Last week at Hotel Backpackers

Only two days left at Hotel Backpackers in servitude. We're both a little tired of people waving their empty beer bottles ( or sometimes not empty ) at us. All the people who work here are really nice and respectful but the same cannot be said about all the patrons. We may not be Chapinos but the sure treat us like we are. But working every night has really improved our spanish, so much that we are having real conversations about American politics, vegetarianism (though everyone still thinks we're completely loco!) and deadly spiders here and back home. Sadly, business has been very slow at the restaurant, but that did give us the chance to check out the latest novella from Mexico (Amor Real) and for Andy to play Sudoku with Edi. Tonight is the weekly barbeque, so it is sure to be bumping with Tourists who want to eat a gut full of meat for 65Q ( $9 ). That is the equivalent of six nights lodging so Chapinos, us and our hotel guests usually don't eat it.

Last night, I ( Andy ) spotted what looked like some big fish right near our room in the river. Some looked about two feet long and some of them were really skinny. Since they seem to feed off the surface we put a bobber on and baited the hook with cliff bars and then Bimbo® bread. First cast I got hung up on part of the framing that holds our room up. I had to climb out a small ledge to untangle it. I looked down and saw that the fish were not fish at all, they were eels! Rebecca cried out "Those are the shrieking eels!", "They always grow louder when they're about to feed on human flesh!" That didn't really happen but it should have. We have been hearing the eels for many nights but never saw them until last night. They feed on the surface and make a lot of noise as they slither around on top of the water. They don't seem to like bread though. As soon as we figure out what they do like to eat, we'll break out the Sushi set and make Unagi for everybody!



Two new volunteers arrived a couple days ago, one from Finland and one from France, which means two things; 1) There are a lot of good people who want to help the orphans of Guatemala and 2) WE GET TO GO TO CASA GUATEMALA FINALLY!! We had the choice of going straight to work at the orphanage for three more weeks or take a week descanso now and work at the orphanage for four weeks.... we talked about it for about 20 seconds and we decided to go to Livingston and hang by the Carribbean ocean for a week. We are going to have a groovy time so look forward to our next post everybody!