Padre y Madre y grandma y dave,
Everything is wonderful. I live in the rainforest. At night the trees light up with fireflies and voices rise from all around the woods. The Mayans start to sing when the sun goes down, and they sing for an hour, and you can hear it wherever you are because the voices echo off the hills. The lake is surrounded by three active volcanoes, and when hikers hike it their shoes melt from the heat of the lava. Last night before dawn, a small earthquake rumbled my cabin. Kirk and I share a small hut all to ourselves with a mosquito net and a red lightbulb. The town is tiny and everyone greets you with Hola, and sometimes Tu Es Mucho Guape, Señora. (you are very beautiful). I will be teaching choir, english and theatre to the niños. Today we played ¨Pato Pato Pollo¨´ – duck duck goose!
everything is relaxed and warm and almost no mosquitos. It is, however, scorpion season, and I haven´t seen one yet, but one girl killed had to kill three the moment she woke up, and another girl came crying to the director at midnight because one stung her. UPSIDE: Apparently a scorpion sting feels like nothing worse than a beesting, and hurts for about twenty minutes, and sometimes makes your tongue go numb, and the locals say it is good for your health to be stung by a scorpion because it adds five years to your life. I am off of Zoloft and doing just fine. I have daily chores and am getting used to being fairly dirty most of the time, but it´s really not bad. Again, as for the scenery, look at any prehistoric painting and that´s pretty much where I live, minus the dinosaurs (though I secretly hope they still exist and are lurking in the bushes). I am picking up Spanish like the little language sponge that I am, and dad, your wordless travel book is a godsend. Everyone is enormously friendly, calm and trusting. La Cambalacha is also enormously poor and need lots of help and everyone should donate $100 to them because when we got here they had to wait for us to pay them because they didn´t have enough money to buy food for everyone that night (they are without funding this year).
We picked up a traveler from Korea named David who just gave me a soothing speech about how I think a lot and it´s okay not to spend so much time thinking, because it prevents me from spreading my wings.
I think I agree.
Tonight we´re going to a Mayan sauna, meaning a sauna in the caves next to the lake. to get the the other towns around the lake, one takes a boat. There are lizards and butterflies and a kitty that falls asleep in your lap. I am learning how to relax. Also, banana flowers are so big I´m scared of standing underneath them because I feel like at any moment they´re going to open up like in Jumanji and eat my face. Pictures from Kirk´s camera coming soon.
XOXOXOXO and wishing I could transport all my loved ones here,
Blythe
