Miss Maps Goes Solo

3 days into my Spanish lessons I´m exhausted, pasty skinned and spotty, brilliant.

Having said that the lessons are great and I´ve already picked up loads, it´s just incredibly intense and exhausting. 6 hours a day (plus homework), 5 days a week for 3 weeks. I sit at a little table with my teacher learning grammar, vocab, listening skills, the whole bit. It’s a shock to the system to be back in a routine, I didn´t expect to have the Monday morning blues at any point during these 6 months! It´s absolutely essential though, the lovely Petal has moved on to Lago de Atitlan and taken her fluent Spanish with her, I´d be stuffed if I tried to carry on travelling on my own without learning more. Plus I´ve missed out on so much already because of the language barrier, there´s absolutely no hope of interacting with the locals without Spanish.

Did that last paragraph sound like I was trying to convince myself? Probably!

I can´t get over how cheap Guatemala is. My hostel is 3.71GBP per night (including breakfast of scrambled eggs, pancakes and fruit). My lunch in the market costs between 37 pence and 74 pence. Last night I went out to a lovely restaurant and had spaghetti, apple strudel and 2 glasses of vino for 6.60GBP. So tomorrow I´m moving to another hostel and upgrading to get my own room (rather than a dorm) which knocks the price up to about 4GBP! Amazing.

The only uncomfortable thing about Antigua is that it isn´t really Guatemala. It´s gringo central and it feels pretty fake. It´s kind of like Bath in England but set in the middle of volcanoes. It feels like the real Guatemalans are kept out incase they make the place look messy. It´s beautiful but after another couple of weeks I´ll be happy to move on.

Tonight will be dedicated to studying and trying to get an early night because tomorrow is salsa! I still haven´t hit the dance floors yet, it has to be done.

I don´t have any more photos of Antigua yet as I´m waiting for the clouds and rain to go away, it´s bloody freezing. But I have tidied up the photos page and put the past 3 weeks into some kind of order.

In two days time I´ll have been travelling for an entire month. Time is a very strange thing when travelling, the first couple of weeks seemed to go so slowly but I´m now worrying about fitting it all in.

Right, off to find a quiet cafe and learn my irregular verbs.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 3rd, 2005 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Guatemala. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.