My last days in Guatemala
Posted on: January 22, 2012
Hi, this is Carks signing in. I am home, and I am happy to be home, to see all my friends and to see my cats.
Five days ago we were in Tikal and we went to the grand plaza and climbed Temple II (that’s a two in Roman numerals), but I already told you about that.
Four days ago we were in Tikal, and we hiked up to Temple IV (that’s a four) and climbed to the top. We hiked there in the dark at four in the morning, because we wanted to see the sunrise from where they filmed Star Wars. We were the only ones there at the top for about two hours, but we didn’t see the sunrise because there were too many clouds. We heard the howler monkeys wake up, though. We came back down, and when we were hiking back it started raining and we got soaked but my sister was singing anyway. Then we had to pack up and get on a bus to Guatemala City.
Three days ago we were in a hotel called the Casa Grande in Guatemala City, it was a mansion, it was big and fancy. We went to the zoo, we saw animals like hippotamuses, giraffes, zebras, lions, tigers, coatis, monkeys, things like otters called nutrias, jaguars, toucans, parrots, pheasants, macaws, a komodo dragon, turtles, baboons with babies, camels, spider monkeys with babies, a white tiger, ocelot kittens (an ocelot is a type of wild cat), owls, vultures, hawks, pelicans.
Two days ago we were on an airplane from Guatemala to Atlanta. We got on the plane, it was boring, I just technically watched TV. Then we landed and got another plane, that one flew from Atlanta to Ohio. And when we got to the airport we got our luggage and went outside and waited for my aunt to pick us up, we looked everywhere and then when me and my mom were coming down the escalator we saw her. And then she drove us home. It was cold, I was prepared for summer but it was winter. There was snow on the ground.
This is Carks, signing O-U-T out, ffoorreevveerr!!!!!!
Carks in Tikal
Posted on: January 17, 2012
- In: Family Travel | Guatemala | Kid Blog | kid travel blog
- 3 Comments
January 15, 2012
We are in Tikal, which is a place with tombs and temples and palaces built by the Mayans more than a thousand years ago. The buildings are made of rocks, and ashes and rubber hold the rocks together. We came to Tikal to see where they filmed Star Wars, and to enjoy ourselves, and because our ancestors built this place.
Temples are made in a pyramid shape, with four sides square at the bottom, and they’re really tall and have rock stairs. The archaeologists don’t want you climbing on the rock stairs, so you get to the top by wood stairs. When you get to the top one of them has rooms at the top and you can go in but the rooms are empty. Some of the temples have rooms at the top that you can’t go in, they have a fence across and I don’t know why, maybe because the archaeologists are working. When we get to the top of a pyramid or the highest they let you go, me and my sister sit on the rock stairs while my dad takes pictures and looks at things in the binoculars.
We climbed up two or three or five temples, my sister says five. We climbed one of the temples three times up and down on the wooden stairs, because me and my sister were bored because my parents were taking too long taking pictures.
Today we had our lunch on the stone bleachers where you would watch a ballgame called pic-a-tosh that the royalties, the kings and princes, would play. You play it with a wood ball covered with rubber but you can’t use your hands, only your elbows and knees and feet. The ball court looked like a small garden, it had grass around it and in the middle, and on two sides there were stone walls that were slanted.
We saw coatis, one was in the plaza between the pyramids begging for food. The coatis look like raccoons, with tails like lemurs that curl at the end and are really long. Yesterday we saw a whole flock of coatis, and I was the first one to see them, there were seventeen and some were babies, and they crossed the road in front of us and we stopped for them and took pictures.
Yesterday we saw monkeys in the jungle, spider monkeys. They had long tails that they used to swing with, and they used their hands, and we saw one baby with all the adult monkeys. The baby was swinging on its mom’s back. We also saw spider monkeys over the swimming pool at our hotel, there were two that were swinging over to a tree to go to bed because it was getting dark.
We saw a flock of toucans eating fruit in a tree, when we were walking back home to our hotel. We saw some turkeys but they look different than Ohio turkeys, we didn’t see any big tail feathers and their feathers are baby-blue colored on their heads and necks and their other feathers are black and brown and green, green especially on their wings.
For our meals we have chicken crepes, or pasta, or an American Breakfast – which is scrambled eggs, bacon and a muffin. Tonight I think I’ll have chicken crepes. This is Carks, signing out.
