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Published: December 16th 2007
Big arch
Antigua is lovely, but it´s a bit short of landmarks. Luckily there´s a dirty great big volcano to the south to help you get your bearings.Hoooola
Its been a week of getting up early and studying hard for us (school starts at 8 over here), but fortunately we´d cannily found a hotel within 90 seconds walk of school, so it could have been worse.
The other main feature of the week has been leg pain! Getting down Volcan San Pedro put even more strain on my legs than it felt like at the time. ouch. back to normal now though and looking forward to some more volcano climbing in Nicaragua next week.
Studying has scarily revealed just how little Spanish I know. Although lots of words are very similar to English, there´s so much grammar to learn, and lots of words like 'for', and 'so' and 'therefore' that you take for granted in English that you have about 5 different ways of saying in Spanish, so its a steep learning curve. I have a lovely teacher called Maria who has infinite patience and is happy to say every word incredibly slowly like she´s speaking to the village idiot, so I'm hoping I'll get there eventually!
Antigua is a lovely place to spend a few days. It is quite touristy, but there are
Found in Guatemala
Little Richard isn´t dead, he´s running a tour company off Lago de Atitlan plenty of places to go to get away from the tourist scene, and the advantage of it being such a language-school oriented town are lots of good bookshops and lots of locals who are used to gringos speaking terrible Spanish who are willing to chat to you and correct you without laughing at you too much! Its another big coffee area and the coffee and cake scene has also made me very happy! I´m still loving the volcanoes too. We had sunset cocktails in a really cool roof bar on our last night in town and suddenly noticed massive puffs of smoke coming out of one of them - we have photos but we´re in Nicaragua at the moment with very limited internet access so will put some up when we get somewhere less rural!
Other highlights of Antigua included the ´burning of the devil´ritual, this pretty much does what it says on the tin! Lots of people congregate in one of the town squares and a huge effigy of the devil is wheeled out. A brave man in a crazy costume pours about 4 gallons of petrol over it and then sets it alight - and local kids
Crumbling Antigua
Sorry about the quality of the photo add to the chaos by chucking a few tons of firecrackers around! Nervous looking firemen hang around the area! It was quite impressive.
I also got to go on a school trip on my last day of school to a local coffee finca and museum. (Si opted to stay at school to finish his lesson on the Imperative - i think this is so that he can order me around in Spanish as well as English). About ten of us and our respective teachers hopped on the chicken bus which was playing very loud eighties music, so it really did feel a bit like a genuine school trip, minus the squabbles about who was going to sit on the back seat. I won't go into too much detail on the coffee making process, except to say its more complicated than I thought, and wow it smells nice. AND apparently there is a special kind of coffee known as Civet processed coffee which is very expensive and sold as a delicacy throughout the world. Instead of popping the coffee out of the berry, washing, drying and roasting, Civet coffee is produced by finding the dung of the civet cat and
The Devil, pre his burning
I always thought he´d look a bit more like an estate agent. sifting through it for coffee beans, as civet cats like to eat the berries but can't digest the beans. The beans are then roasted as usual (I'm hoping after a thorough washing) but suddenly worth 50 times as much. Funny old world, eh.
Anyway, as usual, hope all you guys are well and let us know how you are! we're gonna miss you all at Chrimbo and New Year
Lots of love, Nat xxx
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