Guate?

After many questions I think it’s time to describe spanish school.  There are somewhere around 70 language schools in Antigua, and as previously described, I chose Latinamerica based on Princesa, the most spoiled dog in town.  Class is from 8am to 12pm every morning, it is one on one and I´m being taught by the director of the school.  This is most fortunate because he probably knows the most english of anyone i´ve met.  So far we have covered 2-4 verbs a day, tons of vocabulary and some phrases.  After three days I have probably covered as much as I learned in my first year of French. Actually those french classes were good for something, there are many words that are the same, just said entirely differently and learning to listen to french has helped me listen closely to spanish.  My host family was very surprised that after one day of class I could understand most of what they were saying, saying slowly that is.  What really helped was the father, Sergio, speaking with lots of hand and face expressions.  At first I thought it was just for me, but after hearing him and his son talk, apparently he does it all the time.  The mom I don´t understand as well, but she also doesn´t slow down very much.   supposedly they are both spanish teachers, but I think the dad teaches more frequently and the mom usually works at the hair salon.

Their home is in a compound of apartments in the middle of Antigua that is accessed by an unnumbered black, metal door on calle 3, across from number 35, which is how I remember how to get home.  This could be the main reason I haven´t gone out late at night yet, I´m not so certain I would find my way home.  once behind the black metal door, there is a narrow open air hallway of red cement walls.  There are a few pieces of wood connecting apartments and then are covered in broken glass to deter any robbers.  The apartments are covered in corrugated tin roofs and my apartment isn´t entirely covered, so the middle room that is a kitchen, dining room and wash room feels like a courtyard.  My room has it´s own padlock and I feel silly using it.  But much like south africa, the locals are always more concerned about security that i am, so I lock my door when I leave just to make sure I have my keys with me and don´t get locked outside the main black door. 

The bathrooms are the most interesting part of everywhere I´ve stayed so far.  Just like Kerry warned me, they have electric showers with water going through the showerhead that has a slight current.  Well, I don´t have current testers, so I have no idea what the current is, but I am more grateful for warm showers than worried about getting electrocuted.  On that note, my family´s shower does have a slight current that travels down to the knob, so I use my bandana to adjust the water flow, otherwise the slight current hurts a bit.  Also the shower is in the same small cement room as the toilet and they are separated by a tiny shower curtain.  It is just one cement floor, so if someone has showered recently, the floor is always wet to get to the toilet.  I have to admit that it really only took a day to get used to this system and now it seems mostly normal. 

Oh and food!  this will probably amuse everyone the most, especially with all the food I refuse to eat in the states, but Guatemala is a whole different game, so you should all be proud of me!  At my first breakfast in Guate, the only word I recognized was pancakes, so that´s what I had.  For my second breakfast I was already acclimated to eggyness and had french toast!  Then I started living with my host family and my first lunch had some unidentifiable beef, dinner was beans – yeah- and breakfast was fruit, so i thought I was in the clear.  HOwever, When I woke up this morning I tried to convince myself that I didn´t hear eggs cooking.  But after years of avoiding the kitchen when Dad was cooking eggs, i knew the sound all too well.  Eggs for breakfast!  Eggs covered in tomato and onions with bread.  So I steeled myself and started eating the eggs, rest assured they are just as horrible as they smell.  After gagging down a few bites (the gagging was all in my head), I devised a strategy of using my bread to take a small bite of egg and put it on the bread.  Then cover this with tomatoes.  This bite was then put into my mouth bread side down, so most of the taste was bread, I chewed fast to get rid of the eggyness and then washed it down with tea.  I doubt to most of the world that this breakfast would have caused panic, but under the circumstances I think I handled it quite well.  when I put half my plate of eggs in the trash, I was shocked to find out that it was only one egg that had made my breakfast – those things are huge!  And as consolation lunch was great.  I have no idea what it was, but it was great.

