community chest

so here i am again at finca ixobel in poptun, the place where we saw the tarantula a few weeks ago. senor tarantula is alive and well, we spotted him trotting towards our room last night. after screaming for a bit and shining our torches on him, we made sure he was going the other way, then carried on home. we googled it today, and apparently tarantula bites can't kill you, but they can hurt a lot. hopefully no more sightings.

in other news, me and rebecca (the american girl who is studying at san jose with me) played monopoly today, which was a blast from the past, except this board was in american. we spent the morning and some of the afternoon doing our spanish homework, it's exhausting looking all those words up in the dictionary, there certainly are a lot of words in spanish. we then read our books and sat by the lake, but it's not such good weather so no swimming. lots of mosquito bites, i spent most of the night itching my foot, which has now swelled up like my ear did last week. it's been nice to eat proper food (ie pancakes and burgers) and not the fried plantains, eggs, rice and beans etc of the last week. even though these have also been nice.

our journey here on the bus yesterday was interesting, in that we checked with the bus driver a few times that he would drop us off at the finca, i'm sure he said he would, so we stayed on the bus past poptun. after a while i thought this is strange, it's only 5k south of poptun and we've been going for a while already, so did some rubbish spanish speaking and gesturing etc, and yes we had definitely gone past it a while ago. off we got and stood on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. thankfully we hadn't gone too far past it, and after a while one of the many minibus shuttle things that zoom up and down the country picking people up at random picked us up and dropped us nearer the finca. all the people on the bus were laughing at us, i guess we looked pretty lost and stupid when they found us. anyway all good travelling experience, and that's what you get for not speaking the language properly. it was a relief to get off the first bus as i had somehow got sat next to an evangelical christian. the conversation started quite innocently, he was asking me where i was from and did i like guatemala. next thing he was talking about europe and the euro. he asked did i know the history of the euro, turns out (according to him) it's all written about in the bible (la biblia), and so that's how you get from talking about europe to talking about the bible, clever hey. i told him i would spend the weekend reading la biblia, as he had told me that if i didn't believe in eternal life and jesus, then i was pretty much damned. i'll be damned, he might be right.

raining again now. time for dinner and reading more of our books. incidentally has anyone ever read anything by jorge luis borges? he writes short essays and poetry etc, quite bizarre - catchpole i think you'd like it, it reminded me of you a bit, you should look it up.

jim, i hear you've had your first order for a pair of boots, well done, and jo molloy happy birthday from the other day, and dad please send an explanation of the british economy (or what's left of it) for my complex spanish lesson conversations... i felt very stupid telling her i literally had no clue what the economy in my country was. any help appreciated. please make it simple though and only using the verbs 'to have' or 'to be', and don't include any passive or subjunctive forms please.

ciao xx