Hemos Llegado!

May 23, 2010

We have arrived. Our plane left at 7:30, and after a 2 hour layover in Houston, and a connecting flight at 11:30 (which didn’t leave until almost 12 because the pilot was in Cancun!), we made it to Guatemala and through customs and such by about 3:15. Before the plane to Houston, we sat in the gate and creeped on all of the other passengers, trying to figure out which of them would be spending the summer with us. We got two correct out of about six. The CASAS staff met us and we squashed 8 people into an extended cab pickup truck to drive to the campus. It was pretty close quarters. I ended up sitting next to a guy named Scott, incidentally, he was one of the two that we had correctly pegged as Mennonite. As it turns out, he is dating my friend Allison Yoder from Goshen, whom I had worked with the previous summer at Camp Friedenswald. Once we arrived at the compound, we had the rest of the afternoon off to hang out. We’ll be staying in the CASAS guesthouse for one night, and then moving in with our host family tomorrow. Eek! Our group went to a Wal-Mart type store across the way, just to see what was available, then played Apples-to-Apples for an hour or so, and then hung out on the patio for awhile, until it started raining. There’s also a Bluffton group here, for May term, and I met another friend-of-a-friend, Gregg Beitler, who is the roommate of my friend Bracton Eicher from camp. Turns out… Anyway, it’s about 8:30, and I’m SUPER tired. Tomorrow we take our placement exams, meet our families, and do other orientation-related stuff. Hasta luego!

P.S. Spanish keyboards are SO hard to type coherently on. The @ is alt+2, instead of shift+2, the _ is shift+?, and the ? is shift+_. So obnoxious!

P.P.S. Scott just stopped by and informed us that it's only 7:30. Not 8:30, like I had thought. So sleep is postponed for a bit, I guess...