It's the final countdown! da da daa daaaaa, da da daa daa daaaa! Less than 24 hours left before Sue and I head to the airport with a number of my fellow students to begin our Guatemalan adventure! Muy muy nervioso! It's actually going to be an amazing experience and I can't wait to get started, but I was holding my breath as I typed that and I probably won't exhale until the rollercoaster has gone over the top. As long as I don't scream like a tiny little girly-girl, everything will be a'ight. We'll be there for seven weeks learning Spanish, doing volunteer work and seeing the sites. Seen here is the city of Quetzaltenango, also known as Xela, where we will spend
most of our time.
We have much packing to do to prepare for our seven week adventure, so
let's get on with this dang blog already!
Sue and I had fun visiting the farm of our friend and Sue's co-worker John McCormick. John invited a bunch of the Newman peeps to his beautiful farm and made lots of great food and let us play with the chickens and goats, our first Kansas farm experience.
This past week we got to experience our first Wichita Riverfest, by far the biggest event that our adopted city throws each year. The fest takes over the downtown with live music, lots of food, arts and crafts shows and lots of other fun stuff for people to do. It went on for just over a full
week with stuff going on every day and night. The river itself cramped the festival's style slightly early in the week when it flooded it's banks just a little. No major damage but the river walk was under water as you can see here. Thursday night was Cajun Night, with good gumbo, red beans and rice and a rocking Zydeco set by Chubby Carrier and the Bayou Swamp Band straight from Louisiana. See brief video clip above. Personally, one of my favorite things about the festival was that it made the downtown actually feel like a downtown.
I guess you could call me a published writer if you really wanted to. And personally I demand that you all call me that instead of using my real name from now on. Ok, it's just in Newman's weekly paper, The Vantage, but since this is the first time I've ever published anything anywhere, you might as well humor me and treat me
and treat me like I just won the Pulitzer. My pieces have appeared in the last three editions of the paper this semester. They're mostly music reviews with one political oped piece to spice things up and
make myself a few enemies. If you have fifteen minutes left at work you really want to kill, then you can go to my
new alt-blog , http://www.donutofdoom.blogspot.com/ where I've decided to post the stuff I'm writing (and there are videos!). Just please don't send me any hate mail.
Oh and I've also created another blog as part of my official Student Assistant duties, http://www.newmanstudyabroad.blogspot.com/. It's for Newman's Study Abroad trip to England next year, full of lots of fun and cool things to do wile in the UK. The fact that I've never been to England shouldn't impact my credibility as a blogger, should it? You'd still trust me and go where ever I told you should go in a county I've never set foot in myself, wouldn't you? Anyway, you can check that out too if you want, I donno, whateva.
Lots of fun and exciting stuff has happened since we last chatted,
but I can't remember any of it, so I'll just let everyone know that Sue and I will return from Guatemala on July 9th. Less than a week after that we'll be coming to the New Yawk area for a week. We already have our tickets to see VNV Nation on July 18th and I was super-duper-psyched to find out that I'll even get to catch a good deal of the Coney Island Siren Fest going on that same day.
Anyhoo, wish us luck on our journey, I know it will be amazing, and I'm all twittery and giddy with excitement. We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible when we're in town.
Love, Sonny & Sue
