First week in Guatemala... Pretty cool

Hey everyone, I know I said that I'd write again Friday but, as it turns out, I went to lake Atitlan with a few of the other students. I’m writing this on the PDA right now as travel back to Antigua in a shuttle bus.
It'll take about 2-3 hours to get back, even though distance wise it isn’t that far, roads wind up and down through the mountains.

Anyway, more about that later, Ill start where I left off. The lessons have been going well, in my second lesson my teacher gave me about 75 verbs to memorize, by the next day I had managed to memorize all of them and could fully conjugate all of them. So I turn up the next day expecting an easy lesson because id be able to do all the exercises first time round. 20 minutes into the lesson Cristina said "well done, now we can move on to something else", or something to that effect in Spanish, I can’t quite remember now. Anyway she then gave me every single irregular verb in the Spanish language to remember, which numbers at about 150 verbs. Not only that but irregular verbs have their own methods of conjugation, there are 9 new methods to learn as well as having to remember which rules apply to which verbs on top of the verbs themselves. Needless to say, it's proving difficult.
On the Thursday the school had a trip to the beach, I don’t know the name of it or anything, it seemed to be a place were Guatemalans go for a break rather than travelers. I had a lesson with my teacher for 2 hours, unfortunately she was not well so the lesson relatively unhelpful, the only thing I can think of that I learnt was that arriba means over. The bigger pity was how excited Cristina had been about going to the beach. Apparently it’s a trip the school does every year and all the teachers really look forward to it.
After the lesson we went down to the beach and ran into the sea, the waves were absolutely huge. I wasn’t planning to go in too deep at the time so I still had my vest on. What I didn’t think about was that the tide kept going out to form the waves so the next thing I know I’m hit by a wave as high as my neck. Needless to say I was knocked over and after that, being already soaked; I didn’t see any reason to not go deeper. I got deep enough that the waves were hitting me which was a good foot or two taller than me. It was pretty cool but then the life guard called us all in because the waves were too big.
I'm going to have to interrupt my own story for a moment because... Mirka, who I've been waiting to rant about all weekend, is half asleep and keeps discreetly attempting to rest her head on my shoulder and her hand keeps rubbing up against my leg. The only way I have discovered to keep her from invading my personal space is by putting Led Zeppelin on my Ipod at full blast and then dangling an earphone near her head, it seems to cause her to move the other way. I now have one of the earphones balanced on my shoulder, hopefully that will keep her at bay. Back to the story then, I’m sure she'll get another mention or two later in the post.
After being told not to go in the water we had a football match against the staff, remember these guys were all Guatemalan, which means they are Latin American. Two of the neighboring countries had a war after a contested football match. Anyway we were expecting to play against a team of Maradonas, they were pretty good as it turns out, but not as good as we expected. We were drawing 5-5 after playing for a long while, but we all started getting tired and people started leaving the pitch. But then a load of the staff rushed back on and scored like 4 goals, then declared the match over. They then had the cheek to start calling Bertie, one of my housemates, "Coche" (which means pig in Latin America) because he plays dirty apparently, most of us played much dirtier than Bertie and after they all pulled the little open goal trick at the end I don't see how they can talk. That said, the name has stuck, sorry Bertie.
After the match Carlos, the guy who runs the school started pouring everyone Cuba Libres, using Pepsi so no one bring up the Coca Cola, but the Cuba Libres seemed to have more and more rum every time I went for another one.
Thursday was also Stephanie's birthday (Stephanie is a girl from Minnesota) so when we saw a Mariachi band approaching me and Clint(a 6 foot 7 guy from Sacramento who's Surname is actually Lovelady) went over too them. Clint stood there saying "you play happy birthday... You know feliz (Spanish for happy). I told them in Spanish that it was Stephanie’s birthday and could they sing happy birthday to her, at that point one of the staff ran over and talked to them too quickly for me to understand, but the band went over and started playing. You'll be pleased to know she was extremely embarrassed, ha-ha.
We traveled back to Antigua on the chicken bus (I can’t remember if I explained what a Chicken bus was, basically it's an old US school bus, repainted in bright colors and it’s not uncommon to find locals transporting livestock on them, this one was hired by the school though so no such luck for us. The ride was so bumpy that I may now have spinal damage but I'm sure I'll be fine.
That, night we went out for the birthday girl but first we had a bit of a pre-party on the roof one of the student houses where I taught everyone to play queens, well it was actually a combination of Queens and the American version... Kings. After getting everyone nicely drunk we went to cafe No Se which in Spanish means cafe don’t know and also was a bar not a cafe.
There we got more drunk and I found myself talking to a girl who was ex Israeli air force and Army. So you all know what’s at the forefront of my mind the whole time, well it only took about 3 minutes for me to ask about the whole Palestine thing. I can hear you all cringing but she bloody well deserved it didn’t she. Anyway, this "conversation went on for a good 15 minutes" by the end I discovered that she was fairly liberal when it came to everywhere except Palestine and the other counties surrounding Israel. She also told me her mother was a non practicing Zionist, does that make sense to anyone, I personally can’t see how that works. If you believe in the formation of a Jewish state with Jerusalem as the capital and you already happen to live in the aforementioned state because you moved there, surely you are practicing by default, there isn't much left to actively do is there?
Next we went to salsa club where all the guys had been taking salsa classes could show off there moves, we were there for a while and a live band started playing, when I noticed, I thought it might be a laugh to get them to sing happy birthday and make Stephanie get on the stage. I went up and asked the singer in drunken Spanish (which according to me teacher is better than sober).
The guy called up Stephanie and some other birthday girl and started playing a spiced up version of Feliz complianos (happy birthday). It was funny cos the singer started dancing with Stephanie but she was too embarrassed, imagine a guy on speed dancing round a lamppost and you get a good idea of the scene.
