Cultural Adaptation...

This month I was able to visit one of my officers in the tourist police - His name is Carlos Piñeda. He lives in Chiquimulia. A small town of 12,700 or so on the road to El Salvador.

His wife Maria and son David were very welcoming. They gave me the tour of town . Including showing me the calf being raised by their cousins in one of the nicer homes that I saw in the area. While my Spanish is far from perfected I have made progress this last year in Guatemala. But the dialects and word usage from one area to the next can be very different. Carlos was kind enough to translate my Spanish (such as it was) to the local dialect.

We took an extended tour of the area surrounding his city at the base of Volcano Ipala. This one is dormant. We went in the Trooper to an old finca from that has long since become as dormant as the volcano. The roads (or the lack of roads) gave us a run for our money. But the allure of why some one would choose to live on this mountain was very much alive. It was stunning.

The travel had no major snags. I was trying figure out the wierd rain patterns and then realized I was driving through the outer rain bands of Hurricane Dean.