We´re Here!

Hello all my lovely friends and family!

We arrived last night without too many hitches, checked bags in tow (yay!) , and a man with a sign at the aiport with a sign saying Clayton Hiles. Our hostel is wonderful once you´re inside, though everything from outside looks a little odd... the buildings all run together and doors sort of appear at random with no external differentiation between while home or store is which. The room is great, we have an ensuite bathroom and a big clean room. There´s a lovely view from the patio where we had breakfast, the terrain is very interesting here, I´ll try to upload pictures. Weather has been nice thus far, though the clouds are rolling in now.

There have been minor, expected problems. Firstly, altitude sickness is an odd feeling. We slept about 9 hours last night, spent about 3 hours walking about (saw a very cool church) and then came back exhausted. Totally beat, we were walking sllooooowwww by the end. So we had about a 3 hour nap and now we´re going again. It´s craziness, there´s a constant tightness behind the eyes that really encourages the closing of them. And a bit of cottonmouth, which is no big deal, we just need to find a nearby helado vendor (icecream, super popular here). Anyways, these symptoms will go away within a few days. Lots of water and lots of sleep will help. And the odd rum and coke can´t hurt too much.

The real issue is the language, the accent is off the map! We are so lucky to have a bit of a base understanding... we can bumble along a bit, I don´t know why we´d do without that. Today we were sitting in this little park outside a church on a bench and a woman came up and started speaking very quickly and pointing to her bum. At first we thought she wanted to sit, but eventually (with lots of hand gestures) we figured out she thought we should sit on the ground because the bench was too hard on the bum, it was very cute. Anyways, lessons are NEEDED, the accent is so far off of what we learned. We could perhaps get through our trip the language we have, getting where we need to be, but it will be much more fun if we get a better grasp of the language. We can get lessons through our hostel.

Quick summary for those unwilling to read it all: the people are nice, the hostel is great, the language is hard, and the rum is yummy. Lots of love to everyone! Thanks for checking our blog!

-Dawn & Clayton