Puppy Love

i wuv him.

Serendipity

Comida

It's always a good day when Sandra invites us over for a meal. These are shots from a breakfast she made a couple weeks ago before Julissa moved back to the States. We are so happy we met Julissa and her mom, Sanda, soon upon our arrival. They've been key people in helping us have an incredible experience here. And lucky for us, Sanda is an amazing chef! She owned a restaurant here in Chimaltenango for a good chunk of time. She lived in New Orleans for almost 20 years and brought a lot of tips and taste tricks from her time there and can piece together anything. We've been fortunate to experience her take on Guatemalan dishes. The breakfast shown was poached eggs on corn tortillas, with a homemade salsa, fried potatoes and freshly made papaya juice. First image was our appetizer - figs and a delicious miscellaneous fruit local to Guate. And of course, a meal isn't complete without a cup of joe. Sanda brews the best coffee, too. She owns a coffee farm and we went picking with her a few weeks ago! We might have also got carried away and brought 200+ bananas back from the farm, too. So this is our early exclamation of excitement for our dinner at Sandra's tonight. Don't worry, I'll document it for you. No doubt it will be picture-worthy.

Yesterday

We love it here

Yes, yes we do. We're fortunate to work with a great group of people, we have time and means to travel on the weekends and we get to experience something new every week.

Last weekend we road tripped to San Pedro with our friend, Juli. We spent a night at a colorful hostel, ate good food, watched the sun set over Lake Atitlan and listened to live music.

Not the hostel we stayed in, but where the live music was the night before. More photos of this trip were caught on film!

Tuesday night salsa dancing with Juli in Antigua

...and last night's sunset view from our roof

xx

our little tank

Guatemalan Christmas: Part 1

We came to the coast to spend Christmas with Megan's family in Coatepeque and to experience our first non-white Christmas, no pun intended.

Here are a few pics from yesterday! We'll enjoy some sun for you if you enjoy the snow for us. 

Feliz Navidad! 

hey there

What have you all been up to lately? Sadly we were internet-less for the past week and haven't been able to update. But we're back on track with new internet coming this week so we can post and chat and skype much more!

Lately, I've been trying to get creative with my cooking. We're a bit limited by ingredients here, either because they aren't sold in the market or at the stores, or everything I need is quite separated in town. Breakfast has been my favorite. I recently decided that I need to document these meals better, they are really pretty! Thanks to my amazing mama for sending me gluten free flour and coconut oil, I've been baking plenty of cookies, pancakes and granola.

How pretty is this homemade orange jam? (Courtesy of our new friends). It tastes like Christmas. They're going to show us how to make it soon and I'm planning on documenting for a tutorial. Trust me, you'll want to try it out. This would be the perfect present!

Hello from the top of Volcán San Pedro

Preview of our trip to Panachel and San Pedro, two towns on opposite shores of Lake Atitlán.

Kent is writing a few words to go with this full post. What I can tell you now is this: I can still barely walk because of this hike. And the boat ride back to Panachel from San Pedro (45 minutes) was the most (laughably) frightened I have ever been.

The last image is the view of the volcano from Panachel. The town San Pedro is tucked just to the bottom right of the volcano.

collection

 

I was very excited to start my collection of colorful tapestries and dishes here. This week we went to a few must-see places in Guate. I'm happy we were able to go to Panajachel and Chichicastenango, I knew Kent would love them both. We had a great time. Our preview for Panajachel is up next, but this post is to showcase our finds from Chichicastenango where the biggest market in Central America is held. Can you believe these handmade cups were only $3.75 each?! And it was in a store where bargaining wasn't even an option. Our hand-stitched tablecloth was only $12. Winning. Here's to colorful mornings.

dawn to dusk

A few snapshots of a typical day, from morning to evening. Relaxing, warm weather, yummy food. Happy place.

Greetings from Guate!

Hi everyone! We arrived to our new home two weeks ago and are so happy we made the decision to come here. While we have been getting situated in our nice, cozy place, trying to acquaint ourselves with our neighborhood, the city, the market and the yummiest (and safest) food vendors, we have also been focusing on our spanish. Rosetta Stone has been our good friend (but she also drives us crazy on occasion).

The move has begun!

One flight down, two to go! We will be in Guate tomorrow and will be posting some updates once we get settled.

These photos pretty much sum up our lives lately. By the time we arrive in Guate tomorrow, I will have been on 15 flights in the past three weeks....I'm so ready to not see an airport for a long while.
See you soon, new home ♡

We're moving! (UPDATE)

photo by meg. guatemala '08

Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. 
– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

thanks to Kent for writing our story...

