Exploring Antigua

el 30 de junio 2011

We set our alarm for 7am for breakfast at 7:15. We had a beautiful fruit plate with bananas, papaya, oranges, and strawberries with strawberry yogurt in the middle. We again talked a lot to Elvira after the others had left. We headed back to our room to unpack our stuff. I also took a shower. There are two bathrooms up here. The first shower I tried started smoking a bit when I turned on the water so I went to the other one. I unpacked first and Amber read and then we switched and she unpacked while I talked to her and did some other stuff. We finished a little before 10. We headed out to look for a Spanish school. I had found one online that looked cheap and good. I had not written down the address, though, so after wandering around talking for about an hour, we stopped at an internet café for 15 minutes to check our email. I wrote down the address and we walked to the school. It is about a 20 minute walk from our house, which is about as far away as you can get in Antigua!

The man we spoke with was very nice. It is a decently large school, but it is run by his family with at least 4-5 family members working there. We went on a tour and talked about prices. We had wanted to take classes in the afternoon because they are cheaper and it always rains in the afternoon. However, they only have openings in the morning. We decided to do one week (5 days) of classes. We will do class Friday and Saturday and then three days next week. By the time we had signed our papers, it was time for us to get back for lunch. We walked quickly back to Elvira’s where we had soup with rice in it. She had a green chile from her garden chopped up for us to add to our soup, if we wanted. I tried the tiniest pieces I could and it was plenty! We also had watermelon and salpicon, which is chopped up meat with tomato and onion and some green stuff. We also had vegetables: corn on the cob, huisquil (which is kind of like a potato), and a cooked carrot.

After lunch, we went back to our room for a bit and then decided to take advantage of the sun and went out again. We wanted to find a place we could take salsa classes cheaply, but the only two places were found were charging $10 an hour. We continued looking for another school, but we never found the place. However, we saw several shoe stores and Amber is looking for good salsa-dancing shoes. We looked around but we couldn’t find what she was looking for. In one store, Asusana (sp?) was very helpful and kept bringing her shoes to try on. After trying on about ten pairs, she decided that they weren’t quite what she was looking for and we headed out. It looked like rain, so we started to look for a café. As we were looking, Julia and Liz from my school in Xela came around the corner. We said hi and then we dashed off because it was starting to rain. We backtracked half a block and went into a café (Kashta?) that we had seen earlier. We went up to the terrace which had sections under a roof. Amber had chai tea and I had a strawberry licuado. We talked a lot about school stuff and what we want to change for next year. We were there about two hours. When the rain stopped, a bunch of people started coming in so we left. Amber almost forgot to pay since we had been there so long!

We went to the internet café near our house and we called Bernabe, the pastor from Parramos. Amber spoke with him and we are going to go there and visit on Saturday after school. We then went back to our house. We studied Spanish together for about a half hour before dinner. Amber has a list of phrases such as at that moment, for once, by chance, etc. that I want to learn. I copied the list into my notebook and she put them on notecards. Soon it was time to go to dinner.

We had soup with chopped up green beans in it, chuchitos (which look about the size of a baked potato and I think are made of corn on the outside with meat and a certain kind of flower on the inside), guacamole, and bread. We again sat and talked for a long time. When we got back to our room, we talked some more and then gave each other shoulder massages. Amber was very tired again, so I decided to go to bed when she did and that I would get up early with her tomorrow and write my blog. We ended up going to bed around 10:30 in our fabulously comfortable beds in a very dark room. It is wonderful to sleep here!