In case you stumble across this, I’d like to share that I’ve been writing an occasional post on the USAction blog, Aggressive Progressive.

Saludos,
Neil

it took me a while to realize i was having a hard time adjusting to life in dc. the three main differences:

• 1. the concept of time
  familiar with the idea of operating on island time? that’s how most of the country in guatemala rolls, and i was happy to begin to follow. dc is about as opposite as possible.
• 2. cost of living
  my favorite meal: in guatemala: $2, dc: $9
  haircut at my cornershop barber: $1.35/$10
  shave at cornershop barber: $0.75/$5
  bag full of farmer’s market produce: $2/$10
  monthly rent, with utilities: $107/$715
  four hour bus ride (my city to the big city): $8/$20
• 3. overstimulation
  in guatemala i was living in a city, which mostly felt like the “developed world,” but it was surrounded by mountains and volcanoes. and i could hike or hop on a bus to some natural wonders in less than an hour. dc is more developed, more advertising, technology, cars, people, parties, etc.

the silver lining…

1. my internal clock is better than before. i still get caught up in the go-go-go society, but not like before.

2. i can now earn money. i earned a tiny amount in guatemala, as a dj and a teacher, but it’s officially illegal for foreigners to earn money there. there simply aren’t enough jobs for the people of guatemala. i look forward to saving money towards buying another condo/house or traveling or something.

3. i missed the diverse opportunities of entertainment that dc has to offer and i missed my records and record stores. more than anything, i missed my community of friends and family. i developed a great community of friends in guatemala, but dc is home. and i’m happy to be back.

when i arrived more than a year ago, my plan was to live or travel in latin america for a year. i planned to spend the first two months in guatemala, but was open for what came next.

soon after arriving, i made some good friends, a couple of whom were also foreigners and fell in love with xela and stayed longer than they originally intended. it didn’t take long to realize i would do the same.

i have a lot of friends here that remind me of friends in dc. my life-style is also very similar, except for the luxury that i barely need to work.

i have two more weeks to wrap up my life here, which mostly includes studying more spanish, being with friends, some volunteer work and dj-ing. it will be an interesting transition to be back in dc, especially once i am back to full-time work.

* * *

my brother came to visit a couple weeks ago. it was great to have time to catch up with my bro and show him a bit of my life here. i was happy to introduce him to my girlfriend, too.

he’s a teacher and just took a long weekend, so we went to lake atitlan for one night and then to antigua to see the old city and climb the pacaya volcano. here’s my pacaya video, if you didn’t see it before.

the lava was flowing well and we walked onto the volcanic rock and stuck our walking sticks in the lava. it felt like flowing peanut butter. or… what was that marshmallow spread called?

i was rarely a reader while growing up and often found creative ways to do book reports.

i try not to have regrets, but do realize i’m not well-read and am a slow reader. that being said, let’s get to the post…

Here’s how it works:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog.

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (a friend just loaned it to me)
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan am reading now
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt- have read 4 times
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole (??? one of the few books i gave up on)
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

once again, feel free to comment or email me suggestions for future reads. here are a few of my favorites that didn’t make the list:

The Story of B – Daniel Quinn
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Illusions – Richard Bach
Stranger in a Strangeland – Robert A. Heinlein

fortunately, the rainy season here is not bad. every day, bearing a storm passing thru, there is a good stretch of sunshine or at least a break in the rainfall.

the rainy season starts at the end of may and every summer there are two weeks of canicula (sp?), almost no rain and a bit more warmth.

my sister told me how hot it’s been in dc. i have two good friends visiting for two weeks, and they just happened to choose a time that feels like a spring break from dc. i met up with them at lake atitlan and they’re hanging in xela with me for a few days.

august will be a summer vacation for me. i’ve decided to come back to guatemala in september.

i’m still enjoying this time, learning spanish, doing yoga, working less. i now have a paid job working on a website (for a club in dc) and am doing some volunteer work (both computer stuff and dj-ing).

hope all is well and if anyone is looking for a house-sitter in august or has a guest room craving a warm body, please let me know.

we spent one day hiking along the canyon edge (on the south side) to various lookout points and the following day we hiked a few miles into the canyon.

i was blown away by the size and colors. it was also cool to learn how old all the layers of earth are that we were looking at. ~another good opportunity to put things in perspective.

they have free entertainment each evening and we enjoyed a talk about ravens. a park ranger wove some facts about the lives of ravens into some fun stories that could be enjoyed by all ages.