Five days.  I had exactly five days to move the majority of our possessions to Boise, find and sign on an apartment, and hopefully make some good leads on possible job opportunities.  Ready for a change of scenery and driven by our not-so-secret love of Boise, we decided the City of Trees was to be our next stop in life.

 

Venturing through the parched  landscape of the Palouse with no AC, my only solace came from the free Styrofoam cups of gas station ice I frequently applied to my forehead, arms, and back.  Each cup of ice quickly melted and evaporated off my body, much like the burning Oregon countryside fading into the atmosphere.  Without radio or an iPod hookup, I relied on a 99 cent thrift store book-on-tape, Native American Wisdom, to distract me from my thoughts.  “It does not require many words to speak the truth,” the sayings of Chief Joseph resonated as I raced down the four lane highway that cuts through the land his people “sold” to the government.  After fighting to return home for 25 years he died in exile, never to see the country of his forefathers again.  The doctor said he died “of a broken heart.”

My few days as a Boise resident were brief, yet exhilarating, uneventful, yet life changing.  Rolling into the city I set my clock forward an hour and changed all my preset radio stations to the local channels.  I oriented myself with all the important landmarks one must become familiar with in a new city: the bank, the library, the cheapest gas stations, and the local super markets.  I found the biking trails, checked out the Green Belt, and even met the infamous former governor of Idaho, Cecil Andrus.  Yup, I was on my way to becoming a full-fledged Idahoan.  As I wandered up and down the one-way streets of Bo-Do I envisioned all of the great adventures in store for us there.

And yet, these ideas were surprisingly unsettling.  The more I familiarized myself with everything, the more disconnected I felt.  It wasn’t the city, the people, the neighborhoods, or the atmosphere.  Anyone would be lucky to live in such a wonderful place.  It was the fact that my actions, my desires, were not in alignment with my dreams.  These conscious pricks worked on my mind like a metronome, but were brushed aside quickly.

 After several days of apartment hustling I went by one of the major hospitals in the area to get an update on the job applications I had submitted.  Dressed in a snappy suit and carrying my resume I introduced myself to the HR director in hopes to set myself apart from the other candidates.  “I’m sorry sir, but everything must be done online.  We don’t accept paper resumes and we’ll contact you if we want to do an in person interview,” she immediately replied.  “Oh, okay,” I proceeded, “well, my goal in stopping by was to help put a face with the applications and hopefully sit down with someone to discuss my qualifications.”  She insisted. “Again, sir, there is nothing here for you.”  There is nothing here for me?  Perplexed, I thanked her and left.

 

Later that night I was lying on a friends’ bed pondering my situation and decided to read a small e-book my brother-in-law had sent me called Impossible: The Manifesto by Joel Runyon.   The author makes the case that life is an adventure that is not to be contained by societal norms nor ruled by the wishes of others.  Essentially, it’s a call to action.  It’s a challenge to push your limits and live the life that you have always envisioned.  Through his own words, Runyon put a modern spin on classic transcendentalist principles, and although I had read the works of Thoreau, Emerson, and Muir, it wasn’t until this moment that I realized I had been sacrificing my dreams to satisfy someone else’s ideas about life.  And then it hit me.  I can’t move here, not now.  If we were ever going to do something different, this was the time. We had no apartment contract, no car payment, and no demanding jobs.  I instantly realized just how easy a big change could be. Beginning to panic, I called Megan and made my case for why we should take advantage of that freedom.

“I think we should drop everything and move to Guatemala,” I blurted.  Then, in typical Megan fashion and without hesitation she said, “Let’s do it.”  For years we had dreamed of moving to Guatemala to be closer to her family, to polish our Spanish, and to have an adventure.  However, this dream had been perpetually on hold as we fulfilled our scholarly duties.  And when school was not interfering there was always some other reason why we shouldn’t go—not enough money, time, security, etc.  But as we talked we realized that these limitations were not real.  They were illusions that we created to justify our inaction. This recognition gave us the confidence we needed to make the change.

Within a week we sold 90 percent of our belongings, bought one-way plane tickets to Guatemala City, and landed employment opportunities with a non-profit education foundation in Chimaltenango, Guatemala doing photography, marketing and web design.  We will be living there until next May and will be coming back in time for Megan’s wedding season. We still moved out of Spokane, but not to Boise.  Megan’s family was kind enough to offer a place to stay for a couple months, so we are currently living in Heber City, Utah.  In the mean time, I am working on a sheep farm hauling hay and moving pipe, and Megan is cleaning houses in between photo shoots.  Nothing too glamorous, but it’s refreshing.  We've always appreciated change in all its forms.

Thanks for all the excitement and support we've received.  We are fortunate to have such wonderful family and friends.  We look forward to staying in touch!

Cheers,

Kent & Meg