A Picture Post

Wednesday, June 14th, 2006
Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala

So I just spent about an hour writing this really long post to explain to everyone what I´ve been up to for the last 8 days in Xela (pronounced shay-lah). I wrote what my home and family and school are like, and then the power was cut here and I lost my work. Since I´m too exhausted to spend another hour detailing life here in Xela, I´m just gonna throw up as many photos as I can for you guys.

I spent Monday through Friday night last week in Xela and got up early Saturday to head to Lago Atitlan with Meena and Michelle (two of my friends here who are my classmates at Emory Med in Atlanta). We spent the weekend in two charming lakeside towns, the first Panajaxel, and the second San Pedro La Laguna. It turns out that "la laguna" is very important because we took another bus to "San Pedro" and ended up going two hours in the wrong direction on Saturday morning, by chicken bus.

We had a great time at the lake and I´m going to detail it all and get you all up to date tomorrow in my next post. For now let me end by saying that Lago Atitlan is an AWESOME lake, way way up in the mountains, in the adjacent department (like a state) called Sololá. It´s about a mile high at the lake´s surface, and it literally fills an enourmous valley inbetween several volcanoes and many mountains. Because of this, mountains descend steeply into the lake, the dropoff is sharp, and the lake is very deep. Props to wikipedia for the facts and this photo, taken from the space shuttle:

At around 8 or 9 o´clock in this photo is Panajaxel where we started our journey. Some of the photos in this post are from the lancha (small motor boat) which ferried us directly across the lake to the right in the photo above, to the beautiful San Pedro.

Myself with Meena and Michelle, Escaping a torrential downpour in Pana

Morning photos from the roof of our hostel (above) and on the shore of the lake (below)