And then they disappeared for a week

(Note to the reader: the comma key is still out of commission on this computer so continued apologies to any Lynne Truss fans out there.)

It turns out that once you have children you no longer have much free time left for blogging. Go figure. We're back in Guatemala City now and planning to come home tomorrow morning. The original plan was to come back today of course but more on that later.

Thursday morning Reb and I went to a couple of nearby museums (musea?) the first featuring old Mayan pots and whatnot and the second featuring new Mayan fabrics and textiles. Pictures are available on the internets. After that we walked back to the hotel and was surprised to find Gus and his foster parents there waiting for us. We were supposed to meet at 1 and it was 12:30 but they'd had a long drive out from Quetzeltenango (also known as Xela for some reason). It was rather awkward. Gus was asleep and the foster parents didn't speak any English so we recruited a nice hotel employee to translate for us for half an hour before Oscar our Bethany rep arrived. We discussed things like schedules and how long a drive it was from
Xela to Guatemala City. Oscar is all business. No small talk for that man. He showed up and said "Hello how are you let's talk about the baby's schedule." Around then we decided it would be a bad idea to let Gus sleep through the hand-off so we woke him up and passed him around. Naturally he was pretty wary of us. Finally Oscar and the foster parents left and that was when Gus started sobbing uncontrollably. He didn't stop for 4 hours except for a short interval when he cried himself to sleep. Finally though that evening he seemed to have worked through the initial grieving process and actually smiled at us before he went to bed.

Friday morning Gus woke up all smiles. We fed him cereal and gave him a bottle and took off for the embassy which happens to be next door to the hotel. We were feeling pretty smug about the amount of time it took to be out the door. Our alarm woke us up at 6 and we met Oscar at 7:05 dressed showered and fed. You're not allowed to take pictures of the embassy so I can't post one but imagine any government building built between 1960 and 1975 and you're pretty close. The waiting room resembled the DMV. They batch all the adoptions together at the same time so there were about 25 Guatemalan babies and American parents hanging out in there. Pretty crowded. We were in there about 2 hours. They asked us questions about making sure we fulfilled the requirements for adoption in our state (or commonwealth in our case) and had us swear an oath that we would re-adopt Gus when we got home. The whole thing took about two hours after which they told us his visa would be ready Monday at 3:30. Oscar told us that he would pick up the visa for us and deliver it to us at the hotel.

That was the last official business we had to do till then so we had arranged to spend the weekend in Antigua Guatemala. Guatemala City is smelly. There are a lot of old cars with diesel engines floating around including the GC public transportation system which consists of these red "chicken buses" which drive up and down the avenidas. They're crazy. Usually packed full of commuters and a couple guys hanging out the open doors as if it's a garbage truck. Also due to cultural misunderstandings about Americans adopting Guatemalan babies (ask us about them sometime) it would have been unwise to leave the hotel with Gus unaccompanied. It's different in Antigua. I was personally surprised at the sheer number of Americans there were there. Many American foster parents and young fresh out of college kids either volunteering or learning Spanish. Jacobo (our driver who picked us up at the airport) drove us over there that afternoon. Gorgeous drive through the mountains. I'll save the weekend in Antigua for another post.