We'd been living in Mexico for six months and were beginning to accumulate a bit of history there. So it was getting increasingly pressing that I be able to talk to the locals in their own language about things that had happened in the past: "We coming from far with boat" was sounding more and more cave-man when I said it. Sarka, who had had the luxury of tutors and classes and textbooks in her own development in Spanish, was itching to be able to talk to somebody other than me. These urges drove us to take language classes, and some of the best language classes available in Latin America are to be had in Antigua, Guatemala. Plus, we needed to renew our visas. So in the middle of May we packed our bags and left our boat in Mazatlan, and headed by bus and plane to Guatemala.

Antigua is indeed a fabulous place to study Spanish. Actually, it's a fabulous place to do just about anything. The original capital of colonial central America, situated amid three volcanoes, it was built to survive the innumberable earthquakes that have afflicted it over the centuries. The air is cool and smells of pine and woodsmoke, and great clouds grow up around the forested peaks, threatening rain most afternoons.

The town itself is typically colonial, with a leafy central plaza rimmed by the main cathedral and several government buildings, and with the predictable grid street block layout. Except for religious buildings, all structures are low, two stories at most, but all of them are constructed with very thick walls in order to resist the earthquakes. This makes the graceful cathedrals' columns and arcades look particularly squatty and inelegant. There is also a large, genuine open air and covered market, several restored churches, and a number of interesting ruins from the 16th and 17th centuries. Some of these ruins have been rescued, stabilized and turned into museums, a few have been left alone, and some, apparently, can be rented out as picturesque venues for events like weddings and graduations.

The streets are cobbled, drained along the centerline, and really bumpy for a bicycle ride, though the locals seem undeterred. To get around, one can hire a carriage or a "tuc-tuc"; an Indian-made, three-wheeled motorcycle with a bulgy shell over it for cover. It has curtains for doors, and the front wheel is usually wobbly and slanted to one side. In some towns these are brightly painted, and at night display a crazy show of twirling color lights. The public transit is old American hand-me-down school buses, which have been beautifully painted with bold patterns. Their only drawback is the thick, hot, brown smoke the bellows from their exhaust pipes as they labor up the hills.

I cannot imagine any lovelier way to spend one's days than the two weeks we spent in Antigua. In the mornings we were at school, in a bougainvillea-shaded patio, sitting with a good teacher at a small table, learning how to talk about the future or the past, or about indeterminate things, or new ways of saying things. In the afternoons we returned to the home of the family we stayed with, ate lunch, had a nap, and went later for a stroll through the cobblestone streets to a cafe, where we drank rich Guatemalan coffee, ate mango pie with ice cream, and did our homework. In the evenings we ate with the family and our fellow guests, three Canadians also studying Spanish.

Our classes were very good. We arrived at 8:00 in the morning and studied, with a couple of breaks, until 1:00. My teacher, Juan, is an out-of-work elementary school math teacher. He and I spent a lot of time conversing about worldly topics: In fact, I wish the course had been more structured, because I really need to improve my grammar. I can, however, now talk about things in the past and future, and things that happened repeatedly in the past. I am also significantly more fluent. This is very useful progress.

Sarka, as you may have gleaned, has studied quite a bit more Spanish than I have. What she needs is more conversational practice and reinforcement of some advanced topics. She spent her time with her teacher, Vicky, perfecting her "Imperfect Subjunctive" and "Object Pronouns Together" and suchlike. She got less talking in than she might have liked, but the studying really proved her aptitude. We both agreed that five hours a day was just enough--we could have gone for more, but then where would we have found time for our homework?

Our accommodations were provided by a host family that lives just a few blocks from the language school. They rent a big house in the city so that they can be close to their four childrens' schools and they use three of their bedrooms as guest bedrooms for students. It was very comfortable and Chochi cooked us all three excellent meals a day. They were great at leaving us alone and then spending time with us so we could practice our Spanish. It helped, of course, that they own the school!

