The weekend again

Weeks really fly by here, it always feels like Thursday. Today I got 2 letters in the mail!!! So exciting! One from my seester and one from a friend from CU, what a surprise! Letters are always welcome, they increase my happiness here by like 100 fold. Today it's breezy, chilly, cloudy, and probably will end up raining all afternoon. Once again I don't have to go to the clinic cause she's not in. This week I start volunteering at the TB hospital in the mornings with Amy, Jill, and Greg...I just don't do enough at my clinic to feel like it's useful so I added Rodolfo Robles. They get to give out medicines and give shots into IVs and into butts if they want to learn, so it's more hands on. So now my weeks are like this: MW class 830-1130, lunch 145, volunteering 4-?, T movie/conference, WR volunteering 8-?, lunch 145, class 230-530pm, F nada. So this weekend we went to the lake again but this time with the group and obviously way more tranquilo. We left Xela around 230 on Friday, the weather kinda sucked, cloudy and chilly the whole way to Panajachel. We got to Pana and went straight to the hotel, Hotel Garcia or something, it was a little hole in the wall, nothing special, the bathroom was community so in the bedrooms were just beds and a table and a dresser and smelt like musky rotting cemet, if that makes sense. Walking to the hotel we passed by massive amount of SHOPS!!! It was great, we got so excited to go shopping for CHRISTMAS PRESENTS! They were selling everything, blankets, musical intruments, pipes, jewelry, bags galore, art, other fun little things...so much great stuff and bargain city, though they were pretty tough to bargain with sometimes. So we ate dinner at the restaurant right next to the water which was really pretty and there was live music. Had some drinks. I had chicken filets in bbq sauce with mashed potatoes, real mashed potatoes...yum. It was nice to have good food. Then we went to another bar and hung out, went to another and had some shots, on the way back to the hotel stopped to buy beer to bring back to the hotel to play flip cup, which kinda happened, 2 on 2. Of course this wasn't the whole group...Jill, Amy, Ruchi, Greg, Andrew (who is now gone but was awesome), and I. Then bed time. Next morning got up at 8 am for breakfast and a little shopping before we went to San Pedro. We surprisingly felt great, no hangovers! Woo! Had waffles, cold waffles, and fresh OJ, which is always delicious. Then shopped and bought you all gifts!!! After the shopping spree we hopped into a boat taxi over to San Pedro to the same hotel we were in last weekend. Got to the kayaks again as soon as possible cause Andrew was going to leave at 3pm for Antigua to leave back to the states today. This is where things got interesting and completely awesome. We hung out on the boats for a while with our beers and pringles, attempted to have battles standing up on one of the kayaks...didn't work so well. Then someone had the idea to flag down one of the boat taxis to get them to tow us around in our kayaks...GUATEMALAN STYLE TUBING...and it worked! The guy stopped and tied all 3 kayaks to the boat and began to pull us but one of the kayaks tipped and got full of water so we just cut that one loose and all hopped into the 2 left. He towed us around for like 10 minutes, it was hilarious. Like, what the hell are we doing right now, tubing in kayaks behind a boat taxi in a lake surrounded by volcanoes in the middle of Guatemala. Though...things got lost. Greg and Andrew decided to try to hang on to the back of the kayaks and get pulled which looked like a lot of fun so of course Jill and I did it too...but in order to no lose our bottoms, we took them off and put them in the boats with the rest of the stuff...though, somehow Ruchi and Amy didn't realize that my dress, Jill's bottoms, and one of my flip flops got washed out of the kayak into the abyss of a lake never to be found again. Then jill fell off and the boat taxi driver didn't want to go back to get her, so Greg had to paddle out to her half naked ass. It was interesting but all worth it. Though I'll miss that dress. Jills camera also was found drenched in the kayak...we thought it was in the dry bag but, no, it sadlly was not. So we got done kayaking and had the money that our director had given us to spend on lunch after kayaking (the others in the group ate lunch first and went kayaking after us)...we spent our lunch money not on lunch, let's just say that. What else....we took naps later and then went to meet the group at this indian like restaurant for dinner. I had lasagna, it was delicious, and a molten lava chocolate thing, basically chocolate goo...The restaurant was cool, you sat around the tables on mats surrounded by pillows and a neat lamp hanging above, there were probably 10 tables under a hut with a roof of dried banana leave (I think)...nice music, great atmosphere. Then we did absolutely nothing that night but hang out in the hotel room. Next day up and had breakfast, were supposed to catch a chicken bus from San Pedro back home but there was a jesus parade going on on the road where our bus was supposed to be so Liz(coordinator) found a pick up truck for us all to squeeze into once again to take us to the highway where we'd catch a chicken bus...Piling people into the back of a pickup truck with bars is the norm here for transportation, we've done it quite often. The first time I thought it as kinda weird and scary but now I'm used to it and it's kinda like a ride and you get better views and there aren't people who smell squishing you and there's no horrible music blaring like in chicken buses. So, it ended up being better this way cause we got to see a gorgeous view of the lake and the volcanoes. Got back to Xela about 2pm and had lunch in the food court at the mall, always a treat! I had taco bell and it was perfect. That's pretty much it, just hung out at the school after that and did stuff online and watched part of Pulp Fiction, which by the way sucks and I have no idea why it's a "classic." I was sooo bored that I just turned it off. Can someone explain this to me? So, now I'm off to my house for lunch, and perhaps a siesta. Que les vaya bien, hasta pronto.