Day: May 2, 2016

 I hear a knock on the door: -el desayuno es lista (The breakfast is ready)

-Un momento, Gracias! (One moment, thank you!)

I slide down from my bunk and there’s a thud on the floor. The four of us exit single file to the dinning room. We sit down to the blaring TV and a radio coming from the kitchen, like always.

It was the morning where we got to spend time to just walk around in Antigua with our teachers. Antigua’s cobble stone streets don’t always line up; the rocks are never in any sort of organization just put down as if they where all pieces from a different puzzle. But still they all looked in place. Wherever you go some volcano or another is viewed in the distance. From our host family’s patio we could see volcano agua in distance, with clouds covering the tip. There are modern women and women who dress traditionally in pastel skirts with tassels to blouses in flower fabrics. Little kids and babies are draped over there mothers back in a another fabric, asleep while the mother carry them through their day. The little stores look like holes in the walls but the second you go in they go so far back I’ve been lost in them multiple times. Surrounded in touristic charms to the hand painted owl magnets. We asked our teacher to take us to her favorite store. We arrive at hundreds of stalls set up selling touristic bracelets to stuffed animals. They shops seemed to be set up around two fountains forming a box around each. The smell of wood and fabric clung to the air. Soon enough we lost track of time and walked as fast as we could back to the school.

The humid smell of Guatemala crept into our room, tip toeing and making its way all the way up to my bunk. It was hot. You could feel the density in the air. Outside I could here people from stores shouting to people passing by: “Good clothes!” or “Ice cream!”. I could imagine the little girls balancing the baskets on there heads, or the shoe shiners crouched over shining a customers shoe. The hand made tortilla sent drifted into out room from two doors down also. Every morning and every evening we’d pass by there. Little kids with dirt on there faces would sit in the door way while women (I supposed their mothers) where hand making tortillas in the back. Even in the heat I can’t the women in Antigua had on their traditional outfits. It’s still a mystery to me how they don’t get overheated.
Earlier when we met up at our Spanish school a surprise was set up for us. A fiesta, with a DJ, food and colored lights. We where awarded with tee shirts, certificates, smiles and hugs all from the behalf of our teachers. The tables where set with a yellow table cloth with sparkling glasses and silverware. By the time we where done eating, it was dark and the sun had already gone down. We had dined alfresco so we got to see the ablaze salmon sun set into the Guatemalan horizon of Antigua for the last time. For the rest of the night we danced like we where home. While we where sitting at the tables and eating, I noticed somethings. Whenever the lights would shine on someone at a certain angle, it would turn them into a silhouette. But not a normal one; a silhouette that was rimed in flashing colors.

During this trip I never described my room, so I thought you would like a description. The walls are brick and cold to the touch, there’s a huge dresser to your left when you first open the door, and two bunk beds pushed into the far right and left corners. It’s dark and smells dingy. Bug replant still clings in the air from the time that Sophia showered the room in it at her first mosquito bite. I claimed the top bunk in the left bunk bed, Sophia sleeps under me, Isabella at the top bunk across, Zoriana with bunk underneath. Fun fact: Zoriana’s bunk “almost killed her” (she stated) the first day. The pegs connecting the beds broke. To be honest thinking about it still makes me laugh. I watched the catastrophe happen from my bunk; the look on there faces was priceless. 
Any way what we did today was a little different. Someone came to the school that we had Spanish every morning at and taught us merengue and salsa. I was assigned to a certain side of the room where there was a bee hive; I tried my best with my alternating partner. Following along until we had to duck so the coming and going bees could pass. The dance sure looked, well, different, between all of the ducking. I can almost swear I saw the dance teachers laugh though.