Orange Walk, Belize; Day 20

Wow. So today is such a blur I'm going to have to think about everything that happened! Haha. We woke up and met for breakfast at 630am. Our tour guide/travel agent guy Eric brought us breakfast, orange juice and ham sandwiches and bananas. It was weird to eat sandwiches for breakfast but they were good. We headed out to the Lamanai ruins after that. It was a short drive in our bus with Frank to the boat docks where we loaded HUGE coolers with our mystery lunch in it, provided by our ruin tour guide, Isidro. He was so cool! The thing I'm loving about Belize is the culture, they speak english but many of them speak Creole, and talk like they're Jamaican, and they're black! Its awesome, so different from Mexico yet we are still so close.
Our boat ride to Lamanai was great! The boats were really nice, we could have skiied behind them! He showed us lots of wildlife, there are manatees in the river but we didn't see any.. lots of birds and a couple crocs. We saw a Mennonite village! People who were kicked out of Chihuahua for their religion and now settled here. They are huge agriculturalists and drive horse and buggies.. they aren't allowed to own land, I think because they are citizens of Mexico, but they get like 150 year leases on their properties. That was cool but I feel bad for them because they are such spectacles for people taking the river tour, but they're just people!
When we reached Lamanai, we got off and headed up. We only got to see maybe 3 temples, the place is small and not too excavated, because they're trying to preserve it. They even put fiberglass on top of the masks at the main temple to protect it from human touch.
I noticed too today that the weather here is so nice, not nearly as hot or humid as it was at Palenque and those other places.. so grateful!
I forgot to mention that when we were on our boat ride, there was a baby lizard on the boat and it wad jumping around and crawling over people, it was so fast! It jumped and perched itself on my knee and then just sat, staring at me! Haha I was so scared it was going to jump in my face.. it finally jumped away but I got a good picture.
The lunch that Isidro brought us was AWESOME! Juices to drink, and then chicken in some sweet sauce, salad, coleslaw, watermelon and fried plantains.. so yummy! Oh and beans and rice, mixed together.. because rice and beans is separate, you have to know that if you order in Belize!
After lunch we had about a 45 min boat ride back and came back to the hotel, by then it was about 330.. I had Pearl of Great Price and Capstone class for a couple hours and then at 730 we had dinner. Before that though a few of us went to the convenience store to get snacks for tomorrows lunch/boat ride to Caye Caulker, and I picked up a last gift. :)
On our way back to the hotel I could hear music coming from our pool area, we were having a BBQ put on by Eric.. he totally was spoiling us! He was going to DJ too. I told everyone "we're hahvin a danz par-ty!.. can't chu hea the muuusic, mahn?" In my best Belize accent. Bro Strickland said I got it good :) haha. Eric fed us BBQ chicken, Belize style potato salad, rolls, baked beans and orange juice (its this bottled OJ, I don't know what it is but its some orange drink and its good!) It was all so yummy! He also had homemade vanilla ice cream for dessert. Incredible, right? I think we can keep this guy.
So we had a dance party/pool party, after a while I came up to my room and did some homework and crashed. Tomorrow we go to church and head to the island of Caye Caulker! Caye is pronounced Key, like the Florida Keys!

Orange Walk, Belize; Day 19

This morning I woke up at 5:50am and got dressed and went down to the beach to watch the sun rise :) there was maybe 10-15 of us that were down there at the beach.. at first it wasn't that pretty, there were lots of clouds in the way of the sun. But after a while the sun came out from behind the clouds and it was really beautiful. Just writing this now, I was thinking about how the sunrise can be like our lives? Sometimes its not that pretty, there's dark times and clouds that can prevent us from seeing what's next, from seeing the light. But!! If we keep our eyes to the SON, we will always see the brighter day, a beautiful end. I know its true!
After we ate breakfast and checked out we had a 3 hour bus ride to a Maya Culture museum - which ended up being closed. We did get to see other exhibits in the museum though, like an extensive Barbie collection. There was Barbies in there I had never even heard of! After that we got ready to cross the border to Belize.
We've gotten kindof close with out bus driver, Jose Luis. He came to church a couple times with us and testimonies were given in spanish for him. Our leaders have been talking to him about the church and he seems at least minorly interested so as a parting gift, we gave him a Book of Mormon in Spanish and wrote all our names and little messages inside about how we hope he'd share it with his family and pray about its truth and know that its important to us and because of that we want to share it with him, because we've grown to love him and want him to know it too. We also gave him a group picture of us from Mexico City and a generous tip for all he's done for us. It was sad to say goodbye to him and to our fancy bus!! :(
We got off our bus, handed over our passports and visas, got back on the bus and drove across the border.. them we got to customs and immigration, went through no problem and met our new bus. Its like a school bus only painted (appropriately) red, white and blue and it has air conditioning. There wasn't enough seats because we had to pack the luggage on the inside and the air conditioner leaked really bad everywhere haha.. it's gonna be a fun week!
We have somewhat of a tour guide/travel agent with us to show all the good restaurants and hotels. He also surprised us and told us that we're going ziplining on Tuesday! We've been bugging our tour directors since the very beginning but they said it wasn't possible. It'll be fun to go! We're missing the zoo though in order to go ziplining, Im kinda sad about that because the zoo was supposed to be really good but its ok
So we ate dinner at some restaurant and we all had American food. It was so good. Haha and everyone speaks english! Its so nice! There was a guy playing with a band at the restaurant, playing Tom Petty and Journey, and just some other good stuff. It was really fun.