I’ve now had two consecutive, uninterrupted weeks in Antigua. I was expecting torrential monsoon rain on a daily basis but that weather masqueraded as sunshine most days as I somehow managed to arrive during the canícula (the ca. 2-week break in July/August with dry weather during the rainy season), which meant that most days were beautiful, sunny and warm from morning to night. There were a few days of afternoon rain but nothing that even required my rain jacket to be unpacked from the bottom of my backpack. I just sought shelter in one of the many cafes. I’ve been staying with a lovely host family in the most perfect location, 20m. up the road from el Merced, which has been really good. The view below is from their roof terrace. I lucked out majorly.

I started Spanish classes at Antigüeña Spanish Academy on a Saturday, the day after I got back from Semuc, and had class again on the Sunday so the first week was long. I did 5 hours of 1-on-1 classes per day the first week but by the last hour, I was flagging. 5 hours was just a little much, especially the first few days where I may also have consumed too many Brahvas in the evenings. I think it was partly due to the end of the World Cup and partly after-effects of San Pedro, a place which clearly had a bad influence on me. My teacher, Gloria, was lovely though and just kept laughing at me when I was yawning, saying ‘mucha fiesta, mucha fiesta!’. When my host mom said the same, I knew I had some work to do to turn my reputation around.

It turned out my Spanish isn’t quite as poor as I thought (but don’t get that confused with it actually being any good) and once we started chatting, I could usually, with a bit of help, manage to put fairly sensible responses together. Topics we managed to cover the first few days included the Guatemalan education system, the ageing population of Denmark and England, and the extent of the sports-madness of my parents. ‘Triathlon’ proved particularly difficult to explain. But more so because my dad’s approach is a little crazy and my teacher didn’t understand that level of commitment to what turned out to be called something as simple as ‘triatlón’ in Spanish.

That first week, I spent very little time being cultural. I went to Santo Domingo, el Merced and the food market with my teacher and did a tour to San Antonio, a small Mayan village 20 min. from Antigua, organised by the school, but aside from that, I mostly just drank coffee at La Parada, used the super-fast internet at The Bagel Barn, looked for proper bread (wholemeal, where are you?), chatted to Danish people at a pub crawl and walked to and from the supermarket for Brahva provisions. Mid-week I said goodbye to a few people who I’ve come to consider mates (after 2 1/2 weeks, travel plans properly diverted) but reminded myself I’ll probably have to do that quite a few times the next several months. My slightly excessive sense of loyalty and belief in friendships is being challenged already. And I now have no one to encourage me to drink away hangovers.

My first free weekend was spent doing what I do best – shopping! Remember that box of stuff I threw out? I’ve half-filled that void with embroidered blouses and jewellery. But before doing that, I went on a day-trip to Guatemala City. Or Guatemala, as it’s more commonly called. Or Guate, as it’s called at the bus station. No point wasting time on two extra syllables, I guess. It’s a place which is hardly on any traveller’s itinerary, which there are legit reasons for, but I was lucky enough to get to see it with a friend of my brother’s who lives there so I was slightly less the lost lonesome tourist that day. I was on the way there, though. I took the chicken bus from Antigua and paid my 10Q along with everyone else crammed onto that bus. After about an hour, I figured we must be getting close to the bus station and when a bunch of people got off, I asked the guy next to me which stop it was. Apparently, it was Wal-Mart. Which didn’t help me work out where we were on the map. He then, in perfect English (damn, I hope it wasn’t my Spanish that gave away I wasn’t local) asked where I was going and I said Zona 10 to which he pointed out that this bus wasn’t going there but I could get off at the Wal-Mart stop and change to the R40 bus. I know the reputation of Guatemala City (dodgy) and I know not to take the red buses (super dodgy), only the green or blue ones. According to my Spanish teacher, people get shot on the red buses in robberies every day. I don’t know how statistically accurate that is but I didn’t fancy potentially becoming part of such a statistic so I was fully prepared to opt for a taxi if necessary. But the R40 was there just as I got off and while it wasn’t properly green or blue, it definitely wasn’t red. So I got on. And the driver charged me just 1Q. And then I wondered if what I’d actually just done was to get on a red bus in disguise. I momentarily thought ‘oh shit, this is not good’ but I had already checked with the driver that the bus was going close to where I needed to go and, at that point, it seemed safer just to stay on it rather than get off and hope I’d be able to flag down an official taxi. I got to the hotel where we were meeting safe and sound (no shootings or robberies on my non-red bus) and then got to spend an awesome day seeing two very different sides to Guatemala City.

