Thursday, January 3, 2008

Happy New Year 2008!

Well it is not quite January 1 to wish everyone a happy new year, but we expect it is close enough. Lisa and I had a great week the past week with my mom and stepdad. We actually did not do much some days but that was kind of nice. Unfortunately for Lisa she still had to work from Wednesday to Friday on Christmas week.

On Saturday of this last week we headed to Atitlan with the thought of spending the night. Not! Almost every hotel we called was full, so we decided after calling 5 hotels we would just spend the day there and then head to Guatemala City. In Guatemala City we had no problems getting a hotel as everyone leaves the city for New Years, no one really vacations in the city. As we enjoy living in the country and vacationing in the city, it works out good for us. We like to enjoy movies and a good meal. Now we do have some restaurants in Chichi but they all serve the same food, so some variety every now and then is nice. We recently purchased a Sushi kit and will be taking a stab at making some Sushi.

My mom and stepdad headed back to Arizona on Monday and then we stayed in the city for New Years and returned to Chichi on Jan 2. We had great plans to stay up till midnight and even go to the hotel restaurant for a New Years eve meal. Well the dinner was going to be $80 per person, so we decided against that and had some good room service. However, we did fall asleep before midnight but we did hear the fireworks. By that time we were to comfortable to get up ad go look out a window on the other side of the hotel. We did have a great time relaxing and even went to Blockbuster Video to see if we could get a membership. To our surprise they let us. In the past we checked and you had to have a home phone number which is not available where we live. I guess we got lucky speaking to the manager who let us do it with a credit card. So now when we are in the city we can rent a movie here and there. We found out that many of the movies playing here as new movies are already on dvd and rentable! That was a nice treat.

On the water issue, we arrived on Wednesday morning and we had a little bit of running water and by the afternoon we had great pressure and were able to start washing some clothes. And then...... the electricity went out! So we had water but no electricity! Apparently the country has some very strong winds yesterday afternoon and evening which caused a pretty wide spread electrical outage. So we woke up in the morning and still were not able to take a shower, unless we were willing to take a cold one. So we did the boil some water in a pot / bird bath thing. Thankfully we did get electricity back on around noon today and now we have water and electricity so it is clothes washing time! We will never take for granted the washer and dryer. There are other ways to wash but nothing beats the washer and the dryer!

Well that is all for now. Tomorrow, the HTI team has a start of the year meeting where we all come together worship and check the plans for the new year!

God bless!

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