Right now I'm in an internet cafe on my laptop. It's right around the corner and down the street from where I'm living, which is pretty sweet, although not surprising because it is, after all, Antigua.
Actually, pretty much everything in Antigua is around the corner and down the street. Antigua is, like, one or two square miles.
I appear to be living in a large building that houses several residents, whatever students pass through, and a home furnishings store. There is only one other student living there right now, a German girl who's been touring Latin America and is now here to take some Spanish classes, though at a different school than the one I'm at.
Our rooms are up some narrow concrete stairs to the second floor. We share the world's second smallest full bathroom (The first smallest is probably on a boat somewhere), where the sink is almost in the shower and the toilet is almost underneath the sink. It's pretty adorable.
My room is also pretty small, but the bed is pretty big and the sheets fit, so that's nice. It definitely isn't as moldy as my old room, but I have to wait for those allergies to wear off before I know for sure how allergic I am to these living arrangements. I can leave the door open pretty much all the time, so that helps a lot, although mosquitoes seem to be a bit of a problem. I need to buy some toxic chemicals, stat.
I arrived here yesterday around 10:00 AM, got settled into my room, then wandered around town in search of food and entertainment. I couldn't find Cafe Rainbow, because I suck at reading maps, but I think I walked by it so I'll probably be able to find it eventually. I ended up at Cafe La Condesa, which had only one thing on the menu I could eat (Salad with orange slices and toasted macadamia nuts) which kind of sucks, but the salad was delicious. It just didn't fill me up very much, so I ended up buying a bag of sliced mango and 6 tortillas off the street and sat in Central Park (Plaza Mayor) and ate that while listening to the Peruvian music being played.
I came back to my room later, read for a few hours, used up way too many phone minutes talking to my Mom, and then headed back out around 6:15 to find dinner. I missed Cafe Rainbow again, and went first to a grocery store and bought snacks, and then got drawn into La Peña, a nice but pretty inexpensive gringo-owned restaurant. I had a delicious chicken-pineapple shish-kebob dinner, listening to more live Peruvian music and intermittently chatting with a kid from the US, my age, staying in Antigua to study Spanish before going to college in the Fall.
I made it back home in the dark, thrilled to be in a town where I felt safe at all hours of the day or night - there are always friendly-looking people on the street, lights on in restaurants, etc. Yay! I am so glad to be out of Guate city.
It started pouring rain halfway back to my house, so I booked it, made it back slightly damp, read for a while, and went to sleep.
I woke up around 1:00 AM to the sound of someone typing on a keyboard... in my ceiling... it took me a while to recognize the sound as rodentia. Awesome. At least they don't seem to be actually in my room (Only pill bugs, flies, and mosquitoes there!) and not in my snack stash. Hopefully it stays that way.
This morning I woke up at 6:40, got ready to go, had breakfast with the other student and the owner of the house, and a little before 8:00 I walked the 500 yards to my school, which happens to be in the renovated ruins of an old convent.
I met my teacher, Leticia, and began my 3 1/2 hours of classes + 1/2-hour break. I can see already that the next approximately 7 weeks are going to be intense, and if I'm not a spectacular Spanish speaker by the end I must have gotten run over by a tuktuk before I could finish.
That didn't really make any sense... but I'm actually sort of tired. I'll probably be in here pretty often, since I have every afternoon to myself. I think I'm going to to go the plaza now and buy me some tortillas and/or mango.
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