Jess and Stacey’s Travels

After four weeks of four hours of Spanish class a day, we decided to take a break from the classroom. Both of our heads hurt a bit after two weeks but then got better with a couple of mojitos.  My (Stacey) knowledge of French really does come in handy learning Spanish, but also gets in the way when I try to speak.  I tend to speak Franspagnol.  I now know enough to know when I am suposed to use things like the subjunctive, but am not good enough to actually use it on the fly when talking.  I blame some of that also on my poor command of the English language.  I can hardly recognize verb tenses in English so although  I try to translate in my head, I often don’t know the tense that I am thinking in English.  Unfortunately for us, it also seems that most of what we need to say involves an irregular verb.  We have decided that now we need to practice more in day to day life.  We are planning on going back to the classroom again at some point while we are here.

To celebrate the end of classes and our one month anniversary here, we went to the same Laguna de Apoyo that we talked about in a previous blog entry.  This time, we stayed at the water’s edge at the hostel, Monkey Hut.  There are a few places to stay around the Laguna, one of which is also a Spanish language school.  We have heard poor reviews about that school, although the location is great.  The Laguna water is fantastic and the Monkey Hut has kayaks for use by the guests. The water is said to be 600+ feet deep and drops off quickly near the shore.  It is a volcanic crater with steep embankments.  A few of the guests at the Monkey Hut tried to swim down to the bottom just 20 feet from shore but couldn’t reach the bottom.  Jess got up Sunday morning and kayaked at 5am to watch the sunrise.  There are a few local restaurants around but the Monkey Hut also has an open kitchen for guests to use.  We had dinner at one of the restaurants one night and bought a few supplies to make dinner the other night.  After three days and two nights at the Laguna, we headed back to our family in Granada. 

We are preparing to head north to Gautemala where we hope to escape the heat for a bit.   Next entry should be from there.  Wish us luck on our 17 hour bus ride from Managua to Gautemala City.  We were initially told it would be 30 hours with a stop in San Salvador but we found another bus company that had a more direct route through Honduras. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 9:29 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.