Spanish in Antigua

After spending a few days on a few buses we finally managed to get to Antigua, Guatemala from Cancun after our spell in Cuba. Was it worth is? Definitely! Antigua was fantastic! Surrounded on all sides by volcanoes, mountains and other such wondrous amazingments, it is such a picturesque town and having spent 2 weeks there we feel that we really got the most out of it. When we arrived we spent the morning living in the Central Square because our accommodation wasn´t ready yet. The plan was to spend the 2 weeks studying Spanish and living with a host family for total immersion into the language. One out of two isn´t bad! For what we were paying, the food and accommodation weren´t great. Having spoken to other students we seemed to have drawn the short straw with our host family. Funny because the father of the family we were staying with owned the Spanish school. Don´t think he really spent a whole lot of time in the family home himself. Maybe the food got to him...

The school was an interesting setup. On our first day we were introduced to our teachers and just sat down at their desk. It was one to one teaching! After a bit of a rough start, particularly for Vicki, we got through it with what we hope is enough Spanish to get us through the rest of Central and South America

After a week of bad food, leaky toilets and cold showers we decided to vacate our host family house and found new accommodation in the form of Hostel 5 at the north end of the town. This place was fantastic. We couldn´t have been more comfortable. The family and workers in the hostel made us feel so welcome. It was like being at a home stay. I even managed to catch a few matches and drink a few beers with the dad. Nice guy! It was so like home, in fact that one day when we were locked out of the hostel one of the girls answered the door with her pants around her ankles and told us that we rang when she "was in mid stream". Delightful! Every morning our temporary mother, Blanca, even came to the hostel early to ensure that we had food in our stomachs before we headed off to school. Then she´d wave us off as we skipped off to school, hand in hand. Oh that brings me back!

We really got to know some cool people at our school. It was just like boozing with our mates at home. One or two of them had done a bit of travelling before and there´s no substitute for experience so we got all the travel advice we could remember from people who´ve done it before. Thanks Jeff!

Antigua itself is a really nice place but we´re told that it´s not a real reflection of Guatemala at all. There´s restaurants, bars and shops all over the place and if I´d "let her" Vicki could´ve spent another few months along with a small fortune in some of these shops. I could even appreciate some of the stuff they had. Now that I think of it if I´d "let her" we´d probably still be following "cute little dogs" around the town. Every day when we´re walking around and she saw a little dog she´d be off like a shot trying to make a new friend and telling me how much cuter Sherman is to this or that dog

After all our time on buses and Vicki carrying both of our back packs (how could I carry it? I´m the man) I allowed her have a massage. We found a sweet little deal a few doors up from our hostel. For an hour and a half of a full body massage and a pedicure they charged the equivalent of 30 Euro and hopefully that´ll set us up nicely for some more time on buses. Also a bit of advice from Vicki: Don´t let a Guatemalan near you with wax. She´s got the scars to prove it!

Although we had homework (Yes! That´s right, homework!) every night, we still managed to fit in a drink every now and then in a number of boozers around the town (Refer to below pictures). We found what is advertised as the only Irish bar in the town. It´s called Reilly´s (any relation to a certain Paul to the O?) and the only Irish thing about it was us being in there. We found out it´s owned by a Danish guy and although it´s got all the token "Fiddle-dee-dee" art work on the walls it´s about as Irish as my da! Although we´d be pretty foolish to go to Guatemala just for an Irish bar

We were up on a rooftop bar one evening and something very strange happened. At least I thought it was strange. Vicki, being a child of science assures me that there´s a logical explanation for it. We were sitting there in the open air on the top floor of a bar, above which there is no roof, no poles, pillars or anything at all above our heads. I look up and there´s a spider dangling above us. One of the lads just plucked it out of the air and I was amazed. I was curious as to what it was hanging from but no one else seemed too concerned. If anyone has any suggestions I´d love to hear them...

On our first Friday in Antigua, the school arranged a footy match between the students and the teachers. We went along to support and it was good craic. We thought it´d be a friendly kick about but when the teachers arrived onto the pitch in their own kit and with a prepared formation we thought there was something rotten in the state of Denmark! The students we no great shakes but they got a hiding! I wished I was out there playing but hopefully there´ll be plenty more time to have a crack a few months down the line. It ended something like Maestros (Spanish for teachers but the way they were playing you´d swear they were conducting an orchestra) -20 and Alumnos (Yep, you guessed it. Students!) - 2. Despite the final score it got us in the mood for watching more footy so we went about trying to organise a trip to Guatemala City to go to world cup qualifier between Guate and Trinidad & Tobago. It didn´t quite work out as planned because we would have been getting them off scalpèrs at the gate and there´s no guarantee that even if they were real we´d get in because when the stadium is full, whether they´re with real tickets or not, they stop letting people in. It´s a good system. Anyways the stadium only holds 40,000 and there were millions of people a lot more passionate than us about wanting to go to the game so the gods weren´t working in our favour in this instance. Instead we decided to drop the idea and head to the pub to watch it. It ended up being good fun but the game was atrocious. The football was reminiscent of a game not so long ago between a certain group of Maestros and Alumnos...Crap! Guatemala drew nil all and after losing to Cuba in their next game they were out of the qualifying. When I was talking about it with the dad in our hostel he said something along the lines of "Better that it happens now rather than prolong the inevitable." I liked his resignation to the fact that football in Guate is going nowhere. It´s refreshingly honest!

The food was good and at times very cheap. A couple of days we ate in the market which is where the locals dine. It tasted fine but after we told people where we had eaten we got a few funny looks. Apparently it´s not known for it´s hygiene or quality of food. We survived it and I quite enjoyed it but I guess that´s not saying much. I´ve tried so many different types of food I´m sure my stomach has given up and gone into auto pilot. I´m still alive though so more weird stuff please. True to form I´m still finishing off Vicki´s meals for her. What can I say? I´m a giver!

There are tourist agencies on every corner here in Antigua and they offer so much from treks up volcanoes to fantastic trips to wherever you´d like to go in Guatemala. Because we´re going to be away and hopefully doing all sorts of stuff in a number of other countries, we couldn´t do everything on offer. We just picked what we thought would be great but affordable. We think we did well out of it

One thing we didn´t have to pay for was a first hand experience with an earthquake. Earthquake may be a bit of an exaggeration but we certainly felt the ground move. It was during our second week. Vicki was on the computer and I was talking with Blanca in the hostel. All of a sudden Vicki springs out of her chair shouting ¨Can you feel that?¨As usual I´m the last to know what´s going on. I thought maybe I was suffering from a little wind but then Blanca confirmed that it was a little tremor and it´s nothing too unusual. Soon after we heard that there was an earthquake in the Chiapas region on the Mexican border. It measured 6.6 on the richter scale and we´re guessing that we got the tremor end of it. Interesting experience!

So after 2 weeks of learning Spanish and far from slumming it, we decided that it was time to move on to pastures new...

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