So we wanted to give you a peek of what our day-to-day life is like here in Xela, Guatemala. We’ve been having so much fun being exposed to this new culture and being immersed in the language.

We live with the Gonzalez family: Rosy & Jorge and their three boys. They love to watch “futbol” (soccer) while we share meals. Fortunately, Rosy is a wonderful cook, and so far, we have enjoyed every meal. Rosy typically cooks for all three meals, and Jorge comes home from work to share lunch with the family.

Each morning we wake up, eat breakfast and head to school, which is about a five-minute walk. School starts at 8 a.m., and we each have our own personal teacher. Our teachers know a little bit of English, but they speak to us in Spanish, which is challenging (more for Bethany than Dave), but good. At 10 a.m., we get a 30-minute break which includes fresh bread and cookies from the nearby Xelapan (bakery). After the break, we continue learning until 1 p.m. After school, we go home and eat lunch with our family, then we study or we can do an optional activity with other students. For example, last week we took a salsa dancing class—very fun!

Our house is an interesting mixture of outdoor and indoor. So, if we need to go to the bathroom in the night, we actually have to walk outside to get back inside to the toilet. This home is three stories and has four bedrooms… the walls are all concrete, and there is no air-conditioning or heat. This family of five shares the one shower with the two of us.

The door and the window on the right go to our room!


The view from the roof of our room... Dave did some climbing around to get the best photos possible!


We feel so blessed to be staying with such a wonderful family in a comfortable home (although just today we did find some mold on our wall in our room, probably because of the crazy rainstorms they had here for the 10 days before our arrival). Oh, and this is awesome: the first morning we woke up and walked downstairs to see this!

Jorge pulls his car into the living room each night because it could get vandalized on the street. Crazy!

This is what the living room normally looks like!

Xela is a densely populated city… it’s usually somewhat dusty from the dirt on the streets and sidewalk. We are at an elevation of about 7,000 feet, so it’s relatively cool in the mornings and never gets very hot in the day. We came at the tail end of the rainy season, so after the first few days, the weather has been dry. Sometimes it’s hazy and cloudy and you can barely see the mountains and the volcano in the distance, while other times you can see it all perfectly.

We’ve been having a blast and we are learning so much! Plus we put our bikes back together so we’ll be ready to hit the road in just a couple of weeks. We are getting excited about cruising through all of Central America!

This is our room... with all our panniers and gear piled up at the end of our bed!