A Week In the Life

It's a times like this when I am quite glad of the fact that my mother does not read my blog. In fact she may not even be aware of it's existence. For starters she would probably berate for abhorent blog keeping, but then again, I said from the start that I wasn't very good at this.

The challenge seems all too much like a distant memory these days. It was an epic few days, where we battled tropical storms, paddled until it felt like our arms were going to fall off, but where we also managed to float along beside our boats for a couple of hours, and enjoyed a few well deserved end-of-a-hard-day bevies. I have a post about the Kayak challenge waiting to be posted, I just need to finish writing it...

In other news, this evening I finally did something I have been meaning to do for the last five months or so. Close to my house is one of the poshest hotels in Antigua, and every Thursday night they play host to a living legend, Iganicio Borell of the Buena Vista Social Club.

Before I moved to Guatemala I knew very little about Latin American Culture, but I had (thanks to some univeristy firends) heard of the BVSC. Now strictly speaking old Ignacio is not Guatemalan at all, he's from Havana, but for a long time now Antigua has been his home.  It was fantastic to sit and soak up the atmosphere, sadly you can't just sit and soak it up when you're watching somone play in a restaurtant, and the evening came at an epic price by Guatemalan standards. Unless I can find somewhere slightly more budget friendly to see him play in the future it will have to to be a (very) iregular treat.

In contrast last Thursday was a pretty crazy night here in Antigua. Most of the time we live in a bit of a bubble. Last week that bubble burst, and in a brutal spate of attacks 7 people were stabbed and injured on the streets of the town. What I have found hardest to handle has been the epic under-reporting of these incidents. Luckily no one was killed, and admitedly my Spanish is still not quite up to Newspaper standards, but the reporting of the incidents was sparse at best, verging on non-existence. In fact the only mention of it on the web was from a CNN Iwitness report, and some quite incoherent ramblings by a fellow expat, who spends a lot os his time in local drinking establishments staring at the bottom of his glass and slowly overfilling his ash tray.

The more I learn about this country, the more hilarious I find it's resident expats. The Thorn Tree Travel Forum is a prime example of this. I occasionally venture into when something like this happens, or when I'm looking for a hotel to stay in... I'd never actually become a member though as it seems that the entire population of people who frequent these 'boards' live in some kind of crazy alternate reality to me. They live in one of the most beautiful cities on the continent, seemingly have a LOT of spare time and disposable income, and yet all they can do is snipe, at each other! I have images of bearded older men nursing their ilegal mescal whilst typing ferociously into their macbook pros, whilst an enitre community carries on underneath their noses...