From San Pedro

We're back safely from 2 weeks of inland travel in Guatemala. We can definitely say we habla mucho mas Espanol and overall, we're glad we did it. As is typical of any travel here though, it had its ups and downs. We started out with a day long bus ride to Antigua which was uneventful and we really enjoy this neat, old city. We stayed overnight at our favorite motel for $18 a night and went out to the restaurant that we frequented last season- La Pena de Sol Latino which is owned by a cruising couple who keep their boat here on the Rio. They have live Andean music every night and he's in the band. The food is good and the atmosphere cozy.

The next morning we got on our special "new pullman bus" at 7am and headed the rest of the way to San Pedro which is in the highlands at about 5,500 feet I think and it is also on a very beautiful lake- Lago De Atitlan. The bus ended up being an old clunker where they first put all the gringos up front and then proceeded to stop every � mile all the way there to pick up anyone who happened to need a bus that day. The aisles were crammed with standing passengers and really it was nothing more than the dreaded Guatemalan chicken bus on the inside; somewhat better looking on the outside. Once you get to the lake, you take a ferry to surrounding towns, including San Pedro. We checked in at the school and went to our family that we'd be living with for the week for total "spanish immersion". Our room was on the 3rd floor of their very modest house. It was very simple but OK except for the fact that the neighboring house's chimney (they cook with wood) was right outside our door. I have a really hard time with the air quality down here.

While attending school, you can live with a family and have a private room plus 3 meals a day for $60 per week per person. Cecilia and her husband had 3 daughters and we enjoyed trying to talk with each of them and even played some Scrabble (in spanish of course) & Chinese Checkers one night. We also watched the election on their TV. Guatemalans were SO pro Obama and seemed just as excited as we were about the election. Every foreign backbacker we talked to was interested as well. It seems like the whole world was watching us closely to see if we could come together and make a good decision.

From San Pedro

San Pedro Spanish School turned out to be a fantastic school for us. We took 4 hours of class each day with 1 instructor named Julio. The gardens where you sit for class are so cute and tropical. All around the yard are little stations with a table, chairs and a dry erase board. Some had little palapas for shade but mostly, we enjoyed sitting under a little tree in the open. At 10am, everyone would break and get together for coffee and a snack from the school's little cafe'. We got to meet other students from all over the world and ended up getting together at night with some of them. After class, we'd go home for lunch, study some, and then go out for a long walk. There was a very pretty trail out to a beach that was common to walk on.

From San Pedro

In the late afternoon, we'd go back to the school for "Club de Conversacion" where we'd sit around a table with all the other students that were at our level and there would be an instructor there to lead us. The point was to practice your Spanish by asking questions to each other and having to answer questions in return or draw a verb out of a stack and then conjugate it out loud before making a sentence with it. While it was hard to do, it was fun since we were all in the same boat and it really helped us use what we'd learned. Afterwards, we'd have dinner with the family and either go out to one of the many restaurants that showed free movies or do something at the school like salsa dancing lessons- which we decided we'd never get good at because we're just too WHITE.

From Panajachel

One afternoon we took the ferry from San Pedro to Panajachel, another lakeside town that had a bioreserve. It was a beautiful park filled with exotic flowers, neat trails with high suspended bridges, monkeys, a waterfall and a butterfly garden. It was such a jewel of a place.

We'd had a wonderful week until Friday night when I started feeling nauseous. By morning, I definetely had something going on with my GI tract and Jon started feeling feverish. We were both exhausted as well. But we'd signed up for a kayak tour and wanted to do it so we went. We kayaked with Julio to a neighboring town called San Marcos. In the morning, the lake is flat calm and really pretty with mountains looming overhead and flowers, cornfields and reeds lining the shoreline. Toward the end of the trip, all we could think of was getting back to our room and lying down. As it turned out, the "agua pura" that was provided to us in the house wasn't being filtered adequately so we had gotten sick from it. This all unfolded later, but in hindsight, we should have figured it out.

