Becoming Guatemalteca

It´s funny the way this city finds its way into your soul. Today is my fifth day in Antigua and I realized I feel...at home. Not the way I feel at home in San Francisco, which is one of pure belonging (I belong to San Francisco (exclusively) and it belongs to me (not exclusively)). But I feel like Antigua and I are starting to understand each other. I can generally find my way around the town now. The mechanics I pass by each morning on my way to school and I always greet each other with a friendly ¨Buenos dias.¨ I can carry on a basic conversation with my host family or the local vendedores. I know which tiendas will not rip me off for agua pura. I even laugh off the several instances each day that local kids call me chinita. Inexplicably and unexpectedly, I´ve fallen a little bit in love with this dusty, cobblestoned town. And I can´t believe how fast the time goes by here - my first week of Spanish classes is already over!

My day here basically consists of:
- wake up at 6:45 am to get ready for school
- 7:30 am, breakfast is served. So far it´s been cereal, bread and jam and pancakes. I´m told the typical Guatemalan breakfast usually involves eggs, but the other student living in the house is vegetarian so it appears I am being forced to be vegetarian during my stay as well.
- 7:50 am, depart the house for the school.
- 8:00 - 10:00 am, first half of lesson, followed by a thirty minute break.
-10:30 - 12:00 pm, second half of lesson.
-12:30, return to the house for lunch.
-1:30 - 6:30 pm, walk around la ciudad, find an internet cafe, sit in the park and watch local life, basically a lot of absolutely nothing, which is so wonderful.
-7:00 pm, dinner with la familia. I´m living with the director of the school, who is a man of very few words. The other day at dinner, he asked his wife (even though I was sitting 2 feet away from him): ¨Quien es maestra de ella?¨(who is her teacher). And then she asked me. I answered her. She answered him. Very strange. Maybe there is some unspoken rule that a married man should not speak directly to a single girl? At least not in mi casa.
-8:30 pm, take a shower (pray for hot water - the water is usually lukewarm at best - just warm enough that I can wash my hair without shivering, but just cold enough that I don´t want to stand under it more than is necessary). I have yet to venture outside the house after dark - the house I am staying in is on a pretty isolated road far south of the center of town and I don´t feel safe walking on it alone at night.
-10:30 pm, go to bed.

On Wednesday afternoon I climbed my first volcano - El Volcan de Pacaya. It is a live volcano and we got within a foot or two of the lava - muy caliente! To get to the hot lava, we had to walk over rocks formed from cooled lava, although much of the time there was hot lava running right below the stones we were walking on.

Yesterday I did something I usually try to avoid when I am traveling abroad: visited a gringo dive, Reilly´s Tavern. Who knew there would be an Irish pub in Antigua, Guatemala? And the funnier thing - I knew the bartender! She was a paralegal at my previous law firm in San Francisco. She´s been living in Antigua for a year. The other funny thing - my housemate, the other student living in the house, visited SF for the first time the weekend before he came to Guatemala and stayed with his friend....in my condo building! What are the chances? Little things like that remind me how small this world really is, even when I feel worlds away from my real life.

And today I went on my first chicken bus in Guatemala, which is a very colorful old converted schoolbus that the locals ride. My maestra took me on the bus to visit a finca de macadamia in a neighboring town. The guy who runs the macadamia farm is un hombre LOCO - a gringo that has lived in Latin America for the last 30 years and pretty much hates everyone and everything. You come across the funniest (by funny, I mean psycho) characters when you are traveling. For example, he started our conversation:

El hombre loco: Where are you from?
Yo: San Francisco.
El hombre loco: I was abused as a child in San Francisco.
Todos: *uncomfortable silence*