We had made some plans for the weekend, to check out some ruined churches, a museum or two, to restock our cupboards with food from the market, and to watch the town's Christmas lights get turned on. Unfortunately by 6pm on Saturday evening I was back in bed, where I stayed for much of the weekend. Gemma managed to buy a thermometer from the chemists, it didn't show I had a temperature but something was definitely wrong, I just didn't want to eat and had no energy. So the weekend was a bit of a washout.
We returned back to school on Monday ready for a full week of lessons. In truth, after spending so many hours learning, and then doing our homework we have found it pretty tough to get enthusiastic about running around town. Instead we've been having a more leisurely time, shopping and cooking, and of course watching some Spanish tv. Unfortunately we don't have a sofa in the apartment, so when we are not sat on the balcony we find ourselves taking it in turns to rest our weary buttocks on the single beanbag.
On Wednesday we finished our lessons ten minutes early, so that we could dash to the calle de la concepion in time for a festival. The Quema Del Diablo (burning of the devil) is an unusual one. Lore of old suggests that in years gone past people believed that the devil would live in people's rubbish and cause mischief to all the members of that household. So each year, on the 7th December, they would gather up all the rubbish and unused wood and have a bonfire. Over time, physical manifestations of the devil were added to the bonfire, resulting in "the burning of the devil".
In Antigua some bright spark (you've got to love a pun) decided it would be a great idea build a petrol station on either side of the Calle de la Concepion, so that these days the bonfire is flanked huge quantities of gasoline, which certainly adds a little extra spice to proceedings. And to think that in England we can't even use our mobile phones at our BP garages!
By 6pm the crowds were gathering, packing out the street. We made our way past tourists and locals alike, decked out in flashing devil horns, and the inevitable food stalls. There wasn't much room to extract my camera from my pocket, but I managed to fire off a few snaps as someone set alight to the devil. The local volunteer firefighters looked on with bemusement, but really it felt like an anti-climax, no-one seemed to know what was happening, and within minutes the crowds began drifting away. Which was unfortunate because about 4 hours later a band started playing.
We got caught up in the flow of pedestrians, but managed to shuffle over to the food stalls to try out a few local delicacies. I ordered something which turned out to be a chicken sandwich, which was nice but didn't exactly strike me as "Mayan". We both tested a pork tortilla wrap, but couldn't really get to the condiments due to the crowd, so it would be unfair of me to describe it as bland. Finally Gemma had a couple of sweet dough balls, but by the time we got back to the apartment she was suffering from some stomach aches.
We continued our lessons all week, and have both picked up a lot more Spanish than we expected. My teacher Willy has been trying to drum some concept of grammar into this thick skull, with some success. I can recite the present tense of the regular verbs fairly easily, and both past and future tenses with a little more thought. My biggest problem seems to be picking out the right verb at the right time - once I recall the right one I can check off the endings ok. I certainly find it much easier to read and write than listen and answer.
However, once we moved onto irregular verbs, and then exchangeable verbs the tears started. Even now I can feel myself welling up at the thought of having to conjugate more exchangeable verbs in tomorrows lesson. Fortunately Willy is a great teacher and we'll probably have a laugh when I start mumbling some GCSE French in the absence of the right Spanish word. Earlier today he asked me how many people were at the concert? I replied 300, and one bat. He looked confused until I explained it was an Ozzy Osbourne gig! Even in Spanish I can make crap jokes, how about that!
Before class one day we took a walk to the central square. It was a hot morning so we sat down in the shade for a spot of people watching. We observed as a huge influx of cruise ship passengers disembarked from their air conditioned coaches and began to wander around Antigua in their claustrophobic groups, complete with names badges on colour co-ordinated stickers. The sleepy little square became a hive of activity as the local tat-sellers rushed to find a buyer for their wares, which in Antigua consist of shiny but unpleasant jewelery; bright woven rugs and carved wooden flutes.
We sat and watched as the two parties did battle. We almost felt sorry for the cruisers, their armament seemed to consist primarily of beige shorts, white knee high sports socks and a religious belief in the strength of the US Dollar. Of course, that sympathy swiftly evaporated when I spotted one beige warrior walking up to anyone looking vaguely different and pointing his camera in their face without so much as a "would you mind if I ...".
Later in the day I was sat in our local internet cafe when I observed another of this clan attempting to check his e-mails. He grumbled when he opened the internet to find it took him to the yahoo webpage (rather than google), sulked when his wife told him he simply needed to change the address at the top, fumed when his wife didn't furnish him with his password ("but Henry, you only told me to bring the email address"), and finally combusted when the cafe owner told him they didn't accept US Dollars. I found myself wishing he caught fleas from his new brightly coloured rug and then choked on his new novelty flute.
We're beginning to have more opportunity to converse with the locals in their tongue. Just the other day one of the old women in the square came and sat with us. Initially she tried to sell us some jewelery but soon realised we weren't interested. However she remained sat and began asking us questions: where were we from; how long had we been in Guatemala; where were we going next. Amazingly we managed to answer them all in a way she understood. It felt like quite an achievement.
In fact, even when we don't know the right word for something we seem to be ble to work our way around to the point of being understood. I needed to buy a warm hat, it get's really cold here in the evenings, but I didn't know how to ask for "woolly hat" in Spanish. Initially we looked in a couple of tourist shops but the hats were too expensive, so we tried a local shop. "Yo necessito un sombrero porque yo tengo muy frio" had the desired effect, the shop assistant took us to the counter where she kept the woolly hats, and instead of forking out over a hundred Quetzals for a western branded hat, I bought a hand made hat for 18 Quetzals.
We have one day of school left before we bid farewell to Antigua. We've decided to head to Lake Atitlan for a few days before we leave Guatemala and cross the border into Honduras. If we time it right we might just get to spent my birthday climbing amongst the ruins of Copan, another interesting Mayan site, before we continue our path through Central America.
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