Hi, this is Carks. I am excited for January 19th because that’s when I get home and everyone’s going to be happy. I’m happy to get home too because I get to see my cat, and I miss her.
On New Years’ Eve me and my sister got these headbands, they’re not just headbands, they have bunny ears or horns or Angry Bird heads sticking up, and there’s a heart-shaped switch in the top and when you switch it on they light up. It’s very cool, well, says my mom. We saw these headbands on lots of other kids on the street, and we bought them from people selling them on the street. That’s all about the headbands.
I have something that you guys probably can’t do: I can bounce a broomstick on my foot. You guys can try to practice it between now and when I get home, and see if you can do it, too.
Me and my sister have school for four hours every day this week, which makes me happy because it’s shorter than school in Ohio. It’s Spanish school, we learn verbs, we play games sometimes like Bananagrams, and today we went shopping at the fire station. That’s where they sell second-hand things for traje – the traditional clothes people wear around here – on Tuesdays and Fridays in the driveway.
When we get to school we get to have a cup of coffee with sugar with our teachers, and another cup of coffee when we get a break halfway, but the second cup is only a half cup. At break time we also have sweet bread.
The door of no return
Posted on: January 5, 2012
A few days ago we went on a hike to Cerro de Oro. First we had to take a kind of boat called a lancha from Panajachel to Santiago, which took a half an hour. When we got there we had to walk up past the market until me and my teacher saw a pick-up truck and my sister’s teacher asked the driver if he could take us to the place on the volcano where we were going to hike. There was no space in the front of the pick-up, so we had to ride in the back, standing up, and it was crowded.
It wasn’t a real volcano all by itself, but it was on the side of big volcano, Volcan Toliman, and it was called Cerro de Oro, which looks like an elephant but its name means “small mountain of gold.” We didn’t find any gold there, but we did see a rock formation in the shape of a monkey that was all black from where people built fires on it because of ceremonies they had there.
I found a tooth there, on the ground, it was a little bloody at the end and it was sort of white but it was mostly dirty. I don’t know what it was from, I was too scared to pick it up, and I just left it there.
We saw two iguanas, one had silver-blue scales on its neck, and the other was purple. They were bigger than my shoe and they were hanging out behind a rock together. People here eat iguanas, they sell them in the market on Sundays.
We saw the land below, and the lake, and flowers, and a cave. There’s supposed to be a door, where the people here hid their gold when the Spanish were looking for it. They say that if you go in the door now, you never come back out. We didn’t see the door. If we go back and find the door, I’m going to bring a jetpack, and some rope, and some armor, and some Ninja stuff so I can go in and take care of whatever it is that’s keeping people.
Happy 2012!
Posted on: January 1, 2012
Last night we went to a party at a beach at the lake. We got invited because it was our friend who sells coffee that my dad buys at his Crossroad Café. It was already dark when we arrived, and not many people were there, and I fell asleep in my dad’s lap while we waited for fireworks. Then some other people came in a chicken bus. There was some chips there, and some Japanese food but I didn’t get any of it.
Then they announced they would start the fireworks. We had some friends there from Ohio. The fireworks were colorful and loud, and they lasted a long time. There were some fireworks in the trees, and they blew off some branches. Some were different colors, purple, gold, blue, red, and green. They had spinners that were supposed to be 2012, but they didn’t spin at the same time, and they knocked over the whole sign with the 2012 into the water but the spinners kept going they didn’t go out. That was the end of the fireworks. They were better than the Fourth of July fireworks back in Ohio.
Then we walked home along the shore, which was weird, because we had to cross through this place where you couldn’t touch the water because it smelled bad. We got to a bridge that was made of some tires and pieces of boards, and we crossed it but it wasn’t tippy.
On the way home we saw fire balloons. In the sky they looked like little fireballs, they went with the wind. They are made of tissue paper and a piece of cotton and a match. We saw like forty or more.
After that we went to the roof of our apartment, where there was food and a bunch of people, and fireworks. The fireworks were boring because they were small. There were volcanoes that were shaped like a cone, and you lighted the top until you see sparks, then you quickly set it down and run – they explode with a fountain in green, red, and white. Also I held a huge stick that you quickly light and hold up to the sky, and after a minute flares come out and it vibrates when it shoots the flares out. A flare come out, and about a minute later another one comes out, and then another one, different colors, there was a lot of flares, I didn’t keep count I was just enjoying them.
