I just finished my second week-long, living-with-a-family Spanish language experience of my trip. Originally, I had planned on just settling with my week in Esteli , but I realized that I needed to study more Spanish.
Luckily, Guatemala is widely recognized to be one of the best (if not the best) places in the world to study Spanish. I thought about studying in Antigua, since it was so pretty and pleasant, but I realized that, despite (or maybe because of) the town's pleasant nature, the coffeeshops, trinket stores and tourist restaurants were baking my brain into mush. Not ideal for studying the conditional tense and prepositions.
So I took a bus to Xela, which is somewhat of a Spanish School industry town. Um, actually I took 3 buses to Xela. One sort of inconvenient thing about Antigua is that there are no direct chicken buses from Antigua to anywhere. I had to get a bus to a crossroads town called Chimaltenango half an hour away, then wait by the side of the road for a while. Finally a bus came along that said Xela in big letters on the front. Also, the driver's ayudante (helper) was yelling "Xela, Xela, Xela" at top volume. So call me naive, but I figured the bus was going to Xela and got on.
Since the bus had come from the capital, about 2 hours away, it was already packed with people, produce, baggage and, I'm pretty sure, a cat. I literally shoved my way through and managed to identify a patch of seat near the back after wedging my backpack into one of the overhead racks.
After about a half an hour, though, the bus cleared out a little and I only had one seatmate. His name, unsurprisingly, was Pedro, but surprisingly he had just returned from 5 years living in Queens, New York. I don't think he left willingly and spent most of the ride telling me all the ways that the US was better than Guatemala, with me protesting weakly that Guatemala was beautiful, culturally rich, etc. Kind of a strange argument...
He got off in a small village where he was visiting his aunt for the weekend. Twenty minutes later, the ayudante looked at me and said "Xela, Xela, " indicating that I should get off. I was a bit skeptical and said "terminal?"
"si, si," he nodded vigourously and said something that I, of course, could not understand (hence the going to Xela to study more Spanish).
In retrospect, he might have been saying something like "Silly gringa, you're actually in a town an hour past Xela. Better catch a bus here!" because when I got off, that turned out to be the case. Apparently, the Xela painted on the bus only meant that it went relatively near Xela.
However, it only took ten minutes for another ludicrously overstuffed bus to come along and within an hour I had a bed in a 20-bed dorm in the Casa Argentina, an institution in Xela. Most of the people there seemed to be a part of Xela's significant foreign volunteer community (who rent comfy rooms for $100/month) or backpackers (who are relegated to the dorm). It's an enormous, rambling place with an amazing view of the city an surrounding mountains.
I headed straight into town with the intention of finding a Spanish school. I went first to Sakribal, which had been recommended to me. I liked it, the price was right, and they told me I could start the next day, so I signed up without even looking at any other schools. Lazy? Probably. But the thing is, all the schools use the same teachers, cost about the same amount of money and espouse the same principals of social involvement. It's pretty hard to tell them apart, so I figured that since I liked Sakribal and it had been recommended to me, I might as well go with it.
That night, there was a benefit dinner at my hostel for a group that works with street children. It was a hell of a lot of fun. I ended sitting next to a guy from Cohasset - about 20 minutes from where I grew up.
Then, the next day, I moved out of my hostel and started classes again...