Caye Bridge Retrofitting

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge Seismic Safety Commission can take heart-- we found a bridge still in use and in worse shape than the Bay Bridge.

It was always a fun game to guess when the men working on one side of the bridge would dismantle planks and leave you stranded in the middle of the bay. The other fun game was walking the plank after a rum and coke with dinner... thankfully we never fell off.

Diving with Dengue

Scuba diving isn´t that hard. It´s mostly about getting comfortable breathing underwater, and knowing not to panic and knowing what to do if something goes wrong (what you do is not panic). But when your instructor informs you he has Dengue Fever, looks exhausted through rivers of sweat on land, green on the dive boat, and vomits into his regulator 30 feet below the surface, it makes getting comfortable a little harder. At least we learned that if you need to puke, you don´t panic.

She said Yes (against her better judgement)

I got up early to pick up baleadas (Baleadas are flour tortillas grilled with beans. After months of corn-based foods, flour tortillas are exotic and gourmet. And, they´re Mary´s favorite thing about Honduras), and then dragged her out of bed for breakfast baleadas on the dock in the above photo. I figured the grogginess of waking up early, combined with the happiness of baleadas and the beauty of the early morning Caribbean would lower her defenses and I was right.

Early on the first day of summer Mary accepted my proposal to get married. Now you may be wondering when a wedding will be coming. My brother set the original over-under at 2009, but seeing as we probably won´t be back in the states til 2008, and we won´t have jobs, an apartment, or money, and it took us two months to find a ring and then three weeks to actually propose, I think the smart money would be on the over. Way over. Expect a save the date card somewhere in the vicinity of 2015.

El Primero Dia de Escuela

So I always thought that if I had high school to do over again I wouldn't be nearly so nervous or insecure... Turns out that it's not true-- I still had all those first day jitters on my first day of Spanish school (look at the tense body language in this photo Matt snuck of me marching into class).

I´m So Not High Maintenance

At the beginning of this trip Matt called me high maintenance for some reason I can´t remember (probably because I wanted a shower or some other high maintenance type activity). Then he took me on this "romantic" hike through mud covered paths and flooded river crossings... For the record, I didn´t complain the entire time, except when I had to wade through this river.

Rainforests Rock

So, this posting deserves two pictures (although there are really so many good ones to choose from). Both of these photos came from Northern Guatemala... the crab is some sort of tree crab, and he and his little buddies eat leaves and hang out alongside rivers (not quite like the Dungeness).

The monkey is a spider monkey, and these monkeys move FAST, so my capturing it on film may qualify me to work at National Geographic one day (finally, I know what I want to do with my life).

The Things We Miss

Occasionally while walking down a street one of us will say "I could really go for some sushi right now... or a Tartine croissant... or an evening at the Art Bar... or a pedicure (Matt rarely reflects on the pedicures)... or an installment of the Sopranos..." or any number of things we miss from home.

However, even more than we miss schedules that adhere to time, we miss our family and friends the most. Seeing Hilda and Liam in Antigua today was incredibly nice and reminded me of those I love. Here we are hiding out in an ice cream parlor while it poured rain outside (we don´t miss ice cream as it`s EVERYWHERE in Latin America).

A Ring to it

I was pretty willing to give Mary a hard time in my last post, so this time I will give her the credit she deserves. She found a ring!!!

Of course within five minutes of buying the ring she decided she hated it and it was terrible and she could never wear it. But then she came around, and decided it was an acceptable ring for the time in Latin America, and she would find another one when we got back to the states. (Doh).

For the last twenty-four hours, every time we have walked by a jewelry store she has pointed out that there was another jewelry store we did not need to go in. This does not mean we are engaged... I still have to find a proper place to propose. My original plans were a taco stand in Mexico, but my original plans didn´t provide for the contingency that it would take two months to find a ring, and a pupusa stand in Guatemala doesn't have quite the same sound.