It’s amazing how quickly we can go from being awed by living in a big house with two chefs making amazing meals every day, someone doing all the cleaning, making my bed every day, doing my laundry, and a gardener who’s here three days a week making all the indoor garden areas, fountains, stairs, etc. look amazing… to taking it for granted. Taking it for granted? Yes.

We’re getting ready for our trip up to Semuc Champey tomorrow and I just caught myself wondering why my dirty clothes were still hanging on the clothes line upstairs and hadn’t been dried and folded yet. How did I get to that point? I’m very upset with myself for coming up with such a thought.

I guess I’m really settled in here because I haven’t come up with anything interesting to write about. I have a few ideas for when we get back from the jungle, but it’s been a few days since I had anything new to say. In fact, I don’t think I’ve left the house for a couple days.

There has been a lot of work to do to prepare for our trip into the jungle where we may not have any communication or connection to the outside world. The hostel we booked claims to have WiFi, but I’m not expecting much. I’m certainly not expecting the fast-ish internet we have here in Antigua. But we have made a lot of progress. We’re getting ready to launch a new website and a whole new business. We have people who are going to be working on it over the weekend, so we had to get things setup so they won’t have any trouble getting their work done while we’re gone (and offline).

There has been a lot of good food though. We finally got to try pepián, which seems to be one of the national dishes of Guatemala. This is my fourth trip to Guatemala and I’m only trying it for the first time now? It was really good, by the way. Maybe not as good as the soup we had when we first got here, but still really good. They serve it with a big chunk of meat and some vegetables on the outside of the bowl. Inside the bowl is the soup and some rice.

Sometimes I’m amazed at how many homeruns the chefs come up with. There are discussions about which meals have been the best and which haven’t. The answers are very different between kids and adults.

My least favorite meal was this morning. Pancakes with Chocolate Chips. Not only could I get that at home, but I wouldn’t choose to get it at all. It’s not bad, but it’s not special at all. I would much rather have oatmeal or fried eggs. I think my favorite was probably the soup that first day, but there have been a lot of very close seconds. The consensus among the kids is that the arroz con leche is the best. I find that funny, because they all hate raisins and the way the chefs make it, it’s full of very large raisins. I love those almost as much as the rice pudding.

For breakfast yesterday, we had eggs with American cheese. That’s probably a close second to the “worst” meal we’ve had. American cheese isn’t cheese to me, but I did enjoy having an egg and toast. I think we also had some arroz con leche with those eggs. I guess that means it’s far from the bottom after all.

For lunch today we had Chile Relleno. When Charmaine makes it, it’s a whole poblano stuffed with chicken and chipotle peppers, but here it was just the side of a pepper and then a sort of chicken and spice meatloaf on top of it. It was still quite tasty, but there was nothing stuffed about that pepper.

One thing I can’t say enough good about is the fresh fruit. We always have several kinds of fresh fruit cut up into bowls for us to eat. The amount of flavor in each bite of some of these tropical fruits is amazing. I can only describe it as having more saturation of flavor here. The mangos we have been eating are mind blowing. The papaya is fantastic. Even the pineapple is better than anything you can buy at home. And it’s always ready for us to eat it. Amaing. The watermelon, cantaloupe, and blackberries don’t seem quite as amazing, but they’re all still very good.