First day of spanish lessons survived. That is about the best prognosis. They wisely serve coffee and tea through out the four hour lesson, but even with that my brain felt like it was wilting after two hours. So I went downstairs and petted the dog, Princessa. See, there was very good reasoning behind this whole dog-deciding-language school thing. Princessa also became part of nosotros in many of my made up ´sentences. Beyond all of that fun, I´ve gone for many walk-runs outside of town to see the local villages. I don´t even want to imagine what my lungs look after sharing the road with so many black fume spewing buses, but it´s worth it to get some execise. Last night I avoided the racuious party at the hostel and climbed up on the roof. There is a little patch of cement to sit on and from there I could see over the rooftops to the ruins of one of the many cathedrals and the mountains beyond. Right when I got up there I saw a shooting star and I felt like everything was a little more right with my trip. This morning, right before my spanish lesson, my teacher and I were standing on the top level of the school and could see a clear view of Volcan Fuego and it was erupting! The volcano tops are usually covered in clouds, so it was exciting to even see the top of the peak (mom and dad, think mt. rainer) let alone to see it erupt.

ok, it´s already starting to grow on me here.  Today I walked all around Antigua, got into the tourist thing, taking pictures and then hiked on out of town.  I walked along the main road and was occasionally trapped by the buses spewing black smoke, but for the most part it was a lovely walk up to San Juan del Obispo.  There isn´t really any thing at SJO, a run down town square and some kids, but it was still nice to walk somewhere and get closer to one of the volcanoes.  I don´t know if it was the active one, yes, there are active volcanoes here!  But it was impressivly covered in clouds the whole day.  I can´t imagine what this valley would look like with out clouds and rather suspect the day will never be seen, but it is still thrilling to get glimpses of the peaks every now and then.  Oh, BTW, I also have a wonderful view from the hostel.  So, just to rub it in, I spent an hour or two this afternoon sitting on the balcony, listening to rain on the tin roof and looking out over the town rooftops, across the valley, to the base of one of the massive volcanic peaks.   By the end of my sit (an official backpacker activity), the peak was revealed and I snapped a picture ( I also achieved enlightenment, but the picture will be easier to share).  Mucho amor.

The easiest summary, is just re-read my South Africa posts (which no longer exist, so I guess I have to fill in some details).  Similar third-world transportation, cell-phone dependence, friendly-poor people to Africa.  I’m hoping for improvments in the situation with my conquest of Spanish plan.  After planning on studiously avoiding all gringo contact, I gave in last night and practically fled to The Black Cat (no, not even the black gato) where English was practically spilling out the doors and onto the streets.  It held the typical ex-pat, living off mommy and daddy crowd, but oh, they were so great to see.  This was after a couple hour bus ride from Guate City on the chicken bus; I’ve heard there’s even a song about it.  Wandering around town from language school to language school, with my overpacked bag getting heavier by the minute, I finally stopped at the one with Princessa.  Yes, I chose where to spend my gringa cash based on a dog, a lovely Golden, retriever mix.  The teacher seemed good too, but really it was the dog that kept coming back into my mind as I got more and more exhausted.  I just wanted to curl up on the floor and pet Princessa, probably the only Spanish speaker who understood me at that point.  After signing my week away to LatinAmericano, I left my stuff at Hotel la Casa de don Ishmael, name origin is unknown, and headed out into the city (oh, Antigua, that is).  This was the most exhausting part, trying to feel touristy, but not feeling that interested in ‘discovering’ anything 20 other blondhaired people had just seen.  I then sat in the Parc Central and comenced to feel very sorry for myself.  Not to worry, it’s the same affliction I met with after my 24 hour flight to South Africa – total exhaustion, but not being sleepy and feeling this duty to explore this beautiful city that the guide book praises to high heavens.  This is when I had the epiphany, damn Lonley Planet!  They are exactally as the name implies, a guide to lonleyness.  They try to take you all these cool places, but some how the descriptions never quite match, the places they describe rarely exist when you get there and then you feel guilty for not having the fabulous time the guide writers obviously had.  Well, damn them.  They made me feel guilty for wanting to be around gringos after 24 hours of not being understood beyond ‘gracias.’  And I promise you, gracias doesn’t get you too far. 

Long story short, I gave it, met the gringos and felt much better for having done so.  I slept the sleep of the sinful and have decided to re-locate nearer to the gringos today.  I of course am not a gringa, I just like being around the cute, clueless people.  It’s just like another foreign culture I’ll be studying. 

I have a confession, when you guys send me mass emails, well, I rarely read them. They sit there, pilling up, looking intimidating with long stories of shopping for textiles in foreign markets or missed buses. Then, the worst part is that you come back and I’m caught! You have pictures and allusions to stories that were sent out and I somehow never read. Some of it could be jealousy – think Chile in the middle of Albany’s winter – others out of spite, well, not really. So long confession short, here is my blog for Guatemala. Much like South Africa, I have things to share when living abroad, but become insufferably boring when I return to the states (just like Cinderella, really). The point is that this is just going to be about the next three months in Guatemala. If life is amazingly interesting after that, maybe I’ll start a new blog.. but it won’t be called “Guate.”