Estudio Espanol

Today was day 3 of Spanish clases at Celas Maya. We begin at 8am and finish at 1pm. It is intense to say the least. However, it is alot fun. At the moment I am feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the nouns and verbs I learn each day but once I have time to absorb the information I feel it will be very helpful in our travels over the next 2 months. We are doing a family stay with a local family that lives about a 10 minute walk from the school. The family is very nice, especially the grandmother who felt perfectly comfortable walking around in front of me in her bra on the first day. We really lucked out because our bedroom has an incredible view. The house is located on the side of a south facing hill and the south facing wall of our bedroom is almost entirely window with a great view of Volcan Santa Maria which stands at 3772 meters. Living with the family is a lot of fun but also exhausting b/c we have to use what little spanish we know to converse with them.

Each afternoon, the school offers activites for enrolled students. On Monday we visited San Andres Xecul known for it´s colorful/crazy decorated church (see Keith´s blog for a picture). Inside the church there were numerous life size plastic Jesus´s in cases and the alter had a neon size. It was fantabulous! Yesterday we climbed a small volcano known as La Muela. We were able to hike there from town and the view from the summit crater was awesome.

We plan to leave Xela sometime next week but first we have some volcanoes to climb and hot springs to soak in!

For photos click on the Central America Photos link in the left hand column.