Hela Xela!

Hola mis amigos!  Wow! I just returned from Fuentes Georgina`s in Zunil, Guatemala.  Donde esta you ask? Yo will tell you!

Classic Juan con Louro

Zunil is near Xela (pronounced Shela) and is in the western highlands of Guatemala.  Xela is right around 2500 meters (for those non-Candaians, that´s around 7500 ft! Take that Denver!).  So we are literally in the clouds up here.  Storms roll in with lightning quickness (pun intended) and can last all day or 15 minutes.  There is a lot of geothermal activity here, mainly focused around the local active volcano.  Xela is the 2nd largest city in Guatemala and is subsequently full of people on motorbikes and chicken buses (refer to last post) and microlets (vans with the sliding door open that people hop on and off of!).  It has a huge variety of street markets and restaurants and schools.  The people continue to be much smaller than I am, which was thrown into stark contrast when I attended the Catholic mass at the cathedral in the central park.  We all stood to sing the opening hymn and I am head and shoulders taller then everyone else.  I did however receive a nice compliment today that I look like I´m from Spain.  Considering Spain just won the UEFA Cup, I´ll take it!  I was sad to inform him that I still only speak a poco amount of espanol.

Just getting artsy

For those travelers that may or may not be considering a trip to Latin America I´ll give you some small deets on prices and accommodations.  I´ve been paying about $11 per night for a few different hotels with my own double bed and a shared bathroom.  The 4 hours bus ride from Guatemala City to Xela is about $8 and if you want to ride the local bus around town it`s 25 cents.  Meals have gone from $3 for tortillas and some bomber soup full of shrimp and mussels to $10 for a fantastic pizza with sun dried tomatoes, mushrooms, bacon, onions with a pesto base, plus 1 Liter of the local beer.  Last night was my favorite but most expensive meal- I got a plate of mussels, shrimp and delicious fish and shrimp lasagna with a Tom Collins-esque drink for $12.  Ok, no more dinero talk.

As I mentioned earlier, I just got out of the back of the pickup truck that took me and 14 (yes 14 people in the back of a pickup - we had to stand) about 45 minutes through some unbelievable farm land and up some scary switchbacks to some hot springs that put New Zealand hot springs to shame!  Georgina´s fountain was probably around 112 degrees Fahrenheit in the spot closest to the spring and cooled down to 100 in the lower pools.  The hottest and largest pool is about the size of an Olympic pool and has a huge misty, cascading waterfall at the far end.  I went with a group that was organized by the language school whom I´m studying with this week-Projecto Linguistico Quetzltenango.

Fuentes Georgina´s - Muy Caliente!

What´s unbelievable about the farmland that we traveled through is the angles of the fields!  Imagine Jurassic park style jungle with the peaks shrouded in cloud and greenery that puts North Carolina to shame (you know I love you NC!) and then clearcut some of those gigantic trees (not enough to make it look non-jungley) and slap a radish patch on the side of a mountain.  Now multiply that by a few dozen and string PVC pipes across huge gorges and you start to get the idea.  I am amazed at their ability to turn seemingly impossible land into arable land (side note: it reminds me a lot of what I read about the Jews doing in Palestine in the early 1900´s as they turned desert into farmland, from Exodus by Leon Uris, read it!).
Sorry I don´t have a picture, I was holding on for dear life in the back of the truck!

View from the springs

The language part of my journey continues to go well.  There are a ton of students at this school and the instructors are all quite professional.  There is much more structure here then there was in Antigua, so it actually feels like school - there are good things and bad things about this, but on the whole it´s good.  Mi maestra will help me with anything that I ask her to and will cater to my learning style as much as she can based on feedback I give her.  For the most part we chat in basic Spanish and she corrects me where she needs to, we learn new verbs and she fills in other vocab as I ask about it.  Es muy bueno.  We shall see how things progress.

Jurassic Park

View from my room

One last quick story - my first full day in Xela I was a bit overwhelmed.  Things were slightly more expensive then I expected and I was worried about the cost of the language school.  Since it was a Sunday lots of things were closed.  I went to mass en espanol thinking that I could at least understand what was going on based on my Anglican history but I was a little daunted by how little I could understand even after 15 hours of intense classes.  I couldn´t find the cheap lunch that I was looking for and so after eating 2 baby loaves of bread, uno con queso y jamon, I went to sit in the park.  I was sitting in parque de central listening to some music and a young man approached me.  Alejandro turned out to be a student who lives in Xela with his 2 brothers and parents.  He has not learned as much English in school as he wants and suggested that we practice Spanish together.  Unfortunately, my initial response was that he was going to try and rob me.  But I think he was equally nervous to be hanging out with this crazy American dude!  So we met twice during this first week and we just hung in the park and chatted in very basic Spanish and English for a few hours.  He is such a nice kid and I was amazed that he had the guts to approach me.  I´m thankful that I was open enough to say yes.  I hope more opportunities like that continue to come my way!

