Jess' Travel Blog Summer 2006

Merry Christmas everyone!

Well, I´ve been here for a crazy three weeks and have so much more news than I will be able to write in the brief minutes I have available to me...I´m in Ciudad Quesedad doing some last minute Christmas shopping and there is only one bus home to San Marcos so I can´t be late!

Highlights have included...

Going to a rodeo, attending a wedding, singing spanish kareoke, eating, learning to salsa and dance with the locals, painting faces and playing pinata at the primary school´graduation, learning to make empanadas and tomalis, digging a hole 1.8m deep for a septic tank in heavy clay, walking across a swaying wooden bridge to work every morning, getting up to go to work at 5am every morning, not having a fridge and struggling to keep our food fresh, horse riding, being driven everywhere in the back of a truck, following a machete wielding local into the rainforest to see howler monkeys, seeing toucans fly overhead and watching the vultures endlessly circle, eating a pig killed fresh that morning, and having the locals try and gross us our by holding the head up as a mask, developing machete envy as they are useful for everything here! Eating far too many oranges, pinapples, limes and sweet lemons, having to filter all our water, learning to love cold showers, developing very expressive body language to supplement my slowly improving spanish, tasting the local´s home brewed coconut spirit, drinking from coconuts cut straight from the tree, and being kept awake by roosters with a twisted idea of what morning is, riding horses, being chased by cows and slathering myself in DEET.

As you can tell, it´s been pretty busy.

I am living with a group of 11 others, mostly girls and mostly from Australia in comparatively luxurious accomodation. We have an indoor sink and a shower with a shower head! Both are absolute indulgences, although because the water here is pumped from wells there is sometimes a gap between when the holding tank runs out and the pump starts again. But after a hard day´s work in the sun, and an hour´s walk home from the work site, that trickle of a shower feels heavenly!

We´re working hard, but playing hard too, and have been embraced by the community who have generously welcomed us into their midst.

My love to all, have to run!

XOX Jess

P.S. If you want to see more photos check out my Photo Gallery, i've asked Andrew to upload them for me.