Christmas Pre-Vactation

Hey, you guys may have noticed by my video of the week post last night that I have returned from Guatemala. I did so much stuff I could probably write a 10-page essay on it, but frankly I don't have that long of an attention span, and I've most likely forgotten 60% of it by now. I'll tell what I remember though, and warning, it may still be very long.

Okay, where to start... I suppose I'll start at the beginning of the week.

-----DAY 1 -----

On Tuesday morning, we all woke up at 3:00 AM to go to the airport, because our plane left at 6:00. We put all our stuff in the car and left for the airport. We did all that stuff, and waited for the plane. That flight was fairly short; we landed in Atlanta some time around 7:30. We then transferred to our next flight to Guatemala City. During that flight, we got the "pleasure" of watching the movie Hairspray. Four words: Stupid waste of time. It's about this "large" (to be politically correct) girl who wants to dance on this TV show, but they all think she's to big. Blah, blah, blah. It's a musical. I hate musicals. Jeez. The whole movie she's just going around, singing about how she wants to sing and dance, there's someone who tries to stop her, etc. Basically, (although I can see how girls would like it more,) I don't recommend it unless you like musicals.

Anyway, back to the story. The flight was from like 8:30 to 2:00 or something like that, so they served "lunch" on the plane. Notice the quotation marks. Yeah. Airplane food. They served chicken and pasta, but looking at them you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The guy next to me got the chicken, (which looked nothing like it,) but then switched it with the pasta, (which actually did look like pasta, but still nasty.) He ended up not eating that, (understandably,) just the salad and stuff that came with it. Anyway, we landed in Guatemala City at like 2:00 or something, and went to grab our baggage. That took a while, because they didn't unload our plane right away. We left the airport and looked around for our driver, but we eventually found him. His name was Renando (I think that's how you spell that). Outside there were a bunch of Guatemalans who make their money off of tips from helping people with their bags. One of them grabbed the bags out of our hands, put them in the truck, and asked for a tip. Yeah. My dad gave him 5 quetzales, which is only about $0.80. (By the way, when I typed quetzales earlier, the Firefox spell check caught it, and one of the suggestions was racquetball... ^_^ ) We got in the van and drove through these mountains and valleys, along these crazy roads. Guatemalan driving is crazy (I'll talk about that in a second). One valley we drove down I think must have been more than a mile deep. We eventually made it to the Posada de los Volcanes hotel though, so we could finally rest. The rooms were fairly small, but otherwise it was nice. We then asked the hotel guy (who spoke fairly good English) where we could go to eat. He recommended somewhere (I don't remember the name). We went there; I got the fried chicken. It was pretty good, but a little bland. While we were eating, people kept coming up to us trying to sell us jewelry and shirts and stuff. That was kinda annoying. Overall, though, the food was good.

We started heading back to the hotel, but we stopped by a few shops on the way home. Mostly all of us got something. I got a beaded snake, my brother got a beaded thing that said "Guatemala" on it, my sister got a beaded dolphin for her friend, my uncle got a mask, my grandma got some jewelry, and my parents may have gotten something too, I don't remember. On our way back, there were a bunch of people walking around trying to sell us stuff. Two of them were really persistent; a lady and her son. They both tried to sell us stuff at the restaurant, and they followed us all the way to the ATM, which was about 5 blocks away. My mom bought a doll from the kid just to make him go away, but he didn't. While my dad, my siblings and I were in the ATM room, my mom and my uncle were outside repeatedly saying "no gracias" (no thank you) to try to make them leave. When the boy was convinced that they wasn't buying any more, he cursed them (in perfect English, they say) and left. This ticked my mom off, obviously. We went back to the hotel. We took showers and turned on the TV. There wasn't anything interesting, so we watched the end of Snakes on a Plane. I didn't see enough to be able to comment much, but the violence and language would definitely give me enough information to not recommend it to kids. We then went to bed.

Wow. I was not expecting myself to be able to remember that much of day 1. Wow. Anyway...

Oh yeah, I forgot to talk about the driving. Basically, it's crazy. The are all really good drivers, to the point that they are all really confident. They do crazy things there, and still crashes are very rare there. When they pass other vehicles, they sometimes leave less than an inch between the two cars. And yet, they don't crash or even get scratched unless it is completely impossible to stop. It's hard to explain unless you've personally experienced it, so I'll just leave it at that.

-----DAY 2-----

There were roosters in the back yard of a house next to the hotel. I'm going to help out the Mythbusters with a few myths about roosters:

Myth 1: Rooster crows can wake you up
CONFIRMED
Not only do they wake you up, they keep you up until they stop crowing.

Myth 2: Roosters crow because the sun comes up
BUSTED
Unless the sun came up at 3 in the morning and I missed it, they most certainly do not

Myth 3: Roosters are the most annoying birds ever and their crow makes you want to shoot them
CONFIRMED CONFIRMED CONFIRMED CONFIRMED CONFIRMED CONFIRMED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh my gosh I wanted to kill those blasted roosters!!!

As you may have gathered from my myth busting, the roosters were annoying. They started crowing at 3 in the morning, and their crow sounds like somebody's being murdered! Man, I hated them.

