Today after class we visited a macadamia nut farm. It was a few miles outside of town. We took a bus with an adminstrator with our school. He is really great. I guess he gives tours and accompanies students on tours, but we seem to be almost the only students right now. IT is still the rainy season and not as many tourists and students as there will be later. So it is awesome, we get personalized tours! He speaks english, mas o menos. I try not to speak spanish to him all the time, because my dad can{t really understand. But I try to speak spanish most of the time with whoever I meet. So we went to this farm today. It is beautiful, and very laid-back. It is rainy season here, which i think is like 5 months long. everything is lush and verdant. he has all kinds of trees, and the nut trees grow all over. The owner has been there I think 15 years, I forget. He{s from california and is pretty . . . anti-establishment, I guess. Maybe bordering on anarchist. He has very strong ideas about genetically modified plants and food crops (they are bad), paying taxes (bad) and buying houses (bad. he and his wife have lived in a trailor on the farm for who knows how long). He gave us samples of their macadamian nuts and they were delicious, and chocolate from nearby, which was awesome, and some assistants there gave us face messages with nut oil. He gave us a little tour of the little factory, where they husk or whatever the nuts, sort them by size and dry them. some they dip in boiling salt water for 30 seconds to season, and they are awesome. It{s an environmental cause for this guy, because he said the nut shells absorb huge quantities of carbon, and also a social program. This is a much more lucrative crop than corn or coffee, and they give many sapling trees to poor rural pueblos en guatemala. It was really fun. We had a typical guatemalan dish for lunch, like a spicy red soup with chicken and this small green squash like a pumpkin, called pepian. Que rico!
He said you{re only as big as the love in your heart.

So we found a taxi on the street and negotiated a price with him. His car was clunking along a little bit, but I didn´t worry. But after 15 min he pulls over to this gas station with other taxis in it and tells us we are going to take a more comfortable taxi. So he gives us to this other taxi driver, and we´re just like ¨uh, ok.¨ The traffic is insane, like Peru, but one thing I never saw in peru is not just packed-full buses but people hanging on the outside of the bus! I asked my teacher if they have to pay, too and she said of course they pay! They are paying for the transportation, not the comfort! We were driving at rush hour, so our 45min route took 2 hours, mas o menos. Our taxi driver had a hard time finding the house of the family we are staying with. He stopped and asked a few police officers around town. By this point it was dark and raining. He didn´t get stressed out, though. Finally we found it. Our family is really sweet. They have a little tienda in the front of their house, so there are often people around. Our teachers are awesome. Classes are one-on-one, and both my dad and i love out professors. We came in today, saturday, for class as well, even though usually there is no class and we had to get different professors. They were really efficient and good, as well. We were going to take an overnight bus to Tikal, this MAyan ruin 8 or 12 or 13 hours away, depending on who you ask or when you, I guess. But we have been advised that a huge storm is coming in that way from honduras, so we should wait till next weekend. I hope next weekend is sunnny and the storm has passed. ´My brain hurts from conjugating verbs. It is rainy today. Yesterday was sunny and a guy from the school gave us a tour around the town. We saw two white-shirted jehovah´s witnesses, two white boys, white shirts, riding their bikes. They are everywhere! We saw a pair in our layover in miami, too. There are beautiful ruins of cathedrals mixed in with the town. We walked through the central park, and this little girl followed me for 5 minutes, trying to sell me some colorful cloths. I talked to her a little bit, asked her her name and if she went to school. She was nine.

Yesterday we went to US air express, instead of us air, but they checked us in and we went through security with without waiting in line. It was awesome. We landed in Miami and took a taxi to little havana, calle ocho. In the airport, I heard a guy speaking creole on the phone and I was so proud of being able to recognize some words because I am a dork. Then we were talking to our taxi driver about the different communities in Miami and he said the haitian community is the second largest after the cuban community and that he is haitian. I studied creole for like a week, so I told him ´´Mweh vle aprann kreole.´´ I want to learn creole, and he was entertained by that. He took us to the restaurant I had read about, EL Pub, en calle ocho. IT has a big rooster out front, really big, but we forgot to take a picture. We got awesome rice and beans and plantains and cuban coffee. IT is rainy one minute then sunny the next, so we bought an 8 dollar umbrella for the downpour and walked along this street, where evereything is in spanish and everything is speaking spanish. It´s stereotypical cuban guys smoking cigars everywhere and we pass this assocation of dominoe players, and one guy invites us in in Spanish, while also pointing to an english sign that said trespassers could be arrested. It was kind of a mixed message so we kept moving along. We were looking for shoes for my dad. We kept walking and came out of little havana into rich and fancy miami and it started raining harder and harder but it was warm so it was okay. The wind was blowing so hard it blew our umbrella inside out but my dad kept trying to fix it. It was hilarious. Then we got to this shoe store, super fancy three story glass building and we walk in, dripping wet with our mangled, mangled umbrella that my dad refuses to give up. We find him some cool black sneakers, the coolest shoes he´s ever worn. THe clerk helping us is cuban and only lived in miami two years and was really helpful. More helpful then if she was from here, i think.
We get to guatemala while it is still daylight, and I don´t want to look like such a tourist as to ask our language school to send us a taxi, so we go out to get our own taxi. ok, the bell rang to go start classes! more later