Guatemala con los Padres 9/16/11

Dad posing in front of the national beer of Guatemala... Gallo. His goal is to find it in the states.

I surprisingly one a little stuffed animal, probably because I have such awesome hand-eye coordination (that was sarcasm, in case you didn't catch it...).

Mom playing a game that looked simple but wasn't. Sadly, we didn't win anything from this one.


After having breakfast at the hotel, we headed out to La Feria to celebrate Guatemala’s Independence day! Normally, I would have taken a microbus for about 3 quetzals, but we decided that taking a taxi would probably be a little more comfortable for all of us, so we payed the 40Q to head out to the fairgrounds, located about 15 minutes from the center of Xela.

We got there pretty early, around 9am, and initially not much was open. As we walked around, we saw people preparing their food tents and starting up their games and the rides. It looked a lot like any state fair in the united States, minus the 4H animal stuff and the hot dog and pie eating contests.

We hung out in the fair for about 2 hours. Mom and I played some games and won some awesome prizes. Leaving was a little weird, because we were clearly the three fish moving in the wrong direction…. everyone from Xela and other parts of Guatemala were on their way to the fair!

We considered taking a microbus back to Xela, but I couldn’t find the area with all of them and we happened upon a taxi much quicker. Once we got back to Xela, we didn’t have much to do. We weren’t hungry and I had pretty much shown them all the important places. We did a little bit more shopping, and then went to a restaurant/bar that overlooks parque central. I was pretty excited to finally figure out how to get up there… I had only been wondering about it for 2 months.

After some significant people watching (and trying to find and point out gringos), we headed back to the hotel. We packed everything up and went downstairs to wait for Byron to pick up mom and dad. He came early, and they were heading out of Xela around 1PM.














It was a great vacation! It was so much fun to see a new side of Guatemala (all the touristy sites that everyone talks about), spend time with the parents, and show them my life here. The week went by really quickly, and I can’t believe that my free week is over… it seemed so far away when I started this program.