We already had plans to leave San Pedro the following day and head back to Antigua for a second week of spanish school there. Since it was Sunday, we'd planned to go to the Western Highlands so that we could visit the Guatemalan town called Chichicastenengo, with it's famous market. The Sunday market is huge with Guatemalans who come from all over the country to sell their goods but it's also popular for tourists who want to see the market, bargain for handmade items or just take in all the colors, smells and culture. For some reason, we kind of thought it would be set up in an open space like a field or fairground but when we got there, were surprised to find that it's pretty much just a part of the town, covering a few blocks but not in any open space dedicated to it. While it was good to see, we felt so crummy that the smells made us nauseous and we didn't feel like buying anything. We'd already bought ourselves a little painting in San Pedro that is on this blog entry. We went to an upscale hotel restaurant to get something that might be safe to eat before the bus left for the rest of the way to Antigua.

We moved in with another family who had a very nice little place filled with plants in downtown Antigua, just 2 blocks from the school. There were 2 other Canadian students staying there too. Since our sympoms had gotten much worse, the mom, Carla, took us to a pharmacy with a clinic attached to it where we could see a doctor. The doctor shook her head when we told her we'd been in San Pedro and she seemingly knew just what to prescribe. We had taken a course of our own Cipro but it had done nothing to help. After a stool sample, she prescribed 2 more antibiotics, oral rehydration solution and lactobacillis to help get us re-started again. We had a quite a collection of medicines and even had to set our alarm to wake up in the middle of the night to take pills.

From Antigua, the 2nd time

Within a few hours of taking the first pill to treat giardia, we both started noticing improvement. It was interesting that we both had the exact same symptoms at almost the exact same time. Bad water, coupled with iffy food handing practices were the cause and we felt pretty disgusted by all of it. We decided that the customary saying "Buen Provecho" after each meal should actually be "Buen Suerte" (good luck!). On a lighter note, the culture down here cracks us up. When you go to the pharmacy, there is a large speaker right in the doorway blaring music and the staff take turns with a microphone, yelling out stuff about something they want you to buy. Then there's a person in the street out front with one of those huge mascot costumes on- this one is a cartoon type pharmacist costume- and he's dancing trying to lure people into the pharmacy. Carla was standing at the counter with us helping us communicate with the pharmacist and all the while, her hand is tapping away to the music! The doctor's visit cost $3.50 each and the labs were the same price. Healthcare is pretty cheap here!

Even though we were feeling a little better, we still found the 2nd week of school to be hard to concentrate on. The school wasn't as nice but we did like our instructor and got a lot of content that we now need to memorize. Carla and Jose had 3 nice kids, a great golden retriever named Princessa and 2 parakeets who were deeply in love. Each morning, Carla would hang the cage in the garden outside our room and we'd study to parakeets singing. Since we took afternoon classes, we would study some, then take a walk for exercise around the city, then come back for lunch before heading to class. We didn't have much appetite and at times, couldn't eat what Carla prepared for us. We'd either have cereal or yogurt. We were relieved to be in Antigua though with healthcare readily available and we also really liked being able to wander around the city, catch a movie or get an ice cream cone whenever we wanted.

By the end of the 2nd week, we were really looking forward to getting back to the boat. Things became funnier and funnier as we made jokes about all the experiences we'd had. We could hardly make ourselves eat any more Guatemalan food, were craving large quantities of MEAT, we were tired of sharing a bathroom, taking showers with a thin spray of water, sleeping on scratchy sheets with no mattress pad (it's like this wherever we go in Central America), with pillows that no joke, weigh a ton. These pillows give new meaning to pillow fights (could be lethal). From what I hear, it's an Antigua thing. The Central American standard for "limpio" (clean) is not the US standard and after having gotten so sick, we'd just had enough of this sub-optimal clean. There are no vacuums here! So, on Saturday, we got on an un-airconditioned bus and rode the 7 hours back home. The Rio looks like paradise after 2 weeks away! Plus, our cruising friends are back now. We took long showers, made a fancy dinner, lounged around in the privacy of our beautiful, clean cabin and then got in our comfy bed with the mattress pad and soft pillows.

Despite the ups and downs we had, we did have fun, plus we're armed with much more spanish to try and communicate with. Our families treated us so well and really helped open our eyes to what it's like to grow up here and try to make a family life. It also makes us appreciate what it means to be from the US and what we sometimes take for granted. That we have an infrastructure to protect our health and safety and that we're educated to know it is necessary. And that we have the freedom as US citizens to travel practically anywhere in the world and experience different cultures while most people from Guatemala can't even afford to travel within their own country. Lots of food for thought for us.

Hmmm.... it's almost time to start planning to go to Tikal.....