ravens have a special place in my heart because my sister once called me ‘brother raven’ in a poem and that became my original dj name.

we saw a couple ravens do some acrobatic flying, as mentioned in the talk the night before, and one took a few minutes to pose for pictures.

after seeing so much beauty that guatemala has to offer, it was cool to see something in the u.s.

view more of my grand canyon photos.

in other good news, my sister is visiting me. we went to tikal, guatemala city, xela and the hot springs called fuentes georginas. today we leave for antigua. it has been wonderful to have her here.

next up, my brother arrives this thursday for a 2 week visit.

hope all is well for you and i hope to see you in august. i’m not sure if i’ll be home for good or returning to guatemala for a few more months. vamos a ver… (we shall see)

sharena, julie and i followed our trip to tikal with a visit to semuc champey. i was looking forward to this for a while, as two good friends called it their favorite place in guatemala.

in the local mayan language*, semuc champey means where the river goes underground. that’s exactly what it is, but as a bonus, the earth that covers the river is a limestone bridge that forms a series of pools with cool river water. *guatemala formally recognizes 21 different mayan languages.

there are trails through the woods offering different hikes to the pools and the temperature is nice and hot — perfect for a swim.

we also enjoyed rope swings into the adjacent river and went caving. the caves were cool because they use candle-light and you have to swim with one hand above water (yes, my candle went out at least once) and we later blew out our candles and jumped into pools in almost total darkness.

afterward, we jumped off a high bridge into the river, which was also great for swimming. julie and sharena went tubing, but i took a nap.

the hostel/hotel where we stayed was beautiful, laid-back and located close to everything. it’s called ‘el portal’ and is well stocked with hammocks, but sharena had just bought a new one so we strung it up in our room to bring our “quality of life” even higher.

el portal does not have a phone, cell phone coverage or any computers and the electricity was only on during two short segments of the day. it was nice to be “off the grid.”

after a couple days we were joined by our friend susan and a day later i stayed back, while the three of them continued on to antigua, so i could spend a couple days with my friend and former housemate, katie.

another great time in a wonderful place with good friends… and a reminder of how lucky i am to be on this trip.

view more photos, especially if you ever wondered what a growing pineapple or chocolate (aka cocoa beans) looks like.

it is the largest of the ancient ruined cities of the Maya civilization and resides in a lowland rainforest.

sharena, my former room-mate, her friend julie and i went twice. once in the afternoon and sunrise the next day. it’s really hot mid-day and they currently let you use your ticket over a 24 hour time-span.

the first day, we paid a guide to allow us to watch the sunset and listen to the birds and animals. sunrise and sunset are active times for the permanent residents (wildlife) of tikal.

on our way out, our guide spotted a tarantula on the trail we were walking. we watched it climb onto a tree and then noticed a scorpion on the same trunk. this was a bit creepy, especially considering we were wearing flip flops or sandals and a good friend, dj kokopelli of xela, got stung by a scorpion a few months ago. (he’s fine)

we also saw some raccoon/cat lookin’ animal that i forget the name of and some amazing fireflies. they were big, had two spots that glow for a good while and you can hear them when they fly past your head. the next day we saw spider monkies and toocans. some people go on walking night tours to see pumas.

during the sunrise tour the next day, we learned that some of the temples were constructed in part to track the time of the year. the mayans were/are incredibly advanced in many ways, including math, astrology and the passage of time. the path of sun shadows thru tikal can determine time of year and we were there right before the beginning of the rainy season. it started raining a couple days later.

unlike the copan ruins in honduras, tikal is still being excavated. it was really cool to see mounds of earth and trees covering some temples/buildings and imagine this is how it looked when tikal was discovered. one of the workers encountered a tarantula and invited us to hold it. sharena and i did, pretty exciting.

check out the wikipedia page on tikal if you’d like to read more.

view more of my photos.

here’s a picture julie took that shows a temple from a peep hole in what was probably living quarters.

we had a dinner party for my room-mate´s birthday that ended up being a little bigger than planned (about 25 people showed up) but still ended by 11 pm. our landlord, who lives there, told me the next day we couldn’t have any more parties. bummer!

my other gripe is that if i have a guest spend the night, i have to pay. i’m hoping both of my brothers will be visiting in the next couple months and i’d rather be in a place that is more along the lines of “mi casa es tu casa”, my house is your house.

enough of the negatives, a big reason i want to move is that xela’s yoga studio is located in a large group house and they have an open room! unlimited yoga is included in rent and i am planning to go to class three or four times a week. ~something i’ve wanted to do for a long time.