Guatemala Travel Day!

Sorry for the long delay between blogs, but I have no service unless I go to a cafe with Wifi, so I can’t post. I’ll try to keep writing blogs frequently, but it’ll probably look more like I post several blogs on one day, instead of one blog every day. Does that make sense?

Okay, now onto what’s been up with me! I’ll describe my travel day in this blog, and the past week in the next one!

We left Training Camp at 9:00 pm, along with L Squad, who were going to accompany us to the airport. Goodbyes were said all around, and I don’t think any of us were anticipating how close we’d grow to the other Squads, serve team, and leadership team in a single month.

The drive to the airport took about 2 hours, which I spent napping, since our flight wasn’t until 10:35 the next morning, which meant the night had to be spent in the airport.

Our logistics team found an out of the way place for us to sleep, so we set up our stuff, and did our best to sleep with the lights on and loud, annoying, jazz music blasting in our ears, interspersed by safety announcements every 15 minutes. At around 1:00 in the morning, an emergency alarm was going off, which had my heart racing so fast. Nothing bad ended up happening, but it did keep me up for an additional 30 minutes.

We got up at 4:00 am to start making our way through the giant Atlanta airport. We took a 20 minute long bus ride to get to the correct terminal, and we never left the airport! That’s how huge it is!

Not much happened from then to when we boarded the plane, except for a few more naps while we waited. The flight was also very relaxing, but I learned that my new waterbottle was not leak proof, so my bag got pretty wet. If my passport hadn’t been in a water proof bag, it wouldn’t have gotten soaked, so praise God for waterproof bags!

Going through the Guatemala end of the airport was so easy and amazing. Everywhere we looked, there were signs in Spanish, with the English translation written underneath. It was so weird, but also cool because I could guess the meaning of a lot of the signs!

Leaving the building, we were greeted by the hot sun, people trying to sell their wares, and our first view of the famous chicken buses (the main mode of transportation here).

We piled onto buses that would bring us to our base. It was surreal, riding through a foreign city. Everywhere you look is art and trees. It’s actually so amazing! You know when you watch a movie that takes place in another country, and you’re just like, “Wow, it’s so beautiful! It can’t possibly look like that everywhere!” Update, it can!

Seeing our base for the first time was unreal. We’d seen so many videos and pictures from here, when we were actually standing and looking at it, you almost felt like you couldn’t interact with it. It looked the exact same, but completely different, if that makes sense!

We were assigned rooms based on our teams, and we each claimed our bed and unpacked all of our stuff, almost unable to believe how long we would be here. We’ll be here for about 2 ½ months!!

So yeah, that was my travel day!