Day trips, rescuing chicks, and my interview is a hit

It's a pretty pleasant day here in Antigua- After sleeping in until eight (luxury), I wandered across the road to the local Pasteleria to buy some strawberry pastries, and sat on the kerb in the morning sun eating my breakfast and drinking a real cup of English Breakfast tea (teabag brought from home).

I moved into a local family's house on Sunday as part of my Spanish school package. The family are great- super relaxed and welcoming. The house also functions as the local Laundrette and a kind of cafe for those who know it's there. This means I am provided with three fantastic (and huge) meals a day, but will sometimes be sitting at the family dinner table next to some local who is paying for the same meal. At least this definitly means the food is good. On Sunday before I arrived, I decided to investigate the street food and find something small and bland for lunch, seeing as I hadn't long been eating solid fod after the Dengue and had been quite sick again the day before. Sitting down to eat what I thought were mushroom tostadas, I felt puzzled as to why they were so chewy... and had such an odd smell. And then I realised they were snails. Gross.

My spanish lessons began on Monday. I have one-on-one grammar and conversation practice from 8am until 12 everyday with Julia, my teacher. Julia is fantastic: so patient and enthusiastic, even when she knew that I was hungover and hadn't done my homework. While many teachers and students in the school discuss the weather and where they went on holiday, Julia plunged straight in on Monday morning with "so describe to me all of your past boyfriends!". That's a weird enough task to do in english, let alone in Spanish. I have my suspicions that Julia actually understands english fairly well, but she claims ignorance and we have conversed completely in Spanish from the beginning, which is great but sometimes frustrating when I'm trying to explain something like an interview.

On Friday, I was beyond tired. Orignially I'd assumed that my week of Spanish would be a quiet one- that I'd have early nights and spend my afternons practising verbs. I assumed wrong. The school is a very sociable place- I've met some really fun people and have been out somewhere every night, but this combined with the early starts (my host family are up and active well before 6) resulted in me completely malfunctioning by Friday morning. I am no Margaret Thatcher: I cannot cope with four hours sleep a night. The previous day I'd had an interview for an MA course in London, which i'd stressed over and had been left completely drained. Julia said good-morning to me and I burst into tears.
"What's wrong?!" she cried, "A man? I'll bet it's a horrible man..."
I tried my best to explain with my barely-existent Spanish that there was no horrible man, I was just tired and pathetic. Julia sugested we put the grammar aside and go on a little field-trip.

And so it came to be that I found myself at a photography exhibition of naked prostitutes with my 4 ft 10, excitable language teacher. It succeeded in waking me up, and provided us with many an interesting conversation topic. No discussions about the weather for Raquel and Julia.

That afternoon, I got an email to say that I'd been accepted onto the MA course. Still exhausted, I may have had to stop myself from crying once again. Julia happened to be walking past my house, and squealed with joy when I ran out to tell her.

That night, a group of us from the school went out to a couple of bars. What started as a fairly sleepy, quiet evening ended with me dancing on the bar with free tequila. I still have a headache.

Asides from tequila and Spanish, I've done a few interesting things this week. On Tuesday, I went with a small group of friends in search of the nearby hot springs. We got on the chicken-bus (which in Antigua are ex-American yellow school-buses, completely pimped out with crazy patterns and colours) and got off in San Antonio, under the convincing instructions of the locals. After wandering around this little suburb village for a while, gathering the attention of most its residents, we found a swimming pool, of sorts. It was not hot, and it was definitly not fresh water from any kind of spring, but it did have slides.

I did as the locals did, and kept a t-shirt on in order to fit in a bit more and not be disrespectful, but once our group decided to test out the slides (hilarious constructions built with zero health and safety precautions in mind), we realised we had quite an audience. Gaggles of local women out at the pool for the day with their children were in fits of laughter at the sight of 6 white tourists crashing down the slides in pain. We were laughed at but applauded, and left the pool safe in the knowledge that we had at least provided some entertainment for everybody.


I will now attempt to attach some photos, although my android tablet gets very confused about these things...

The view of Antigua from the cross on the hill...

This is what we had for dinner the other night: black beans, tomales and a weird turnip-like vegetable. Very tasty.

The cat keeps waking me up at 5am. She drinks my tea and tries to get into my drawers, but she's gorgeous.

On Friday we went on the chicken bus to the old city: what was once the capital before it was destroyed by a volcano eruption. Today it's a bit of a souless place with lots of concrete, but we did find a purple chick running loose in the road. I carried it around to save it from being run over... nobody seemed to want it or know where it came from, but eventually a woman with a young daughter took it home. It was probably made into a soup that night, but I felt that I could sleep easier knowing that I'd at least spared it from a tuc-tuc related death.

And lastly, the only bar in the old town: the "rock" bar. One man's shrine to obscure Latin American death metal, where the choice of drinks were a litre of beer, or a litre of beer.