Sabbath and Xunantunich and Iguanas

The Sabbath day- best day of the week. We got up this morning and got ready for church. We enjoyed a great breakfast of homemade pancakes, eggs, and avocado (from the fresh tree) and then sat around and played Uno for a bit before heading to church. Even though we don't have an alarm we don't have any problem getting up nice and early.

There is a local church right down the main street of our town...it is a small church with just one branch located inside. When we showed up there were 17 people in the congregation...and they were all so welcoming and open to having us there with them. All the women greeted me with kisses, and shook everyone else's hands. Church was in Spanish... the music they used a cd player and sang along with it (in spanish). The kids were pretty good sports until the talks started...then Miles gave me the look I can see coming in years when he will be a teenager. I tried my best to follow along but I could only catch a word here and there. They had an intermediate hymn and then the next talk was in English! All the kids immediately looked around...maybe thinking they were actually understanding spanish now.

After church we headed to the Xunantunich ruins. They were AMAZING. Right before you crossed the river ferry to get to it some locals were wanting to be hired to be tour guides...we decided to hire one that way Dustin and I could understand a little more of what was going on rather than running from ruin to ruin watching our kids use it as their playground. Naz was his name and we were so glad we hired him. He took us from section to section explaining exactly what each was and what it was used for. When we got to the top of the highest ruin it was such a spectacular view- you could even see Guatamala from where we were. While there there were a lot of guards walking around guns (Rowe got a kick out of that)- The government decided to bring more protection here because years ago some Guatemalans would come and rob the tourists. With tourism being over 50% of the income for this country they knew they needed to keep it as safe as possible.

We did the classic pb&j for lunch while driving back to San Ignacio and headed to the Iguana habitat.

We got to the San Ignacio hotel which is where the habitat is located- the only issue is they only run the tours on the hour and we got there at 3:20. The kids were desperate to do the exhibit so we sat in the lounge of the hotel- I fell asleep and who knows what the kids did for that 40 minutes. Finally at 4 we started, the guy came and got us and took us into the habitat which was located behind the hotel. Probably the size of our kitchen with 36 iguanas inside. All of them were injured at some point and are being nursed back to health in order to be put back into the wild. There are only two that they will never release back into the wild- Ziggy (who has some form of spinal bifada) and Star Gazer who they said was born as a preemy and not everything connected in his head...he sleeps on his back like a dog, looks constantly up to the sky, and just doesn't behave "normal". During the time we were feeding them one jumped on Dustin's back and while I was laughing at him another one crawled up my front...and then another one joined that one so I had two climbing all over me. As excited as the kids were once we were in there and they saw how close we could get none of them wanted to touch them...