From Antigua, with love

I can't find the colon on this keyboard, which is aggravating. Oh well. I also can't figure out shift in order to cap a letter. But we make do.

So, today has been very low key. I woke up, showered, did laundry in the shower, and went back to bed. Getting in bed after a shower is one of my favorite treats in the world, and I usually don't allow myself to do it, but since I am on vacation, I am allowed. Breakfast is included in the cost of our hostel stay, and I have ordered the desayuno tipico both mornings, because there is hardly anything better than scrambled eggs, beans with red sauce and crema, and fried plantains. We waited for MRM to get out of class, and then remained at the hostel to watch a subtitled movie and then headed out to lunch. I was very excited to learn that the cafe served kombucha tea, and then very sad to find out they were out of it. After lunch we split up, MRM and I wandered and window shopped and made plans to head to Cafe Sky to do homework and watch the sunset from the roof, but it began to sprinkle so we headed back towards the center of town and made it into another cafe on the main square in time before it began to pour. Our server reminded me of a short, Latin Lil Wayne, so of course I fell in love with him immediately.

I proudly have kept myself sunburn free so far, except for my toes, which I forgot about, and now they look like red Vienna sausages. Poor toes. Wearing sunscreen is a pain, I think it makes me sweat more, or at least feel a lot stickier than I should me. But I've resigned myself to feeling that way all summer rather than burn up and risk more damage to my already melanin-free skin.

Tonight we are supposedly going to "Mexican Night" at the hostel, which merely means 2 for 1 margaritas. Tomorrow night there is some Cuban music off the central park that we're going to try to catch and on Friday night there is a screening of a documentary on the Guatemalan Civil War. So finally I will learn something about this beautiful place I'm living for the next three months. So far I am still feeling very much the tourist here. It doesn't help that I look exactly like all the other tourists here -- aviators, Chacos, Nalgene, cargo shorts, daypack. I've never stood out so much before -- to my knowledge -- but I don't know what can be done about it.

In the two and a half days I've been here, I've already lost weight. And not from Guatemalan diarrhea! Yet. So that's the good news. The bad news is, some of my clothes are already too big, and I have 13.5 weeks left. Mayhaps I'll invest in a gaudy woven belt.

OK, it's dinner time and we don't know where we're eating yet, so I'll wrap this up. But first, an apology -- there's no spell check on this computer, and I haven't reread this post or the last one, something I swore I would never do. So if there are gross misspellings and grammar errors, I kindly ask your forgiveness.