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We arrived into Guatemala City late at night and it was already strange how familiar the place felt.  We think we finally have become professional vagabonds – new country, ain’t no thang!  After our adventure in India, we had that experience as the bar for traveling in developing countries.  So we were taken by surprise when we arrived in Guatemala City – very metropolitan with several state-of-the art malls and business centers.  Clean, no trash, no animals wondering in the streets, no touts clamoring us to buy this or that.  Sure, there have been a few people so far trying to sell things, but when you say “no”, they just walk away!  Well, that’s new.

We stayed at this hostel in Zona Viva (Guatemalan cities are sectioned into zones), which provided a good assortment of restaurants, bars, and other nightlife within walking distance.  Right away, we met these two guys from none other than Ohio and we spent the next night hanging around the zone with them.  It was a nice introduction to Guatemala.

On Sunday we took a bus out to Queltztanango (Xela) where our language school will be.  Our host family is really nice, just “mama” and “papa” and their son who, interestingly enough, is in medical school.  Mama agreed to make vegetarian meals for me, which is very kind of her, since it’s a pretty big challenge in Latin America to make meatless meals.  We’ve already had some good conversation, with us speaking terrible Spanish – just saying nouns and no real sentences, and our family speaking some English to us.  They said all Spanish begins tomorrow!

Tomorrow begins the second half of our year long journey!  Although we can't believe it's already at the half-way point, it feels like we've really been able to take our time and treasure all our experiences so far.  It's a new feeling, not being so pressed for time, but we have found that no matter how many extra days or weeks we spend at each place, it still doesn't seem like enough time!  We already miss our friends and family and wish we could have had more time with everyone.

Now we're off to Guatemala to learn us some Espanol (there should be a flying tortilla over that 'n' in Espanol, but we haven't figured out how to make that character on our keyboard yet)!  We'll be there until the middle of February, then we'll fly to Lima, Peru and spend several weeks in Peru.  We will fly back to Nuevo Mexico in April.  By that point, we will probably be throwing in little Spanish words into our postings at an astonishingly irritating frequency, so bear with us.  That should pass as our fluency drops back off over the next few months... 

After our amazing courses in yoga and Buddhism/meditation in India, we really wanted to investigate and challenge ourselves even more with these topics.  We had hoped to find a monastery or retreat to do during April-May, but this ended up not being a time that many places accept students/residents, and the ones that do, are WAY expensive - basically like going to a resort.  So, after a little brainstorming, we ended up arranging to stay at a friend's cabin outside of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.  [To those of you not from New Mexico: yes, there's really a town there named after a game show from the 1960's.  They got like $50,000 or something from the game show to change their name.  We know, it's kind of bizarre.]  We'll do our own little personal retreat out in the desert and hope to make a dent in our book stack (which now is a challenge, since we just got a Kindle for Christmas!!  Our book collection just keeps growing...), and delve deeper into our spirituality.  We intend to keep silent most of the time, but when we do need to speak, we'll be practicing our Spanish!  Or, Espanol, rather.

So, here's to Part II of the Sweetums and Sweetpea Adventure!  Stay tuned for some more adventures!  Adios, amigos!