En Guatemala

Hola mis amigos! I´ve switched hemipsheres from my last post and now I´m in the lovely town of Xela, Guatemala.
Most of you may already know this, but I decided earlier this year to take advantage of a relatively flexible summer by taking an adventure down south for some research.  For 10 weeks I´ll be taking 1-on-1 Spanish lessons 5 days a week.  Also, hopefully I´ll be able to volunteer and even possibly join a medical mission team and use my paramedic skills.
Here´s my quick soapbox: Why am I here to learn Spanish?
I have felt inspired to make this trip to ¨aprendar¨ Spanish because a) if Christ tells me to love my neighbor, I can´t very well love someone that I can´t speak with.  Thus, considering that there are going to be more Spanish speaker then English speakers in the US by 2020, that´s a lot of neighbors!  b) In that same vein, it will certainly be helpful from a business stance. c) I already come in to contact with many people who do not speak English in my job as a paramedic, so it will be helpful professionally.  d) It is going to make visiting Spanish speaking coutnries in the future way more fun!

So what is Guatemala like you ask? Well, let me tell you.
When you fly in to Guatemala City and walk out of the airport there are dozens of people there vying (sp?) for your attention.  However, compared to Thailand where the throng literally presses up against you, here it´s much more relaxed and you can make decisions in your own time.  I had arranged someone to greet me with a sign with my name on it and considering the fact that I was 6 hours late, I was amazed when I saw the sign!  Mui bien!
The city is not typically a tourist spot.  The streets are poorly marked, the concrete is pockmarked, and there are huge metal doors lining most streets.  I felt safe where I was but I can imagine it getting a bit hairy in some areas after dark.  Not a lot to do during the day, but I wanted to get the lay of the land and buy a phone so I took my time and decided that my next stop would be Antigua.
¨Chicken buses¨ are the cheapest means of transportation within Latin America.  I have been fascinated by them thus far for each one has a driver and a hawker/money collector.  Sometimes the bus will come to a complete stop for multiple people to get on, but if there´s just one person it will just roll and the person hops on.  Now if you can imagine, almost all the buses are literally old American school buses.  As I read in some tourist book, this actually makes them ideal for their use here in a country where driving is a sport!  They are extremely safe and extremely reliable.  Did I feel reliably safe while we were weaving across 3 lanes going uphill while overtaking much smaller vehicles? Oh yeah! Cuz we´re the big dog on the road!  Keeping this image of a school bus roller coaster in your mind, now add to that a reality show that turns the bus from it´s old broken down version into a Xzibit-style ¨Pimp my Chicken Bus¨version! Outragesou paint jobs, video and sound systems to show movies or pump some serious accordion, now add 3-4 adults per seat and people filling the aisles with people sitting in your lap in order to let people by, while your glasses fog up because of the humidity and you start to get the picture.
After my $1 ride an hour down the road to Antigua I was met off the bus by a guy named Juan.  His chipped tooth smile got bigger when I told him, ¨Me llamo Juan tambien!¨ Juan showed me the way through town and led me to an alley and through a metal door.  Hmmm, you may be wondering whether you would have followed Juan.  Well, you may know that I´m a tall feller, and here in the ancestral home fo the Mayans, people are quite short!  So that may be a false illusion of safety, but it makes me feel better.  Also, on the walk, Juan has been chatting to me about his Spanish school and his love of Antigua and how I should never leave (again, maybe a comment that you wouldn´t want to hear from someone leading you into a dark room in an alley).  But once inside and after my eyes adjusted I met Mama Luvia.  A sweet woman with big brown eyes and a warm smile, she and Juan ushered me upstairs to have a look at the rooms.  The rooms were decoreated with multicolored fabrics and all had big beds.  And in the center of the rooms was a patio where there were 6 people sitting.  2 Englishmen, 1 South Korean and 3 Guatemalan instructors, eating guacamole and drinking rum and coke!  Juan suggested that I start learning Spanish immediately and after about 1 second I agreed.  So for a cool $90 I had 15 hours of one on one with Jose.  Jose es profesor de los idiomas por 32 anos!  El habla 5 idiomas: espanol, ingles, german, japonese, y francaise!  He was fantastic and gave me a great head start!

Antigua itself was wonderful!  A city full of color and motion, it definitely screams, ¨Look at me!¨  Thus there is a booming tourist industry and over 75 language schools.  The diversity of restaurants, shops and street stalls rivals big Western cities, though the cobble stone roads are not the most comfortable to walk on, let alone ride a tuk tuk on (still a huge American market that´s waiting to be tapped-tuk tuks, for real!).
There are 3 volcanoes around Antigua and the one pictured is the one south of Antigua.  Activities surrounding Antigua include salsa dancing, mountain hikes, more Spanish practice, reading-people watching in the lovely Parque de Central, finding sneaky hostel patios with awesome drink specials and general tourist debauchery (it´s quite safe a night, so intoxicated strolls are not very dangerous, but keep your eye on that tuk tuk!).
After my 3 days in Antigua and despues aprendar un poco EspaÑol, yo viajo a Xela.
I´ve been in Xela for 2 nights, but I´ll have to save late for a later date!  Gracias por leer mi post! Buenos dias!