Tumbleweed

I've been in Quetzaltenango ("Xela"), Guatemala for a little over three weeks and Ginny's been here for a bit over two weeks now. We've been doing an immersive Spanish program to try to improve our Spanish as much as possible. We study Spanish one-on-one for five hours per day Monday - Friday in addition to speaking as much Spanish as possible in our homestay. It's working well as our Spanish has really improved leaps and bounds (well, at least mine has) since we arrived.  We have one more week left in the program so hopefully we continue to improve!  During my first two weeks in Xela, I stayed with my homestay family which was a very cool experience. I stayed with Maria (see photo below) and her family, which consisted of her husband Mario, her two adult daughters and their kids and five dogs! I ate all of my meals with the family and it felt really authentic. I was missing Ginny though so I moved over to her homestay last weekend which is a much less crowded...

It's been a while since my last blog post as we haven't been doing any international travel recently. That all changed a couple weeks ago when we flew down to Mexico for a visit. We hadn't been to Mexico for a couple years so we were really excited to visit one of our favorite places on earth. We started in Puerto Vallarta which is a great beach destination but not much of a cultural mecca so won't feature prominently in this post. The photo below of me on the rickshaw is the only shot from Puerto Vallarta. We enjoyed our time there but were ready to move on after a week as the temperatures were getting into the 80s and we had had enough of the beach.   The next stop on our itinerary was Mexico City, a place Ginny and I had not been to in more than thirty years. From our first walk around the city (pretty much our favorite activity anywhere we go), we were enraptured with the street life and the vibrancy of the city. We quickly got accustomed to eating mouth watering ta...