More visitors, volcanoes and a cooking class!

We have been so lucky and grateful to have so many great visitors this year!! Tara, Matt and Grace visited us over Thanksgiving, and this blog post is terribly late. Right after their visit, Sadie and I went back to MD (high school entrance exams), then we returned and went back to Spanish class for a week, then I was sick for a while, and then we had our next round of visitors. Well, you know how it goes! But I wanted to get back to this visit because these photos and experiences need to be shared.

We spent a few days in and around Antigua and one of the highlights here was Cerveceria Catorce. This is a favorite place of ours, a brewery with food, live music, and lovely grounds including a great playground and a great view of Volcan de Fuego. They also have a trolley that they drove down to Guatemala from Kansas or Nebraska and which they now use as a shuttle between the Cerveceria and Antigua.

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Once at the Cerveceria, we didn’t see much of Willa and Grace who were checking out the playground.

And then there’s the view. On a clear night, THIS is what you can see!

We also took a trip to Lago Atitlan, which again is my favorite of all the places we have visited in Guatemala.

This was the first time we took a boat out on the lake and visited different villages.

The following day, Tara, Brett, Sadie and I went back across the lake to take a cooking class in San Pedro. We met our teacher and went to the market to buy everything we needed.

Anita started this business a few years ago when she was working for a tourist agency at the lake, and a visitor wanted to learn to make some Guatemalan dishes, but there wasn’t anything like that at the Lake. So Anita offered to show her how. And they must have had a wonderful time because this tourist then wrote a stellar review of Anita’s cooking class, even though it was only intended as a one-time thing. And soon afterwards someone else called her asking to book a cooking class, but she said that there wasn’t one. However, the review was so positive that she kept getting requests. At first she just did it on the side, but now she has a full-fledged business that supports her family plus several other women who she hires to help with clean up as well as some of the vendors at the market. Another amazing thing to me was that she learned English by interacting with North American tourists. Her English is quite good. She gave us instructions mostly in English, but when we sat down during the meal, we spoke mostly in Spanish. Tourism is definitely her lifeline however, we asked about the downside and she also spoke about the foreigners who have bought or leased a lot of the lakeside property for very low amounts because the local people don’t always understand how the property values have increased so much in a short time.

And while we were cooking up a storm, Matt, Grace and Willa were at the nature reserve by the hotel. It was so great that the next morning we all went back! The highlight was seeing the coatis. We could feed them bananas and they came right up to them because there was a hole in the fence. The kids were totally enthralled. (The next time we came, the hole had been repaired and you could no longer feed them. Maybe too many visitors got bitten?)