I received a curious invitation in the email last week. “Guatemala bloggers will be meeting at 7pm in the Rum Bar in Antigua; we’d love it if you could visit.” At first I was sad about the message, as Antigua is 11 hours from our site, then I realized: our vacation travel schedule put us in Antigua that very afternoon! We dropped in, and met a handful of expatriate Americans living in Guatemala. It was a fun, strange evening of seeing Guatemala in a way we don’t normally experience. The invitation was from Mark, who occasionally posts on this blog and has his own at GuateLiving.com. I’ve wanted to meet him for months. His comments are interesting and occasionally inflammatory, so I wanted to know if the guy was a jerk or was an interesting guy that just likes to stir the shit. Turns out, it’s the latter. We’re going to have dinner with him this week.

I often marvel at how powerful blogging is, as a tool if discourse and information disemination. As you can see at the sidebar on the right, several of our Peace Corps friends use it as well to help them accomplish their third-goal objectives (increasing awareness of foreign peoples on the part of Americans). Sarah just wrote a good article in her blog about the difficulties of being a married couple in the Peace Corps. Joe & Katy (yet antoher married Peace Corps couple) just started a new blog/website for their newly-formed NGO, UpInternational. If you want to read more stuff, or my every-three-or-four-days schedule isn’t enough for you, check them out.