Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Spanish School Dropouts

We got to Quetzaltenango on Sunday. That afternoon we met our family, let's see if I can remember: Susana, Ethel, Danny, Mario, Angel, Lily, and Abuela, which just means Grandma, they never gave us her real name. There's also a bird and a dog.
Over lunch I told the family about my experience living with a Spanish family. For those of you who don't know, I'll fill you in: my Spanish "dad" grew marijuana in his closet and the grandma who lived across the hall smoked crack. Sometimes that's just a figure of speech, but in this case it was true, she actually smoked crack. As I'm telling all of this Grandma is sitting across the table wide-eyed, shaking her hand up next to her head grunting, "oof, oh, no." The rest of the family is fascinated, "The grandma smoked crack? Well, here you don't have to worry about that, she's on controled doses." Then the told me that they were pretty sure she'd never done drugs (Grandma doesn't really say much besides oof and oh) but that she'll drink wine if you give it to her. At this point Grandma pipes up to add that she drinks Gallo, the national beer too. HA!!
After lunch Brad and I explored the town. Quetzaltenango, or Xela is the second largest city in Guatemala and incredibly small. There are no high rises, not a lot of traffic and we were able to cover the city in about 40 minutes. We found the central park and had nachos (delicious) and a drink called ponche, which was equally delicious: milky, sweet and topped off with Guatemalan licour. On the way home we bought a bottle of wine to bring to Grandma, she loved it.
Yesterday was our first day of school. The classes are from 8 am to 1 pm with a half hour break at 10:30. Being a student again has given me new sympathy for my students, school is boring! Brad agrees. We decided that we didn't come all this way to spend mornings staring at the clock and hoping for 10:30 and 1:00 to roll around so, we're dropping out. We are going to finish out the week, though. We're not complete bumbs.
But tomorrow we're going to climb a volcano just out side of town with some of the other students, so we won't make it into school until afternoon. Thursday we're going to a concert and Friday our teachers are taking us to a market in a little mountain town. Saturday we're going to leave town early, but I'll be sure to get plenty of pictures of the family before we go.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't believe you are quiting!
I am soooo disappointed!!

Anonymous said...

I am counting the days until you come home! Miss you, cuz! KPx