Miss Maps Goes Solo

The stats:

36 hours of Spanish done
84 hours to go
25 sides of A5 of new vocab learnt
1 entire pack of flashcards written out with grammatical rules

I’m starting to think in Spanish.

Seriously, the classes are great. I changed my sweet but incompetent afternoon teacher and now have an excellent professional teacher in the morning and a lovely girl who tells me about her love life in the afternoon (oh, and she’s also a good teacher!)

But being in this quaint town is faintly depressing. I think going from my 9 to 5 type London lifestyle to 3 weeks of hardcore travelling and adventure, to a 9 to 5 lifestyle in a small, easy, gringo filled town is a bit of a shock to the system. I actually want to wear my backpack!

Antigua is beautiful (albeit freezing) and I’m living extremely nicely here but I’m busting for a long bus journey, not eating for 24 hours and wandering the streets for whatever dodgy hostel is listed in the Lonely Planet, who would’ve thought!

My day usually starts with a typical Guatemalan breakfast of black beans, eggs scrambled with onions and spicy tomato sauce, fried plantains, sour cream or cheese and bread or tortilla, absolutely bloody gorgeous…

Lessons start at 9 and run through until 1. Jenny (lovely Swedish girl who I signed up for the classes with) and I head to the market for some cheapo food (tortilla stuffed with cheese and topped with refried beans and guacamole) and go back to school from 2 until 4. We usually both have shed loads to study in the evening so things are pretty quiet in the week. I hang out at my hotel for a bit, watch terrible Guatemalan soap operas with the staff then head off to a nice restaurant armed with my flashcards and vocab lists.

On Friday night I went to the local Irish bar (for god’s sake) to say goodbye to a couple of people who I’d been travelling with for a while. I met a couple of lovely older Guatemalan guys who moved to Boston years ago and got chatting to them. Wonderfully, they invited me to their niece’s 15th birthday party the following evening. This was one of those situations where I had to weigh up any potential dangers against the fantastic experience that it was sure to be, I was determined to go for it. Unfortunately, all that cheapo food got the better of me and by Saturday afternoon I felt far too green around the gills to do anything but go home and feel sorry for myself. I managed to find the two guys and apologise, gutted.

By Sunday evening I’d recovered and went out for dinner with about 6 other travellers which was lovely, you meet some great people doing this. We ended up in the dreaded Irish bar but I kept running over the road to check whether the night club was playing salsa music (1 week in this bloody salsa frenzied town and I’d not moved a hip). Bingo, at 10.00 the music changed to salsa, I ran home to get my dancing shoes and met the girls in there. We had a pretty cool time although Guatemalan salsa music is bloody awful. The best part of this was the realisation that a gringa who dances salsa going into a salsa club full of Guatemalans isn’t going to get mawled to death. Seemingly I’m the wrong colour and can’t dance anything like the local girls so there were no worries there.

The only restriction on my lovely lifestyle here is that you just simply can not walk around this beautiful town on your own at night. Just running the 2 minutes back to my hotel last night I got lots of whistles and comments from the police (who have large guns). This is the biggest downside of being a solo female traveller, unless I’m out with others I have to come back to the hostel by about 8pm otherwise I’m being totally irresponsible. It’s not nice to have to rely on others.

As I only started Spanish this Tuesday I had lessons right through to Saturday so only had Sunday off. This weekend I have a whole two days free, lucky me! Hoping to make the most of it and leave this 4-volcano-enclosed town for Chichicastenango, famous market about 1 hour north of here.

After the lessons I reckon I’ll do a mammoth bus trip straight through Honduras (because compared to Guatemala Honduras sucks, if you don’t dive that is) and into Nicaragua. This is about 15 hours so there’s no avoiding the slightly dangerous night journey situation, but I’m sure I’ll have hooked up with some more lovely backpackers by then, hopefully big scary looking male ones!

Lots of love to you all

Tags: Guatemala

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 12:52 am 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.