Guatemala: Studying Spanish isn't necessarily a vacation

Apologies for the hiatus, but as you can tell, I was in Guatemala for the last two weeks.

Shane and I arrived home safely late last night after an extremely long day of travel. Today is Sunday and I'm recovering while doing errands and cleaning. As always the dust I stir up causes allergies, but I have given the kitties a much needed bath, so that should help me with the allergy situation over the next week or so.

Things I've noticed on return from Guatemala:
Everything is so expensive here!
The bananas are different; the ones in Guatemala are small.
We can flush toilet paper down the toilets.
There isn't actually much less Spanish spoken in the States, at least in Miami and New York.

I probably only have time right now to chronicle the first week, which we spent in Antigua.

Day 1
Shane and I arrived in Guatemala City on Saturday, June 30. It was raining heavily. The airport was under construction; coming out of customs we stepped into open air, greeted by a huge mob of people. Amidst the chaos we finally found the driver of our ride to the homestay in Antigua. His driving in the rain on curvy roads was rather harrowing. In Antigua, the narrow cobblestone streets ran full of muddy rainwater. The driver found our house, and we were shown to our room by Rodolfo and Miriam, our homestay parents.

The room was quite dim, because the windows were frosted. When we opened them, people passing on the sidewalk were only a few feet away from the beds, so we never kept them open. The street was not far from us either; we could hear trucks and buses (actually old school buses from the U.S.) as if they were about to smash into the house. Then there was the bathroom, which at times smelled rather strongly of pee. The grimy tiled "tub" scared us. I felt a little bit disappointed, but it was only a matter of getting used to everything after a day or two. The house itself was nice, though. There was a patio in the center with a lush garden, and parakeets and an old parrot named Pancha.

In Mexico, lunch is served at around 3 pm, so I expected to have arrived just in time for a big meal. We hadn't eaten anything except for a sad little breakfast in the Miami airport very early in the morning. Unfortunately, mealtimes in Guatemala are similar to those in the States, so we had missed lunch and had to wait till 7 pm for dinner. Though we were tired and without local currency, we decided to brave the city to stave off the hunger. We wandered the streets and eventually found the Parque Central and a large yellow baroque church called La Merced, which was near the house. We made it back to the house in time, we had hoped, for dinner, but it turned out that the time difference between New York and Guatemala was two hours instead of one; we thus had to wait another hour before dinner would be ready. Once we sat to dinner, we were thrilled. We had tasty tamales, which was the local custom on Saturday evenings. They were different from Mexican tamales; they were much softer and wrapped in banana leaves.

Day 2
Sunday is the only day one does not get meals from the homestay family. In the morning, Shane and I went out to find an ATM so that we could get quetzales, the local currency. We had breakfast at a lovely cafe near the center of town -- a typical breakfast of eggs, beans, bread, plantains, cream, cheese, and coffee. The coffee was delicious, and we sat there for a while reading. We did some shopping around the center. In the afternoon, Shane borrowed the family's guitar, which they never play, and played a while, as I wrote in my journal. We had a cheap and rather scary lunch at a run-down restaurant with another student living in the house, a Danish guy who was leaving the next day.

Day 3
Monday, first day of school. Four hours of one-on-one lessons with a half-hour break in between. We all sat at little tables, two by two, around the school's courtyard-garden. After class, lunch at the house. After lunch, we saw the ruins of the old convent of the Capuchin nuns.

Day 4
Tuesday: more classes, lunch at home, and a walk to the neighboring suburb/town of Jocotenango to see the museums of coffee and of Guatemalan music. We learned a good deal about coffee, played some marimbas on display, and saw a video of ceremonies and music. A garden path impressed us the most; there were banana trees, many exotic flowers, squash vines, cardamom trees, passion fruit plants, large spiders. We walked back to town in a light rain. We sat in the patio at home reading and doing homework. We tried a different Guatemalan beer than the famous Gallo, which we had had on Sunday and didn't like much; this time we tried Brahva, but it was much the same. Rodolfo made fun of me for turning red.

Day 5
Wednesday: more classes, lunch at home, walk in pouring rain to Cerro de la Cruz, which is literally "hill of the cross," a hill to the north of town with a large cross, looking over the city and at Volcan de Agua to the south. We tried to find Spanish-language books to buy, but they were too expensive. We stopped at a little bar and found a good Guatemalan beer, Moza.

Day 6
Thursday: more classes, during which my teacher and I told ghost stories, lunch at home, more book shopping, tour of the monastery ruins at the church of San Francisco, and ice cream cones near the center of town. No rain that afternoon, so we hung out in the patio doing homework and drinking beer.

Day 7
Friday: by now, very tired of Spanish classes, but after lunch at home, we went to hike the active Volcan de Pacaya, south of Guatemala City. We thought we were going on a tour in a minibus, but we ended up with a bunch of other tourists on an old school bus. It was frightening; on the highway we passed the wreckage of a school bus, at the gas station stop we saw armed guards with large guns and the driver with a pistol on his belt, and going fast in an old school bus up the dirt mountain road almost gave me a heart attack. The hike was only supposed to take an hour and 45 minutes to the base of the volcano and another hour and 45 minutes coming back down. I found it quite exhausting. Once to the base of the volcano, we saw the remnants of the last large eruption in the fall of 2006 -- a huge river of volcanic rock. We climbed up a little, feeling the heat under the rocks and seeing a few small spots glowing red with lava. At the highest point that we reached, I stepped on loose rock and fell, scraping myself on my right wrist and back, but it was nothing serious. Coming down the sun had already set, and Shane and I hadn't brought a flashlight, so we pretty much stumbled all the way down whenever we were not in the range of other people's flashlights.

Day 8
Saturday we were tired from the volcano hike, so we just did a bit of walking and shopping at the market. We bought a birthday cake for Rodolfo that we ate that night at dinner. We had a lot of fun with him and Miriam and Pancha the parrot, but we were ready to leave Antigua, which was very touristy, noisy, dusty, and rather stressful. The next morning we would leave for the market town of Chichicastenango and from there, to Lake Atitlan, where we would spend our second week....