The law in Guatemala is that everywhere has to close at 1am at the latest, so we were kicked out onto the street. We started walking to a place that had an after party when the guy from the band ran out after me and told me that we could get into the after party there for half price. By that time the others had started walking, I don’t think Stephanie liked the idea of another dance with the band.
We ended up going to one which was basically a boom box in someone’s back garden. The woman behind the "bar" rang a bell every half hour or so and you had to run to the bar and hold your mouth open, then shed pour tequila in until your mouth was full, it seemed like an unwise move which makes me think it probably wasn’t her garden. Also I'm calling it a garden, it was more of a courtyard as it was all paved. I haven’t mentioned so far that it cracking flags at the time, we were soaked to the bone as there was no shelter.
Anyway, I woke up just in time for the lesson on Friday, still drunk and headed to my lesson. My teacher found it very amusing and wanted to hear all about it.
We set off for Atitlan at 1:00pm, still tipping down so it made for a nice, stuffy, hung over 3 hour drive.
We got out of the shuttle in the pouring rain, the driver, being a kindly sort of chap, parked with the door directly over a huge puddle.
We went straight down to the dock and caught a boat over to san Pedro. About 300m shy of San Pedro, the boat ran out of fuel, luckily there was some spare on board so we were going again before long. From the dock, it looked like the road up the hill was a waterfall.
San Pedro is a small town built on a hill, it seemed to cater heavily for travelers. Most of the bars were run by westerners where as the hotels and activity type businesses were run by locals. There were a huge number of massage parlors and yoga classes etc. Lots of the stuff seems to have been set up by travellers who arrived there and then never left.
We were quite tired and hung over, as well as extremely damp. We used tuc tucs to get to the hotel (tuc tucs are like mopeds with 2 rear wheels and a cover. Me and Clint both got in the same one, which was silly because we are probably the heaviest guys. It would have been fine if for not trying to drive up a waterfall. Since we were trying to do that, our tuc tuc kept sliding down the hill. In the end the driver pulled into the turning circle and had a run up, once we reached a dryer part we got going. It didn’t take long before we overtook the others and got to the hotel. It was pretty good for 25 Quetzals (about $3) per night.
On Saturday the weather was far better and we went for breakfast in a little cafe overlooking the lake, the view was pretty amazing.
We went off to rent some kayaks after this; me and Clint were given these really crappy which floated really high on the water, making them really unstable. We paddled for about 45 minutes and arrived at a small beach where we stopped and chilled for a while. Clint suddenly remembered he was supposed to be meeting someone at the dock as she was arriving late. He headed off and we carried on paddling away from the beach, after 5 minutes a few people decided that they were going back as it was another 45 minutes paddling to anywhere. This left me, Mike, Tony and Bertie, the plan was for us to paddle over to Santiago. After going for another 20 minutes, the wind had picked up and was blowing against us, big waves were coming at the kayak making mine wobble all over the place. I didn’t realize this but the "water proof" hold was filling with water. The four of us decided that the whole Santiago thing wasn’t going to happen so we headed back for the marina, about an hour in the other direction. I was expecting it to be easy but unfortunately it was just as hard because the waves rather than helping, kept spinning my boat round because it was so light in the front.
When we got in sight of the marina I was with Tony but the other two were a way off. I mentioned to Tony that the Santiago thing was a shitty idea and he said something to the same effect. I lost concentration for a second and suddenly the Kayak rolled, tipping me into the lake, Tony came over and grabbed the Kayak so that I could climb back on, I didn’t have much trouble but unfortunately I hadn’t realized the back was so full up so as Tony let go it flipped again. When we looked closer we noticed the whole back end of the Kayak was submerged. What made it worse was that we could not drain it on top of Tony's kayak because his was an open top and I doubt he wanted broken legs. We couldn’t drag it to the side either because it was too far. The first thing I did was grab the gear out of the hold and throw it in Tony's, then we needed to empty the hold. The whole rear end was submerged though so door into the hold was covered in water. After trying for a while to lift it long enough to get enough out we had the idea of having Tony push down on the front while I lifted up the back and scooped, which isn’t easy with nothing to stand on. It worked and eventually it was possible to scoop out water without it filling up again. By this point though I was unable to hold on to the Kayak anymore I was so tired. I remembered seeing a life jacket in Tony's hold though so I had him throw me it and put it on. This solved the problem of me having air, but unfortunately the wind was blowing Tony and the kayaks one way and the current was taking me another, I rested for a bit and tried swimming back over, but the current was too strong. Tony managed to work out a way of pulling my kayak behind him, the pushed it over too me. After struggling for a while we managed to finish scooping out everything we could and I got back on, it was still unstable however so I had to paddle back very carefully. The only thing I remember Tony saying the, whole way through was "Man, I'm hungry as crap".
We went and got changed, then it was straight to a bar. My arms and legs were in agony so I thought alcohol would help to numb the pain.
The next morning we went horse riding, I only had a pair of flip-flops with me due to a minor packing error in Antigua. I ended up getting trodden on by my horse which was one of the biggest there, it wasn’t pleasant. I’m not sure what the horses are fed on because my one constantly tried to grab leaves etc from the side of the road, at one point it scoffed down a whole maize plant, while walking.
The guides took us to a beach, it turned out to be the exact same beach that we kayaked to the day before, hurray.
No near death experiences that day though, I probably ought to point out that I have been writing this blog over the space of 2 days on my PDA, you’ve probably worked out it’s pretty long already but it was a busy weekend.
I’m sat at the computer in my house right now finishing it off, I seem to have caught a bit of a cold which isn’t nice. By the way, I have bought a Guatemalan mobile, it cost me about £12 and now I can receive international or skype calls for free so just ask if you want the number.
Ok, that’s it for now… Later