BIG Weekend: White Elephant, Football, Goths, Volcano!

Beth and I had a pretty packed and fun-filled weekend. Here's a synopsis of what all we did.

Friday, January 11
Beth and I attended a white elephant gift exchange with about 30 other staff members at the home of Tony and Audrey (they're the couple we spent the weekend in Santiago with). We brought a trash sack full of extra coat hangers as our gift, and, surprisingly, someone actually traded for it! We really thought the first person to open it was stuck with it. But I guess that goes to show there were some other pretty awful gifts. With so many people and so many exchanges, the whole process probably took two hours. It was a lot of fun and pretty funny at times when coveted gifts kept being stolen.

This is the jacket I really wanted, but sadly it was taken...

Saturday, January 12
We had a typical, lazy Saturday morning filled with eggs and toast, coffee, and a couple episodes of The Simpsons. Aftewards, we headed over to the tennis courts to play for an hour, but unfortunately there was a tournament being held and we couldn't. We spent the afternoon at a friend's place with 10 or so people lounging around watching the Packers game.

That night we had plans to go to a goth themed party. I'm still not sure who's idea this was or why they thought of it, but it turned out to be really funny seeing all our friends here dressed up like sad goths. Plus, the party was held at an amazing home about 30 minutes away off the highway to El Salvador.

I was only planning to wear a dark t-shirt, but then was coerced into wearing makeup and a black hat. And I'm glad I did as it was fun to be in costume. Beth looked the part even more as you can see by the pictures!




Sunday, January 13
Sunday we went with our friends, Courtney and Alan (and their son, Wiley), to Volcan Pacaya, for an afternoon hike. This is the active volcano we hiked at night a few months ago. It was a beautiful day (as most days are right now) and fun to see the trail and volcano up close in daylight. It was continuously spewing smoke from the top and we were expecting to see a lot of lava after some other teachers told us about their experience from the week before. Unfortunately we didn't see the rushing lava like they had described (we only saw a couple streams of it), but we still really enjoyed being outside and seeing the craggy monster up close.

A look at Pacaya from the highway

Hiking up

The Carvers

Notice the smoke spewing out the top and the little hikers off to the left of it.
We plan to hike to the top at some point soon.

This cooled lava is what makes up the base and volcano and is treacherous to climb--it's really sharp, so if you fall, you're going to get cut! It is grippy with proper shoes though.

It only takes an hour to get to the trail from our place and less than an hour to hike to the base of the volcano, so it's an easily doable weekend activity. We hope to take some of you there when you come visit!