Monday, November 28, 2005

Antigua! It was a long twelve hours by second-class bus to Guatemala City, followed by a bargaining session with a taxi driver and an hour in the cab. (He wanted Q225 and we got the ride for Q150. We still did not know how much a Quetzal is worth or what a ride should cost, but we did our best.) We finally bought a guidebook on Sunday and then spent the day enrolling in Spanish school and finding a room good enough to spend two weeks in. Anyway, we are now settled in Antigua and going to school.

Because Antigua is so tourist-oriented, it's scorned by some as a terrible place to learn Spanish. Also, it's supposedly not "the real Guatemala." Well, probably if we were doing a six-week trip we'd go elsewhere, but we have a lot of time so we're ignoring all that. Antigua is beautiful. The streets are cobblestoned and the houses - none more than three stories high - are all painted luscious bright colors. The city is at the bottom of a bowl formed by green hills and mountains and volcanoes, and we get especially good views of Volcan Agua while walking around town, or if we stick our heads out the window and turn left. The leafy Parque Central is exquisite. It's no Central Park, but it's bountifully-benched and kept sparkling clean and has a big fountain and two little fountains to admire.

And our hotel (Santa Lucia, across from the Mercado) has a regular showerhead! All of the other places we looked at touted hot water "twenty-four hours a day." This of course was possible via the infamous electric showerhead which is nothing but a cruel joke. The hotel we're staying at only has hot water from 6:00 to 9:00, morning and evening. But. It is actual hot water from a non-deadly tap, and this is infinitely preferable, especially since we have to get up early for school anyway.

Centro Linguistico La Union is the school I attended four years ago. I liked it then, so we went there this time as well. The price has gone up a bit - it's now $95 for twenty hours of one-on-one tutelage in the morning, cheaper in the afternoon. The school is in a pleasant courtyard setting with lots of greenery and small tables set up every few feet, each for one teacher and one student. They serve free coffee, tea, and bottled water. (No milk though, or even powdered creamer. I don't know why.) It's nice. We both like our teachers. But we have to be there at 8:00 am! I mean... vacation? Whatever. We are dying to improve our Spanish.

The school also sets up "activities" for the students in the afternoons. They say the morning classes are more expensive than the afternoon because of the free activities which the morning students are entitled to attend in the afternoon, but I have to say I haven't yet seen a free activity being offered. (That's my only complaint. Besides the lack of milk.) Anyway today Michael and I paid Q30 each to pile into the microbus with some other students and be taken to Ciudad Viejo, a Mayan town fifteen minutes away from Antigua.

What attracted me to the activity was that it involved learning to make tortillas. For some reason, I really, really want to learn to make my own tortillas. But it turned out that the activity was more of a hodgepodge Mayalike experience. It was the type of thing that makes me a little uncomfortable - being part of a crowd of gringos observing the natives - but sometimes one just has to get over oneself, I guess, if one wants to learn things.

A Mayan woman named Doña Gloria called for volunteers to dress in traditional Mayan clothes and act out a Mayan wedding. This was very interesting, and would only have been better if the "groom" had limited himself to just one wedding-night joke. Then we ate some pepian, which is a Mayan festival food, a kind of chicken stew with rice. The tortilla-making was just a small portion of the activity, and I decided not to even take part, because it just looked like the gringos were wasting food. The lady who was demonstrating the process created perfect tortillas, which we ate with our pepian, but no one was going to eat the lumpy, misshapen tortillas made by the students. Mine would have been just the same and I couldn't bear to make tortillas that would only be discreetly thrown to the pigs, or whatever, with no time to improve my technique.

After that we got to see a lady weave a row onto a tapestry using a backstrap loom. I have heard of backstrap looms before, but never realized that the name comes from the fact that a strap goes around the weaver's back, well, really her butt, and that's how she holds her work in place while she weaves. I really wished she could have done more than one line because it looked interesting, but I only got enough of a sample to let me know, in case I hadn't guessed, what a pain in the butt (ha ha) it must be to create all that intricate Guatemalan weaving.

Then we had the opportunity to buy some of this weaving, and then we were taken back to the school. I hope that at some point Michael and I get a chance to get to know people's lives outside of a two-hour lecture and demonstration activity.
I expect there will be less to write about in the next couple of weeks since we'll mostly just be going to school every day and studying in the evening. But this is really exciting for us because while our Spanish has improved somewhat with travel, it really needs help, especially if we want the "real" whatever.


HOURS ON THE BUS: 101


HOURS IN A TAXI: 2

 

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View of Volcan Agua from hotel rooftop.

Local color.

Doña Gloria exlains the wedding ceremony.

Michael was asked to dance by the "mother-in-law" ...so handsome.

Making tortillas.

Backstrap weaving.

Guatemalan weaving.