So yeah. I woke up at 3, and tried to sleep until 7 when I was officially woken up. We went to breakfast at a place that I believe was called The Deli (not an amazingly creative name). I got pancakes and orange juice. The orange juice was HUGE!!!!! It came in this giant glass that must have been 5 or 6 inches across.

We then went down to the beach of Lake Atitlan to go to a boat tour. We met this guy named Ibraham who made us some pens with our names on them. We then got on the boat (the Cristalina, I believe) and we went to three different villages surrounding the lake.

The first one was a bunch of shops on a giant hill. They didn't have much, but we did get some Gatorade. ^_^ We had 2 hours at each village, including the travel to get there, so we left that village at 11.

The second village had a bunch more shops with some cool stuff. Since we had to leave that village at 1, we were getting hungry. We went to a shop and I got some Doritos (they turned out to be spicy cheese or something like that). Those were pretty good.

At 1, we went to the third village, but the trip took a while so we got there at like 2:30. It was another village on a hill. There were only like 4 shops, so we didn't do much there. We went back to the boat at 3, and the we went back to the hotel. We had some Goldfish and watched TV until dinner.

At around 6 we headed down to the place we had gone the day before, and on the way I got this cool hourglass thing. This time we all partially split a big dinner plate with 2 steaks, 2 pieces of chicken, 2 pork chops, and 4 sausages. That was GOOD! About halfway during the meal, the kid who had been trying to sell us stuff the day before (the one who cursed at my mom and my uncle) asked if he could have some chicken. We gave him some, and then we gave him a box of the rest of the meat to take home to his family. My mom started being all philosophical saying stuff like "bless those who curse you" and stuff. Haha. We did a little more shopping that night, and then we went to bed.

-----DAY 3-----

Early the next morning we left for Chichi, one of the major shopping cities. We got there at around 10, and we were told that we had until 3 to shop. We looked around and got a few things, but nothing amazing. One interesting thing I noticed was all of the people carrying around chickens... At about 1 we went to a steakhouse to eat (I believe it was something like the Las Brasas Steakhouse... maybe...) Basically everyone hated their food, except my uncle and me. My uncle liked his, (I think,) and I thought mine was okay. Everyone else did not like it. But at least it was food. We continued to shop, we found some interesting things. We found a guy who had switchblades (the kind that pop straight out), and my uncle was going to get one, but then we thought that they may be illegal in the US, so he didn't. I got a cool knife that was like a switchblade that swings open instead of sliding out. We went back to the van and waited until 3. We then left for Antigua.

After about 2 hours we got there, and we checked into the hotel. We got a really nice and big room. We were all hungry, so we went to Burger King (yes, fast food!) I thought that they has chicken fries, (because papas fritas means french fries, so I thought pollo frito meant chicken fries,) but it turned out they didn't so they gave me chicken nuggets instead. Those were okay, but nut nearly as good as chicken fries. We then got ice cream, (yes, they had ice cream at Burger King,) which was pretty good. We then went to the hotel and went to bed.

-----DAY 4-----

Let's see, we woke up and went to McDonald's for breakfast. I had pancakes, (or as they call them, "Hotcakes"), which were really good. We went to the market, and we got some stuff. We all got some beaded key chains, some Christmas ornaments, etc. My brother got a little banjo thing, and my sister got a little drum. My uncle got like 5 more masks, which he had to take back to the hotel in the middle of our shopping. We went to Pollo Compero for lunch. They have amazing chicken. I also found out that there are Pollo Compero's in the US, too, in places like San Fransisco, Houston, Chicago, etc. We had ice cream there, which was really good.

My brother and I went back to the hotel while everybody else went shopping some more. I watched The Benchwarmers and Talladega Knights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. The Benchwarmers was great, I was laughing all the way through it, and Talladega Knights, was pretty good, but not as good. They got back from shopping then we went to dinner at Burger King with these two girls we met. They told us that Pollo Frito meant fried chicken, not chicken fries. Haha. I had chicken nuggets again. We then went to the hotel and slept.

-----DAY 5-----

Early in the morning, we got packed up and ready to go to Guatemala City. We also ate breakfast at the hotel. I had pancakes, (again,) but they weren't very good. I tried to post a comment on The Vanishing Blog, but I couldn't log in because my dad's PocketPC couldn't interpret the button as a link; it just thought it was a picture. (On a side note, it's amazing how many internet cafes and WiFi hotspots there are in Guatemala...) While we were waiting, this car that was parked outside our hotel kept going off... I believe that it went off 41 times before we drove away. ^_^

After about 2 hours we arrived at the Grand Tikal Futura hotel. O_O It was the biggest hotel I've ever been in!!!!! It was 11 stories, with 3 glass elevators in the middle. It also had a gym, indoor swimming pool, and a mall! It was soooooooooooo cool. But, unfortunately, (ruining the happiness,) we found out that the people using our room were not going to check out until 3. It was some time around 11. We had to wait in the lobby for 4 hours. So, we looked around at the pool and stuff, went up on the roof (they let you do that), went to the 11th floor and took pictures, rode the elevator, played DS, etc. It was extremely boring, and the fact that we hadn't eaten yet didn't help. To make things worse, we were told we couldn't eat until Vannessa got there. (By the way, for those who don't know, the reason we were in Guatemala was because we're adopting her. But that's another story; ask my mom...) They said they would bring her at 12:30, but we ended up waiting until like 2:30 or something like that.

