insane-- 45 minutes of crazy dirt roads along a mountain side. The water in the hot baths at that spring was even hotter than the previous! And they really don't mess around-- we saw newborn babies in that water!

We ended up leaving Momos a day early so we had a little wiggle room for getting to Chichicastenango in time. It was so hard to say good-bye, but Momos was too great not to go back in the future. In fact, Peter and I had lunch in a cafe, got talking to the owner's family, and now have a place to stay when we come back to Momos. Too funny.

So, we thought that leaving early for Chichi would be easier...Well, the short story is this: crazy landslides, stopped by the police, realized we took a wrong turn 45 minutes before, turned around, four semi trucks stuck on the mountain road to Chichi, 3 litres of Tiky, virtually invisible speed bumps, and Peter and I sneaking into the hotel room with Doug. It was awesome.

Market day was a whole other kind of crazy. We were sent out with assignments to buy items for re-sale back in the states for fundraising. At the schools where Doug fundraises, friendship bracelets are extremely popular and great sellers, so our mission was to buy out the market of as many bracelets as we could get for as cheap as possible. Some stats:

Initial price of a bracelet: 12-15 Quetzales

Haggled price: 1.25- 2 Quetzales

Initial goal amount: 2,000

Bought: Over 3,000!!!

Haggling is such an addictive art form.

After 7 hours of exhausting haggling, we enjoyed our end-of-the-day congratulational Capirinhas, some shwag-comparing, and a dip in the pool. Oh, and Peter and I were sneaking around the hotel this whole time. A few white lies and a massivley-swanky hotel later, the rest of the group left in the rental car for Panajachel, and Peter and I took the chicken buses.

Get this-- no horror stories from the chicken buses! They were amazingly easy to transfer, not too full, and we even got a sales pitch from a guy trying to sell 'all-natural medicine'. Rad! It was an easy an successful meet-up with the group in Panajachel, and we grabbed lunch before an insane torrential downpour. After the rain 'calmed' a bit, we took a 20 minute boat ride to San Pedro, found a place to stay, and finally, here I am, in an internet cafe in yet another amazing rainstorm.

San Pedro is not only a beautiful location, but the city itself is centered around two main paved roads-- with everything connected by a network of trails and tiny paved paths. So cool! Definitely a traveller's town, but the feel is so relaxed and peaceful. Peter and I stayed in a room last night that had this view:

I mean....c'mon.

We head back to Antigua tomorrow...then just two nights before we are back in the states! Too crazy. I need to stop typing now.