We had three younger female housemates, all from Canada. It appears that we in the US--at least around the Bay Area--really don't understand how many Canadians there actually are. The country is bursting at the seams, for it seems we encounter Canadians everywhere we go. There's even a full-time Canadian restaurant/bar/community center right on the water in Mazatlan, called (you guessed it) Canuck's! Anyway, there were three of them in our house: two 18-year-olds from Montreal sowing their wild oats, studying Spanish and "volunteering" between jaunts across the country and late nights at dance clubs; and a 20-something-year-old from BC refreshing her Spanish before working on her Master's thesis research on health care around Guatemala. They all seemed to think we were pretty old.

Antigua has been repeatedly damaged by earthquakes; a series of earthquakes in 1773 led to the city's abandonment, while in 1976 an earthquake killed 23,000 people in Antigua and Guatemala City nearby. We felt our share of earthquakes while we were there; two, anyway. One of them took place at 2:30 in the morning. It rolled and rolled and rolled, a pane of glass in our window rattling steadily, for at least two minutes. Everybody in the house woke up, and the family was dressed and ready to go, though where they planned to go I'm not sure. In the morning we learned that what we had felt was a 7.3 earthquake in Honduras, over five hundred miles away. It destroyed one of that country's two main bridges and killed seven people and injured more than forty (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/eqinthenews/2009/us2009heak/#summary), and was felt throughout Central America. In Spanish there is a sharp distinction between the word for a small earthquake, "temblor," and a big, destructive earthquake: "terremoto." To us it felt like a terribly long-lasting temblor, but this was unquestionably a terremoto.

Guatemala suffered a 36-year civil war that began in 1960. When I first traveled there, eight years after the war ended, I could still hear its echoes. There were stories of kidnappings just outside of Antigua. Traveling in southern Mexico I heard stories about out-of-work Guatemalan soldiers invading villages or helping the narcotraffickers. Tourist services in Antigua--which is a very, very touristy town--were present but pretty rustic. But things have improved a great deal since then, and Antigua is obviously thriving. It is thriving so much that they charge an entrance fee for cars coming from Guatemala City just to come in!

That Antigua is thriving does not mean that Guatemala is out of the woods yet. The country is still very poor--more than half its population lives below the national poverty line--and wealth is very unequally distributed. The BMWs paying the entrance fee to come into Antigua on Friday nights (not to mention yachties in boat shoes coming to learn Spanish) are a shocking sight when one considers the five-year-old shoeshine boys in the central park seeking their Quetzales. The country's leading exports are coffee, sugar and orphans.

We were oddly removed from all the tragedy of Guatemala, however. Staying in Antigua felt like being in some sort of Disneyland of clean air and tasty food and pretty architecture: Pleasant and a little surreal, kind of a guilty pleasure.

The country is very racially divided, too. The Ladinos barely speak of the indigenous majority, and evidently consider them ignorant and backward. And the indigenous culture is indeed quite different: The Mayan people we encountered in Antigua and elsewhere had a directness that was sometimes refreshing and sometimes shocking. One afternoon, as we sipped our cappuccinos and did our homework (I happened to be writing a story about Dracula), a young Mayan woman came to the table hoping to sell us some textiles. We politely turned her down. After a few vain entreaties she grew more insistent and insulting, calling Sarka a "crazy gringa" and a few other things. I suggested that she leave us alone and she went away, dumping upon us a quite eloquent barrage of insults in English, and the suggestion that we stupid gringos go back to our own country. However she learned such fine English in order to use it in this way was not a little creepy, and the irony is that Antigua is hardly her own country to invite us to leave: Like most any Maya one sees in Antigua, she herself takes the bus quite a distance to come into this Ladino stronghold.

All this is to say that Antigua was a very heady experience. Two weeks away from the boat, up in the mountains, studying Spanish, was a refreshing and interesting vacation from the sweltering saltwater of living aboard in Mazatlan.