New Year's Eve

If you're hoping to read up on all the cool Guatemalan customs that I'm partaking in tonight, prepare to be disappointed. Unless something really dramatic happens in the next four hours, I'll be laying in bed (hopefully dreaming comfortably) when midnight comes along. This week totally beat me up. On Wednesday I hiked up a volcano, then Friday morning I skipped class and helped some of the teachers move furniture into the new school. The lease was up at the other building they had, and they decided to move someplace a bit cheaper since they haven't had a lot of students lately. I had to move about thirty beds and fifty desks, then this morning I helped moved the rest of the stuff. Needless to say, I'm exhausted. The good news is, for helping Thursday the owner of the school brought me out for a really nice dinner and then since I helped today, as he was leaving he told me I can come back and stay at the school for free! Totally cool, I might cash that favor in when Jamie and Rob come to visit me in August.

Being with the moving guys was actually great practice for me. The only people that I've really interacted with here are people who's job it is to be patient with me: teachers, tour guides, etc. These were just regular moving guys that I was helping out and I was able to communicate pretty well with them. Of course the extent of our communications was pretty limited, I only needed to say "Hey, do you want this?" and "It's not heavy, I can do take it by myself" and very infrequently "Oh dear God, I'm going to drop this, help me, quick!" It was also pretty cool to hang with my teachers in a non-school setting. They're really good people, I'm definitely going to miss them when I leave next week (ahh!! next week!!).

I'm not crazy over the new place. It's older than the last house they were in, plus the lay out isn't as good. In our last place they had all the bedrooms in a separate part of the complex, it felt more like a business with an attached apartment building. Here it's definitely more like a house. The office is set up in the living room and all the bedrooms are upstairs. People need to knock on the front door to come in, in the last place there was a bell and the office could buzz people in. It's weird for me because now that I feel like I need to be listening for the door all the time in case someone comes when no one's in the school. I keep telling myself that it's not my job, but I can't help but feel like it's my responsibility when no one is in the office.

Right now there's only me and one other student here, an older man who sponsors a girl here in Guatemala. A lot of the other students left this morning, and three of them are away for the weekend. Unfortunately we only have a key to the iron gate in front of the school, not to the front door, so we need to keep it open all the time. I wouldn't normally worry about that except that the neighbor stopped by to let us know that they were robbed this afternoon, so now I want everything locked and bolted. The other student went out for New Years though and I have no idea what time he'll be getting back, so I need to leave the front door open for him. Lucky for me this house has a second iron gate built into the staircase leading up to the bedrooms, so I locked that. Now someone can get in but they can't get up to the bedrooms. Let them steal what they want from downstairs, I just don't want to wake up to some burglars standing over my bed.

So the big thing to do on New Years here is (you guessed it) set off fireworks! I'm anticipating an hours worth of them, and I'm glad that I have a window now (yay!) so I can watch them while I lay in bed. I'm really excited for what this next year is going to bring, and I love that this time next year I'll have a ton of new friends, speak a new language and be comfortable in my new job! (And I'll be getting to come back home!) Hope everyone's having an awesome New Years!!