I stayed up until one o’clock. Fireworks started all around us at twelve, we saw big ones and little ones, colorful ones and bright ones, some loud ones and some quiet ones, some fountains. We saw some curved ones, when you shoot them they curve up and leave a trail and then they explode over houses. The fireworks were all around our hotel. When there weren’t so many fireworks anymore we went downstairs and went to bed.
Christmas Eve and fireworks
Posted on: December 31, 2011
- In: Family Travel | Guatemala | Kid Blog | kid travel blog
- 2 Comments
On Christmas Eve night here in Panajachel there was a parade that I spotted first from our balcony, and so my sister and I ran down to the street. Santa was riding a fire truck and he threw down a ball to me. Two girls were throwing out candy from the fire truck, too, and my sister got candy but I didn’t have any.
After we had dinner we watched a movie, it was The Polar Express, it had to do with a Christmas train and we got to watch it in English. Every other time, we have to watch movies and TV in Spanish. Then my sister and I went to bed. Then our parents woke us up at 12 midnight because of the fireworks, they said look at the fireworks! Then Daddy suggested why don’t we go up on the roof, so we went up on the roof and we saw two other people from another apartment up there, who spoke English. So we talked to them, and we went back down to get the sparklers my Mom bought, and we shared our sparklers with them.
We could see fireworks, it was like a firework cage to be on our roof. There was fireworks surrounding us on all sides. There were some of the kind that just go up and flash and make noise, and there were a lot of the kind that make a lot of noise down on the street, and there were lots of the kind that go high and are colorful and explode into lots of colors, these were in Christmas colors, green and gold and red and blue and white. The fireworks lasted a really long time, until one o’clock.
Then we came downstairs and opened presents. I got a hat that I asked for, and a hot-pink monkey shirt that I wanted also, and I got a necklace that I didn’t want. I gave to my dad a knife and I gave my sister peacock earrings, and me and my sister gave my mom a chocolate bar and a notebook cover made of special Guatemala cloth. Some of these things I bought with my own money, which I get for an allowance each week, not in dollars but in Q, which stands for quetzales which is the kind of money they have here. But I’m going to save the rest of my allowance from now on so I can get a hundred dollars when I get back home and go to the bank and exchange my quetzales for dollars. It takes about 8 quetzales to make a dollar.
The ball I got from Santa broke a couple days after Christmas, but I got a big blue spiky ball which I wish I could take home with me, I bought it with my own quetzales.
The long and winding road
Posted on: December 20, 2011
I went with my dad to a village called Tierra Linda, which means “pretty land” in English. I didn’t think the land was pretty but the walk back down the mountain was pretty. It was a really long drive and very winding and uphill to get there. At the village there wasn’t much more than a dusty road and a couple of houses. The houses were made of concrete, and one house had lots of pigs and cows and goats and one pig was stuck on the roof and looked like it had been there for years.
Dad wanted to go there to look at a construction site, because he’s a geologist and a teacher and he wants to learn how to make earthquake resistant buildings. Buildings fall down in an earthquake more easy if they’re big, or if they don’t have straight metal bars inside the concrete.
A family is building this building we looked at, and they gave us bread like muffins and Coca Cola for our drink. This family was halfway done with the building, they only had to add the roof and the door and some paint. They did have the metal bars in their concrete, I could tell because the bars were sticking out the top where they will add the roof.
While Dad was looking at the building I held the ladder for him as he went up to look at the top. When he was done, we were ready to go home, but the truck that took us up there wasn’t back yet, so we had to walk. We were really far up in the mountains, and we had to walk all the way down into Panajachel. The mountain was steep but the path was zigzaggy so it didn’t feel too steep. We walked down a lot faster than we drove up.
I picked the title of this blog because the road really was long and windy and because it’s a Beatles song.
- In: Family Travel | Guatemala | Kid Blog | kid travel blog
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Since my last post, when my sister was sick, I got sick and then my mom got sick, too. But we’re all getting better now and it’s back to work!
Mostly we have been in Panajachel, but we also went to Mazatenango to see my birthmother again because she broke her wrist. We hired a private bus to take us there, and it took four hours driving around the volcano crater and getting higher and higher and higher, and then we headed south and went lower and lower and lower. Up higher they grow corn, and down lower they grow sugar cane and rubber trees, because of changes in the weather like its cooler up higher and warmer down lower.
