Travels with Mom and Dad

That´s right. My mom and dad came down to Guatemala last week and we had ourselves an adventure. We headed straight to Antigua when they arrived and spent a few days there enjoying the colonial city in all its goodness: Good food, ruins, a few museums, ziplining over a coffee plantation, Lenten festivities. From there we headed to Santiago on Lake Atitlan (called "the most beautiful lake in the world" by Aldous Huxley and a whole lot of other people) for a few days. We enjoyed the weather, played cards, rode horses up to a ridge and overlooked the whole lake, my dad and I sunk a kayak in the middle of the lake and got rescued (not that we weren´t gonna make it safe to land on our own, but it would have taken a long time) by some local fishermen in their clapboard boats. Adventuresome, simple, good, luxurious. We spent our last night in the capital at dinner with my host family. Both moms cried about the awesomeness of the other. It was a good time. Very nice to have some time off and see parts I hadn´t been to before. Here are the pictures from my camera. My dad will send some more soon.

Lent is a big deal in Latin America. Here is a vegetable design on the floor of the main cathedral in Antigua. They do stuff like this the whole 40 days.

All vegetable.

They carry these massive floats all through town. They´re so heavy that they have to trade carriers every block. They sway back and forth and side to side when stand in one place because it´s too darn heavy to stand still with it. See video below.

The guard.

The biggest float. I think I counted something like over 60 carriers.

My dear friends Dave and Jessi Lueck happened to be in the country as leaders on a youth group missions trip the same week! We met up on their last day in Antigua for lunch. It was inexpressably relieving to see these people.


That was last week. This week I´m working, and then next week... more vacation! Yep, pretty much the whole continent will be on vacation next week for Holy Week. I plan to go visit some caves/waterfalls with some friends from Church, go to my host family´s pineapple farm for a couple days, then go to the beach for a couple days with some other friends. THEN... the home stretch. But let´s not start counting just yet. More photos and updates to come soon.