UNESCO Site: Antigua, Guatemala (5)

Those were the only two rules I can remember aside from the standard “be home by dinner”, “participate in family activities” and the like- things we wanted to do anyway. Our host mother was an excellent cook and made the best local food we’d ever had (which I suppose was destined to happen as we had no comparison- but it was fricking good). When she found out I have an unusual love of banana pancakes, she made a special stack for me to take on the plane the day I left. She was caring, attentive (without being subservient), and treated all of her students like we really were a part of the family. We couldn’t have asked for a better homestay experience. Except for one thing. Every morning the family rooster would crow at dawn and wake us up. He lived in the front yard, which is the direction our window faced. And for some reason, he felt the need to stand just under our window and crow at the top of his lungs. My friend and I had dreams- sleeping and waking- of having rooster for dinner one night. We’d have been happy to do the cooking.
School was another matter. Not that we disliked school, mind you. But it was the pit of all frustration for me. We had signed up and paid for the intensive one on one classes, and each student was assigned to a teacher. For four hours a day, Monday through Friday, we sat in the school’s inner courtyard at a folding table and tried to conjugate verbs, memorize vocabulary, and try not to reach across the table and choke our teachers. I loved my teacher, but that much intense attention for that long of a period of time gets to be a bit much. I played along the first week, trying my best to keep up, going home after these sessions with serious headaches. It literally felt like my brain was stretching to accommodate all of this new information, but my skull wasn’t giving way.
The school offered evening classes of salsa dancing and cooking lessons, which we regularly attended, so I was able to keep a positive association going, but by week two I broke down. I suggested the teacher and I compromise- we spent the first two hours working from the books, and the second two hours walking around town, practicing whatever I had learned that morning. She liked the idea, and it turns out she was as tired of sitting in the school for four straight hours as I was. Her best friend happened to be teaching my new best friend, so as a foursome we would leave in the late morning and walk the markets, be told to ask directions to places we’d never heard of, haggle over fruit prices, etc., and actually use what we were learning. We could go anywhere in the town and do anything we wanted as long as the teachers came with us and we only spoke Spanish. It was wonderful. I retained so much by using my Spanish outside of the classroom; I learned more in those three weeks than I had in six months of language courses in the States.