On the roads there are lots of holes. And there are cows in the road, and sugar cane that drops off the trucks. At one part of the road we turned off the engine and then the driver lifted his foot off the brake and the car slowly by itself rolled up the hill without anyone pushing anything. This place is called the Mysterious Hill, and everybody tries it to see if it works.
Our driver took us to Pollo Campero, which is a chicken place kind of like Kentucky Fried Chicken, and they had a playplace, and my birthfamily met us there but they were a few minutes late. After lunch we met my 19-year-old brother. It was confusing because we had a translator who was named Carlos, and I was Carlos, and my brother’s name is Carlos! After we met my brother we went to their house and we went in the back yard and played soccer. There was a really long hallway with a gate at the end, so the gate was one goal and the other end was the other goal. The ground was not grass, it was dirt, and that made it easier to play, but the dust kept flying up.
I think turf is easiest to play soccer on, because there’s no mud and no dirt, but you can get hurt easier. We drive by soccer games here sometimes, and people look really serious about it, but there aren’t very many soccer fields and they sometimes play on basketball courts because of that. There aren’t very many soccer fields because there’s not much grass – in the towns everything is concrete or stones, and outside the towns they grow things everywhere.
On the way back it got really dark and we thought it was really late but it was only 6:30.
Back in Panajachel
Posted on: November 30, 2011
Yesterday I stayed at home and read books and played on the computer, because my sister was sick and there was nothing fun to do.
Except that for part of the morning I had a friend. Her name is Azucena, and you say it like “as-sue-SAY-na.” She has one brother and three sisters and her parents run a tienda that’s right next to the lemonade stand which is close by our apartment. Their tienda sells clothes and other stuff but A was too scared to peek in all the way today when we went to buy shoelaces and so I don’t know what else they sell. We didn’t get shoelaces. My mom thinks they sell shoes.
Azucena and I played hide-and-seek and tag on the apartment stairs. She taught us the word for hiccups when my mom had hiccups, it’s higo, and she taught us how to cure the hiccups a new way. You plug your ears with your thumbs and then you pinch your nose with your pinkies and then breathe in air. It works, because my mom tried it.
For hide and seek I hid up and down the stairs. There are statues and pictures in the stairs and so we had to be careful. We went up on the roof, and up there is nothing much just lawn chairs and beach chairs and a table and plants and a solar collector that collects the sun and uses it to make our hot water. There’s a metal bird, really big, almost as tall as me, and it rocks back and forth and the beak poked Azucena and she got a big scratch so we went downstairs and Daddy got out his first aid kit and got her a bandaid.
My mom pulled out my last feather today and now I don’t know how I’m gonna fly. It hurt when she pulled it out, but she thought it was just from my pillow and not from my wings. I might be an Animorph. Yikes! What if I am?
Carks’ adventure on the beach
Posted on: November 29, 2011
Last week we went to the beach, at a place named El Tulate. Our hotel was on an island there, a sandy island with coconut trees and banana trees. We got there on a lancha, but the ride was fast, like a snap, because the island isn’t very far from the shore.
When we first got there we walked on the beach for a couple minutes and then we went swimming in the swimming pool because it was getting dark and my mom was afraid we would be swept out to sea.
In the middle of the night, my dad got up to go to the bathroom and when he was walking back to bed he stepped on something and it bit him. Then he turned on the light and he saw a scorpion on the floor where he had stepped on it! So the scorpion had stung him. He got his first aid kit out and tried to see if there was a stinger in his foot but there wasn’t. Scorpions don’t have stingers, but they have poison.
The next day me and my dad and my sister went out to the ocean in the morning, and we dived under big waves and jumped over small waves. On the beach we saw crabs, shells in some places, and jellyfish in some places. Then we went and dried off, got our clothes on and went to lunch.
For lunch we walked down the beach to a place where there were lots of other people, but they weren’t tourists they were locals. There were coconuts for sale for four quetzales, the man would cut the coconuts on one side first with a machete and then a smaller cut on the other side and the smaller cut opened a hole where you could poke a straw through to drink the coconut milk. There were pigs running around on the beach and under the tables looking for food. We got fish for lunch, A got one half and I got the other, she got the tail and I got the head.
Then we walked through town looking for an ATM but we didn’t find one. We took a tuk-tuk to the ATM in the next town.
carks 