La escuela de español

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So I signed up for Spanish school today. At San Pedro Spanish School, which seems to be the one that everyone goes to here. It's funny, when I began this trip, I never thought that I would ever sign up for Spanish school, but now that I'm down here, I am pretty enthusiastic about it. The nice thing about independent travel, though, is that your plans can change at a whim, and your vacation can take a shape by the end that you never thought it would have at the beginning.

Before this trip, the only experience I'd had with the Spanish language was a few years spent in high school where I learned little to nothing. I spent a few weeks before I came here studying Spanish independently, and I have been trying to exercise my skills here by paying attention to what people are saying and reading newspapers with my trusty Spanish-English dictionary. I have really come to enjoy the act of learning the language, way more so than when I was learning it in high school. I feel like I have a decent command of the language at this point, and I am able to understand simple spoken sentences, and I can read the newspaper if I have a dictionary. However, I would really like to be able to have a conversation in Spanish, and I hope that my experience here will allow me to do that.

San Pedro La Laguna is a pretty nice place to chill out and spend a few days, and it now looks like I am going to be doing that until Monday. My friends with whom I have been travelling will most likely leave tomorrow or the next day, so for awhile at least, I will be travelling alone. It's nice to have some companions to travel with and talk to, but on the other hand, it's nice to have the independence of travelling solo. Not having to wait for anyone and being able to make your own mistakes is liberating, in a way.

We did go cliff-diving yesterday. We kayaked across to the other side of the lake (a considerable distance) to find a place that was almost out of a hippy commune of the 1960s. There were nude people of both sexes sunbathing on rocks by the lakeshore. There was even a naked guy playing a flute. The little area we'd gone to was apparently by a sort of resort-type place where people go to do yoga, meditate, fast and do things of that nature. This is near San Marcos La Laguna.

We found the cliff-diving spot, though, which had to be about 10 meters high. No one was brave enough to jump off at first. We asked a local that was on a boat below us if it was ok to jump from, and he said it was fine. So eventually we all jumped. We even got pictures of all of us in the air. The view from the point was beautiful, although it's beautiful pretty much anywhere on the lake. Sorry about no pictures today, my camera's back at the hotel, and I'm pretty much too lazy to walk back there and get it right now.

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Comments

[chris]

so I called Brian up
Wow, thomas, me parece que tu has disfrutado mucho hace estas tres semanas. Yo no podia hacer amigos en los hostels, pero yo veo que tu lo haces muy bien. No sé por que tu website no funcionaba por mi antés, pero yo pienso que Opera lo hacía, o Dvorak, tal vez. Sanjay llegó en Austin el jueves pasado y nosotros nos hemos diviertidos, tratandos de encontrar algunas chicas (pero sin éxito). Estoy feliz de que tu quieras asistir una escuela de lengua mientras de que tu estés en América del Sud, yo también pienso de estudiar una lengua aqui en Austin, durante del verano. Todo el mundo de NI qui trabajó aqui el ano pasado te recuerda, y todo el mundo tiene ganas de verte de nuevo cuando tu revuelvas. Voy guardar la cerveza frío por tí, hasta pronto amigo, buena suerte.