Guatemala

It’s been a LONG time, but today was a field trip day!! Every Wed/Fri is ‘practical’ studies, and you get to wander the streets of Antigua visiting different places to listen and speak Spanish. Alan was pretty psyched about not having to go to class!!!

We visited a Mayan museum and a coffee museum. We learned quite a bit despite the small stature of the Mayan museum, but because there was a guide and our Espanyol was so great, we heard most of what we needed to hear. Having a guide makes visiting museums so much better!! The coffee museum was pretty cool as it was actually a functioning coffee producer, so while it was more like a front for it to sell more coffee, it was very enjoyable and you did learn a lot about producing coffee!

One thing to note, after speaking with our home stay, it seems like things took a much better turn as our breakfast was an omelet!! Lunch was even better, with an actual chunk of meat!! We almost cried!! No jokes man, it’s never happened where for an extended period of time we were constantly feeling hungry!! Dinner though was a ginormous upset, with nothing but a bowl of rice soup with some spinach inside, and a drizzle of cream. AAHHH!!

Went to class and did homework!!!!

Going to class, you realize how much time you have when we used to be in school, and also how easy it is to spend all that time so quickly. Time really flies when you’re studying!

As mentioned, our school organizes activities from Monday to Thursday every week, and the activities change for anyone and everyone. Today, there was a tour to walk up the hills to a viewing point which overlooks the city of Antigua. The walk up was notorious for robberies and muggings, but now the city has implemented tourist police to make sure that doesn’t happen anymore. The city of Antigua feels very safe, but at times you are reminded by the massive assault rifles people are holding that, the country may not be all fun and games.

And other than that, our days are rather mundane. Learning Spanish though, is very difficult for us, especially Alan who has no understanding of grammar at all. It’s amazing that he managed to get by ANY form of education system with so little knowledge of grammar! It doesn’t help that French and Spanish have mucho similarities, and it’s quite hard not to revert back to the French that was drilled into your head (and have mostly forgotten) for almost 10 years.

Our home stay, despite being an extremely lovely house run by an extremely lovely lady, is a bit of an irony. The house is amazing and has Wi-Fi (which most don’t have), but the hot water doesn’t always work! We’ve had to take bucket showers from boiled water using the gas stove…haha old school. Another oddity is that, the lady is an AMAZING cook, but despite she never cooks any protein and we’re always hungry!!!!!! Need to talk to the owner about this!

Classes again in the morning, and by the end we can have a conversation with the teacher, albeit a very simple one. The Spanish language and French language is very similar, and at times we had to force ourselves not to actually say the wrong word like “Muy bien” instead of “Tres bien” for very good. We’ll probably extend our lessons from 4hrs daily to 6hrs daily! The school even offers ‘excursions’ from Mon-Thurs, where you can do some more touristy but fun stuff in Antigua, so you’re really never feeling bored.

After class, we headed out to the local market to see what kind of goodies we can get. It just seems like something we like to do…checking out the markets of places we travel to. We got some fresh fruit, obsessed over their fresh flowers, and the STRANGEST thing was that we found this local lady selling some Asian foods like Shin-ramen, bok-choy, wonton wrappers, and even李锦记老抽!!!!! We’re not quite sure who goes and buys her stuff, but we’re just happy because we left with two packages of emergency ramen…haha!

In the afternoon we met up with a few travelers we met back in San Cristobal la Casas in Mexico, who was also here studying Spanish as well. We exchanged travel stories, had an awesome cup of ginger+passion fruit ice-cream and wandered around the town of Antigua.

The streets of Antigua can get rather touristy, but as a place to learn Spanish, it really is great as the prices are extremely fair, interesting people who are all here to share experiences with you, and all these first-world amenities that keeps you comfortable.

Having classes at 8am, we actually managed to wake up at 7am, stop over for a coffee and made it to the ‘classroom’ on time! It’s been a while since we’ve gone to school, and it’s even harder to remember the last time we’ve made it to class at all =P

The classroom, is actually a massive garden on the outskirts of Antigua where numerous other students and teachers gather. A table and three chairs was all we needed, and we found a little corner overlooking the whole garden. It’s actually a really nice place to study, and if all classrooms were like that with a 1:2 teacher:student ratio, everyone would do pretty good and not be able to fall asleep in the back like Alan did.

Learning, for the longest time, was not very ‘pleasant’ as it was difficult to garner a sense of giddiness from studying Pareto distributions and finite difference methods for calculation option prices. Here though, even at the end of a 4hr day, we felt like we learnt a lot, and felt HAPPY about learning, which is awesome =)

Our teacher is a middle-aged lady with two daughters, the sort of cheerful and patient lady with a round figure, the sort whom you’d automatically think would make a wonderful mother and a pretty awesome cook. She was extremely patient with us, and made learning Spanish a bit more fun than we imagined it to be. It was great! And after class, she helped us to find our home-stay. The Spanish-school scene in Antigua is extremely developed, with a lot of classes to choose from, and all offer a home-stay option where you can live with a local family and ‘immerse yourself in the local culture’. Oh, and 3 meals are included too!

Our home-stay is really nice, and we think we may have taken over the master bedroom of the owners! The owners are a very nice Guatemalan couple, with the husband working at a water purification company while the wife stays at home and takes care of her grandchildren and cooks up meals for us. There are several others staying here as well, so it is easy to get lazy and start speaking English!

We spent the afternoon in a cozy little coffee shop… studying!! Haven’t been so hardworking for a looong time!

The bus was supposed to arrive at 6am, and our shuttle was going to wait for us with our names outside the bus station. We really didn’t feel comfortable walking around Guatemala City, especially when we don’t understand the language.

The bus rolled into the bus station at 7:30am, and there was no shuttle to be found anywhere. And the shuttle service company only spoke Spanish! Luckily, there was another fellow traveler that knew Spanish and was EXTREMELY helpful once again. He went outside to ask a shady-looking taxi driver for a payphone, but the shady-looking taxi driver just let him use his cell phone… wow so nice! The traveler helped us out, and eventually our shuttle arrived at 9am to our massive delight.

In short, Guatemala City looks pretty ugly. The moment we rolled into Antigua though, everything changed as soon as the tires rolled over cobblestone roads instead of tarmac. Like other beautiful colonial towns, this placed reminded us of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Our hostel was located inside this long walkway off the avenida (Antigua is designed like a grid, avenues run North-South, roads run East-West). The place was cozy and neat, with a rooftop lounge where two hammocks were strung with a beautiful view over several of the town’s churches. We freshened up, and got outside exploring the town. One thing that got us both really excited, was that our guide book and online, there was talk of a Korean restaurant! In Mexico, it’s really hard to eat a variety of food, so we’ll try for it every time we can, be it Korean, Chinese or Indian.

We wandered the city but didn’t manage to find any of the restaurants we wanted, and ended up eating at a ‘pub’ that served curries and chow mein… haha, it was decent. The strange part though, was that they served only 1 import beer, and that was from Brooklyn Brewery!?!? Just a bit strange to see a ’boutique’ brewery like that extending its grasp so far! The town market though, despite being massive and maze-like, was much of a let down without any of the fresh fruits we were thinking of.

The afternoon was spent napping in a hammock, basking in the suns warm glow. And for dinner, we ate bagels at the Bagel Barn, which also has screenings of movies everyday at 7pm! Watching Ben Affleck’s Argo, we headed back to our hostel and were ready for tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we start our week-long Spanish lessons and stay in a home-stay! Excited!