Zona 1 is the ‘historic’ part of town and has a bit more character than the business areas around Avenida Reforma. But definitely not enough to entice backpackers. After grabbing some lunch, we then went via a bakery for some empanadas de crema and eventually onwards to Paseo Cayala in Zona 16. Which is the exact opposite to Zona 1. It’s basically a town within the city, like a movie-set of white-washed buildings and fake churches, with shops and international restaurants and barely a huilpe in sight. If you have money in Guate, you hang here. As the sun started setting, we started trying to work out how I was going to get back to Antigua without having to take a red bus back to Wal-Mart. But the people who knew Guatemala City thought taking the chicken bus to Antigua was a silly concept and slightly crazy (apparently, in Guatemala City, even locals opt for shuttle buses over the camionetas). So, in the end, I returned to Antigua on a shuttle, with significantly less disposable cash for shopping than I’d arrived with but with the kind of story that proves that tourists sometimes do stupid things without meaning to.

On Sunday, I was back on the chicken bus but this time heading back to Chichicastenango, aka Chichi. With plans for actual shopping this time. I went with my host-family flatmate and we caught the chicken bus for the first leg of our journey at 8am. The first part of the trip (Antigua to Chimaltenango) went smoothly and once there, the guy on another bus quickly yelled out, asking if we were going to Chichi and if so, to hop on board his bus which had already started departing. The rear door was open so we had to jump on the back step and grab onto the ladder and then squeeze our way into the packed bus from there. Only it wasn’t going straight to Chichi, which a lovely helpful man let us know soon after we got on, and we would need to change at that damn stop whose name is really hard to understand in the Guatemalan accent. At least I knew I had been at that stop before though, unfortunately I just couldn’t picture it at all in my head. Thankfully, quite a few people needed to change there so we didn’t end up missing it and the final chicken bus, which would take us the last bit of the way to Chichi, arrived soon after.

The market felt decidedly smaller than last time I went and there were definitely more tourists this time (predominantly Americans). We had already comp-shopped the market in Antigua so we felt confident about the bargaining but it wasn’t that much cheaper than what we knew we could get things for in Antigua and some of the products weren’t as good quality. We quickly got the hang of the ever-so-useful reply ‘no busco’ to ward off eager vendors. But I finally got one of those embroidered huilpes I’ve been browsing since Xela. Which region it’s from is a good question, I picked based on colour which probably comes as a surprise to no one. On the trip back, we managed to get on a bus in Chichi that went all the way to Chimaltenango which meant we only needed to change buses once. In theory, this was great but there was so little space on both those rides, it probably would have been nice to break up the journey with an extra stop. It ended up costing 25Q each way (the same as from San Pedro) and we ate churrosquitos for lunch and cheese pupusas at the market in Antigua for dinner so food only came to about 20Q so, aside from the shopping, it was a nice cheap day out.

As week 2 started, I think my Spanish actually deteriorated. I tried to remember all the exceptions in the imperfecto, I tried to get my head around the preterito, futuro, conditionnel and all the reflexive verbs. And I spent ages trying to memorise the rules for when to use ‘para’ and when to use ‘por’. And I still made a million mistakes. By Wednesday, I concluded that I’m just a bit rubbish at this language but that since I at least have all the notes for all these tenses and grammar points, I will try to revise them a bit more as I go along on this trip if/when I have the time. Because in Antigua, I’ve just managed to find too many distractions from studying.

But the second week, I was finally a bit more cultural. I visited as many of the churches as I could, took hundreds of photos of the colourful houses and visited the chocolate museum. Essential, obviously. I also went on the Monday afternoon pub crawl again. Even more essential. Obviously. And I went up volcán Pacaya. Not essential but everyone does it (tricked by the lava photos at the tour agencies) so I felt like I wouldn’t have done Antigua properly if I hadn’t gone. There was also a festival in town on the Friday (July 25th), celebrating the patron of Antigua, Santiago Apóstol. It started on Thursday evening and continued all day Friday with parades through the streets, music and performances. More photos were taken. And then today, I moved out of my host family’s house and now I’m mentally preparing myself to say goodbye to Antigua, my temporary home-away-from-home.

Tomorrow I’m leaving Guatemala. I will miss the volcanoes, the green hills all over the country, the view from anywhere in Antigua, the coffee shops, the 10Q happy hours and resulting antics, the full-length mirror in my room, walking through the tiny fridge door to the mezcal bar at Café No Sé, the secondhand clothes stalls at the market with all the vintage sequin dresses I wanted to buy but couldn’t, the roof-top terraces, the colourful chicken buses and the challenge of consuming mango covered in pepita from a bag without a plastic fork. I’m excited about the next 3 weeks but I know they’ll feel rushed. It has been 4 awesome weeks back here for my second time in the country, improved greatly by breaking the plan for a bit and listening to other travellers. Hopefully I’ll be doing more of that when I hit South America. Although expect my spreadsheet to get updated whatever happens. Once a planner, always a planner. Or as one of the hilarious Glaswegian guys I met on the pub crawl last week said; ‘proper planning prevents piss poor performance’. And what kind of person would I be if I didn’t trust drunk Scottish people?

Today I’m listening to: Haim – ‘Don’t Save Me (Cyril Hahn Remix)’