GUATEMALA!!!!!‏

Jenna arrived in Guatemala Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Oh my goodness! we are here and it is amazing. okay, i probs wont becapitalizing or using much punctuation, because the spanish keyboard is different! ay ay ay. it is absolutely beautiful here. no joke, right when i walked off the airplane... i smelled guatemala. guatemala has the best scent EVER! i love it. everyone so far has been so friendly and patient. we flew in around 630 pm and it was alreadydark, so it just looked like a normal city from the plane, which was sort of a bummer, because i bet it is way gorgeous in the daylight from the air. we got our baggage and and went through customs without any problems. when we got out to the curb, there were a ton of people waiting along a little blocked off area. a man was waiting for us with a sign that said CCM.. an awesome old yellow school bus picked us up. altogether, we had 5 hermanas and 8 elders.. i think. we went straight to the ccm... it was about a ten-fifteen minute drive, so we got to see a little bit of the city. we saw mcdonalds, wendys, quiznos,subway, and some other american things, which was lame.. haha. lots of "farmacias" i think i may have spelled that wrong. it would be super cool to be able to serve in the city, but i am very much looking forward to getting out into the country. we got an amazing welcome once we got here. we are now the new "north americans" group. with the old "north americans" group and the "latinos" that came today, they said that there are about 90 missionaries here! How crazy is that? it is so small and intimate and awesome. they fed us pizza last night,which was very surprising and funny. but don{t worry, we got real guatemalan food today! there is a temp cook right now, but we are told the main cook is amazing and will be back in a couple of days. all ofthe north americans are here for six weeks and the latinos are here for 3 weeks. so we get a new set of each every three weeks. does the cycle make sense? so, we came in last night, greeted the new latinos this morning, we will say goodbye to them and the old north americans and greet the new latinos and north americans in 3 weeks. sorry if that{s confusing. we can{t drink the water here, so they have a ton of filtered water dispensers everywhere. the ccm is actually really nice. there are only two buildings opposed to the 20-ish in provo, but one of them is the gym and is used for housing for people who come to visit the temple. there is a high fence and guards all around, pretty interesting. all of our teachers are locals, but have pretty good english and are so nice. i feel kind of bad for the new latinos,because the majority of the people here speak english, so they are the minority! all of the hermanas here are super friendly and cute. there are probably only 20-25 of us, probably not even that many, so it is fun. it{s cool introducing myself or just when people try to read my tag, because they try to say it the "american" way (which still isn{thow we say it), but i just pronounce it the spanish way. i said it our way to one of my teachers and said "es no bueno" and she just started cracking up. marin really does sound so much prettier in spanish. i actually feel really lucky, because my name is so easy and could be hispanic. one of the elders here has a last name that is a cuss word in spanish... pretty awesome. there has also been some confusion with hna. searle{s name... haha. i love it here. i still have my companion from the mtc, plus one of the sisters we were always with at the mtc, hna winder (we{re a triio), but we will be assigned a latina companion to eat meals, go to gym, and other various activities with, so we can be immersed. it is WARM and sunny and gorgeous and humid (no more gross dry skin, thanks utah!) and beautiful and good-smelling. it has actually been pretty fun and hilarious. everyone is just so friendly and comfortable so there is constant spanglish flying around. we are to help some of the workers here with english and everyone is supposed to help us with spanish, so it is fun. when we greeted the new latinos today, we QUICKLY ran out of things to talk about.. haha. we would just end up looking at each other and laughing. it will be a fun (and frustrating at times, i{m sure) process. they said they are working on us being able to print our emails, read them, then log back on, so we won{t use all of our 30 minutes. we{ll see! times up!! lovvvvvvvvve,hna marin