Bottling apple cider

The red thing is a corker for champagne bottles. Unfortunately I missed that one in action!

The Cathedral de Santiago at night

Casa Encantada

Antigua has some really fabulous hotels. This is where we stayed the last weekend. Some of the rooms are accessed by walking across candlelit stone pathways in a pond! We were sad we missed the delicious-sounding breakfast in the morning.

Cooking class in Antigua

I never posted pictures from our last day/night in Antigua. We stayed there the night before we left Guatemala because it is safer and more fun than Guatemala City, where the airport is.

Holland was interested in taking a Guatemalan cooking class, so we took on at El Frijol Feliz (the Happy Bean)

So happy Holland is home!

Last Day

Here is the view from my desk, where Ana Maria and I sit every afternoon and study. The intersection down below is quite busy, so I have a good view of all the action below.

Holland and I are all packed up and ready to take a shuttle into Antigua in the morning. Although we've already spent a weekend in Antigua, we are planning to spend tomorrow night there before flying out of Guatemala City in the morning. It's supposedly about a 45 minute taxi drive. We are not staying in Guatemala City because it's not particularly safe for tourists and also because we want to take a cooking class in Antigua.

Although Holland kind of dragged me here, I've actually had a really wonderful month and am very sad to leave. I like our host family a lot. I am amazed at how much progress my Spanish has made over the month. Although I took it for two years in high school, it was pretty much non-existent when I got here. Now I can hold a comprehensible (although somewhat labored) conversation. I wish I had more time to learn more....and to get a little more relaxation in! I've wondered many times during residency how much time it would take for me to start feeling like a human being again and now I know: about a month. I've begun to feel like a normal person again for the first time since med school. I can think about non-medical things that I want to do and what I want to do with my life. I can talk without saying negative things! And for that, I am terrifically grateful.

Hair

Most of the various Mayan groups have some sort of cloth head/hair piece that is worn by the women of that particular town. Here is one of the more popular ones around Xela, which involves cloth woven into braids.