After they arrived, (and we got our room) we went to the food court in the mall to eat. It was packed. Even though it was 3:00, it was completely stuffed. It's a miracle that my Grandma got us some tables. We got pizza from Pizza Hut, and it was really good. After that, we went back to our room and watched Star Wars V and VI. And it was in English! My sister wanted to go swimming, so we went down to the pool, but we found out it was closed. The sign said that it closed at 21:00, but I had a brain fart and read it as 11:00 PM (which would be 23:00 for those of you who don't understand military time). So I was telling people that it closed at 11 when it really closed at 9. Whoops. I do stuff like that all the time. O_o So anyway my sister kept blaming it on me, but my mom was trying to convince her that it would have been to cold anyway... So then we went to bed.

-----DAY 6-----

We woke up fairly late because we didn't have to do anything that day. We went to McDonald's for breakfast, and I had Hotcakes again (they're my favorite!) We looked around the mall, and I found out that they sell Wii's for twice the price there! We watched more TV, and for lunch we had Domino's/Taco Bell. Supposedly, the Domino's was supposed to be the best Domino's in the world, but everybody in my family says it wasn't very good. I thought the taco's were good though. They needed a little more cheese, but they were still pretty good.

Now we were getting bored, so we decided to mess around on the elevator. We went from top to bottom a bunch of times, jumped when it started, danced, sat down, etc. A few times my brother decided to hit all of the buttons, but later that night one of the hotel workers jokingly said "Are you the guys who have been hitting all the buttons on the elevators? The security guards were looking for you." I knew he was being sarcastic, but I got his drift that he wanted us to cut it out, so we didn't do that anymore.

We watched even more TV, and then we decided to go swimming. It was the coldest water ever. Even the hot tubs were freezing. Apparently, the hot tubs weren't working, and the hot tubs were what kept the pool warm (there was a pipe from one hot tub into the pool). There were just getting ready to fix it; we came a little too early. We didn't stay there extremely long due to the temperature.

I'm losing track of the order of what happened, but some time this day we were forced to take our Christmas pictures...

We went back to the rooms and played with Play-Doh (it's amazing what you will resort to when you're bored). I made a few things and stuff. Yeah...

Then we had Pollo Compero for dinner. After that we watched even more TV and went to bed.

-----DAY 7-----

We woke up, ate McDonald's (yet again), and looked at the rest of the mall. I got a big stuffed Mario, which I thought was pretty cool. I guess we watched more TV and stuff (that's really all there is to do). We got Pollo Compero for lunch and did some other stuff... etc. We were really bored.

We went swimming again, (when I say we I mean my siblings, not me,) and again the water was freezing, but this time the guy was doing repairs. He got the hot tubs running again, but I didn't have my swimsuit so I couldn't get in. (BTW, while they were fixing the hot tubs, the water level was lowered. The hot tubs have these buttons to start the jets. Because of the low water level, when these people in this one hot tub near where we were sitting tried to turn on their jets, it sprayed all over where we were sitting. Luckily, I was somewhere else, but my parents and my Grandma weren't so lucky; they got sprayed. That was pretty funny.) We stayed there until dinner. We got some Pizza Hut, but again the food court was full so we went to our room to eat. We watched more TV and went to bed.

-----DAY 8-----

Yay, the final day. We got up early, packed our stuff, ate McDonald's, (for the final time,) and waited. We had to wait for our shuttle to the airport. It came, we went to the airport, and our plane left at (I believe) 1:30. We had lunch on the plane, and this time it was better. I got the chicken. It was pretty good. The movie on the flight was Arctic Tale. It was just an over-dramatized documentary like March of the Penguins, except instead of penguins, it was polar bears and walruses (or is it walrusi? lol). Blah blah, global warming in destroying their home, blah blah. I mean sure, being environmentally friendly is great and all, but read this post on The Vanishing Blog if you really want to know about global warming.

Anyway, we landed in Atlanta at about 6, and we got on our next flight. It was fairly short. We arrived in St. Louis some time around 8:30, and then we went home. I posted the weekly video, then I went to bed.

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Here I sit now. This is the longest post I have ever written, and hopefully (for your sake as well as mine) is the longest I ever will write. I woke up at 9 this morning, started writing, played in the snow for an hour, wrote some more, had lunch, went to a class, got back, wrote more, went to church, got back, and wrote the rest. I've probably been writing for a total of 6 hours. I hope that it hasn't taken you that long to read it.

I commend you if you've read all the way through this. I could've written more, if I could remember it. If you skipped to the end to see what I said, go back and read the whole thing, you cheater! lol

Post stats:
6 pages
3,458 words
14,626 characters (no spaces)
18,126 characters (with spaces)
323 lines

Wow, it ended up almost being a 10-page essay anyway!

Whew...

Now off to bed...

And remember...

Don't drink the water!!