Week 1 of Spanish

Hola!
A quick additional fact: The majority of towns and cities in Guatemala have a Central Park serving as the center of town. The Church is always on the east side of the Park.

We began our Spanish classes on Monday. We had 4 hours of class Monday thru Friday, from 8am to 12pm daily. In addition to the time in class, we probably studied atleast a few hours each day. We learned a lot of verbs, a lot of basic conversation tools, some verb tenses, and lots of vocabulary. Our teachers, Carmen and Olga were both really friendly, fun women with lots of interesting stories to share. The majority of the teachers only speak Spanish, and your classes are one on one. Therefore, you have no choice but to speak Spanish. It was the first week of classes, so the conversations were semi basic. To give you an example, I (Amir) was able to describe the Golden Temple to my teacher, Carmen. She was very appreciative of the knowledge, as she did not know anything about India. I (Ami) had a really funny moment with Olga. She was teaching me a word, hay, and she was saying what I swear sounded like "Hay, terir, terrar"-ok, something like that. So I asked her to repeat it probably 3 times and I tried to say it back to her to understand what she meant. All of a sudden, she started laughing hysterically and pulled out a piece of paper to write, "Hay - There is. There are." We had a good laugh over that. Overall, the instruction approach was thorough, but not overwhelming.

Several students, mostly from the US, come to Antigua to study Spanish. We were able to meet several fellow students. Some had been studying for several weeks straight and were pretty good. A few of them had no background in Spanish, so we were impressed and excited about our potential to learn during the course of our travels and classes.

We also learned our first salsa moves on Wednesday. The school organized for salsa lessons to be provided, so a salsa instructor came and taught us the basics. We practiced the moves for an hour and a half! It was really fun, but it will be so much fun once we're good at it! But we have to start somewhere!

We hiked up to la Cruz, the Cross, with our friends at another school. The views of Antigua and Volcano Agua were beautiful. In years past, they had a lot of robberies against foreigners in that area, so since then, they have police up there all the time, and haven't had any problems since. We were also escorted by the town's tourist police.

As for accomodations, we stayed with a family for the entire week, which was great. The madre de la casa was Dona Dora, a cute, elderly lady who made us feel right at home. She would laugh with us at our mistakes, but was patient and fun to talk to. We ate all our meals there for the week - breakfast at 7 am, lunch at 12:15 and dinner at 6 pm. Some mornings we would have just fruit, which although may be good for you, is not filling on its own. Lunch and Dinner was traditional home cooked Guatemalan food. The portions were healthy (more on that later), and overall, the comida was great. It also was great to be able to unpack for a while and settle in.

My favorite food story with the host family was with meal portions. Trust me, she knew who could eat! One evening she made sandwiches...sounds plain, but they were really good. She had just finished making them as 4 of us, including Ami and myself, walked into the dining room. She was bringing the plates for Ami and another student into the dining room while I was walking towards the kitchen to wash my hands. As she was giving Ami and our housemate their plates (one sandwich per plate), I saw a plate with two sandwiches. I smiled ear to ear and grabbed the plate and walked with it back into the dining room. She pointed at me and said "Si". I knew it was for me and said "Muchas Gracias", still maintaining the big smile. Everyone shared a laugh. I was just happy to have enough food. Thank you Senora!

Pictures to come soon with the above text. Before having a picture taken, they yell out Whisky! My kind of country. Sounds much better than cheese.