I´m sitting in a small Internetcafe in Antigua, Guatemala at this moment. I survived the journey, and I´m finally here!! Hard to realize..anyhow, I´ll start from the beginning.
Yesterday I said goodbye & wished safe travels to my family back to Sweden, and this morning my aunt took me to the airport in Washington, where the adventure took its start. The ethnicity-rate on the plane to El Salvador was around 99.7% spanish-speaking people & 0.03% swede (right, that was me..) after some intensive hours of trying to understand what people around me chattered about (in 90km/hr-spanish) I had a plane change in El Salvador. On the next plane I got the seat next to an old sweet man who made me the lucky one to hear his life story (he was 87, so it was quite a story!) all in spanish ofcourse..he didn´t seem to care at all about the fact that just understood bits of what he told me, he just seemed happy that someone listened to him. He had a quite interesting life story I must say..poor man, apparently three women had left him even though he had a vineyard and made his own wine!
ANyways, totally exhausted from this very sudden step into the spanish-speaking world I arrived in Guatemala city, where I met a girl from Iceland who´s going with another organization than the one I´m with, but who will be studying in the same school as me, she seems really nice! After waiting around 20 minutes for someone to pick us up at the airport while taxi-drivers & hotel-personell to all means tried to convince us to come with them, our driver - Jose- finally arrived. He proudly presented his "only" 15 years old toyota, which would take us to Antigua.
The road took us through a mountain-passage, up and down rolling, green hills. Everything´s extremely green, and all the flowers are blooming since it´s the rain-period in Guatemala. On the road we saw trucks filled with people dressed in colourful, traditional clothing holding plastic over their heads to hide from the rain, we saw a man dressed as a clown juggling in the middle of the street and a women with her three small children biking upp one of the big hills (with all the children on the same bike!) old men with their herds of sheep or goats walking along the road, busses cramped with people & animals stopping to pick up even more people! All this colours & movement everywhere..it was amazing to see! All the houses along the road where extremely colourfull, every house it´s own piece of art. The traffic was crazy though! Me & Maria (the girl from Iceland) had a nice conversation in the back of the car, trying to ignore our driver´s cursing. Sometimes the two separate streets came together as one, and we we would have to make a drastic turn to avoid crashing into a car coming from the opposite way. It was really scary at first, but we got used to it. When we arrived to Antigua it was even cuter & more pittoresque then I would have imagined from the pictures I´ve seen. Almost only one-story buildings, a lot of parks, surrounded by three huge volcanoes (only one active though..relieving to know, isn´t it?=) the whole city is built on cobbled streets, so there´s not much traffic in the city (and the traffic is very slow) We drove by several colonial ruins, beautiful churches and a huge market where they seemed to be selling just about everything (will explore it further some other day, it´s open every day, but sundays are the busiest days, apparently)
We dropped Maria of at her hostfamily, and then Jose took me to mine. The oldest daughter opened, she & her mother are both working as spanish teachers in the school where I will be studying. The house where I´ll be staying turned out to be a small hotel, with a long corridor with several rooms on each side. The father, a nice old man who works as a shoe-repairer (might come in handy=) showed me to my tiny room, where the big bed took up most of the floorspace & my bags took up the rest of it..where I will put all my stuff is still a mistery! Under the bed? The walls are all white (but I´m working on it, putting up photograps & adding my "personal touch"=) After taking a cold shower (no warm water in the house..lovely..no warm baths or hot showers for me for a while!) He showed me the rest of the house. It´s a big house (well, hotel I should say) with several balcones, a common area and, my favorite place, the roof top, where you get an amazing view of the whole city & the surrounding volcanoes (I´ll put up pictures of all this, cause it´s all hard to imagine if you haven´t seen it) They had chicken in cages up there (probably to be eaten though..=(
Anyways, not much time left on the computer..just wanted to let you all I´m alive, and everything´s worked out fine! I already love this city, there´s something new to explore behind every corner (did that sound cheesy or what..) and all the people I´ve met so far have been really nice & hospitable! (although it´s already ennoying me how macho many of the guys are..even though I was prepared for me, it kind of struck me. Luckily I´m not blone, but with my blue eyes I don´t look like I´m of spanish heritage)
Oh, and if you want to send me a letter or so (yeeey!!=), it has to go through the school. The address is:
Karin Rudberg
c/o Escuela de Espanol Cabaguil
Calle Poniente No.6
Apartado Postal 372
Antigua
Guatemala
Tomorrow is my first day in school, so we´ll see how that goes!
Now I´m gonna go get lost in this wonderful city=)
Hope all is well with you, keep in touch & please leave me a note on the message board to let me know how you´re doing!!
Lots of love
ps. I´ll try to write some more & put up a couple of photos tomorrow after school or the day after