Going Guatemalan

Guatemala

Street mural in San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, outside of a cafe.

Keeping with the new Projects theme, Julie and I are going to Guatemala in order to hopefully make major strides towards Spanish fluency. And this trip is not a touristy trip, we’re not traveling on bikes or on foot, but are staying put for 6 full weeks in the town of San Pedro La Laguna near Lake Atilan in Guatemala. We are getting immersed and going full Guatemalan.

We are going to school, Coopertiva Spanish School, which is a school making a concerted effort to give back to the community. We will be living with a Spanish speaking family, they feed us three meals a day, and we have one on one Spanish lessons at the school five days a week for anywhere from two to six hours a day. Our hope is that with our basic understanding of the language we already possess, after six weeks of intense immersion, we will be much more fluent and much closer to achieving a big thing from our Projects List.

A major challenge to our immersion stay will be that we have friends there. Our cycling friends, Dave and Jenn, are currently en route to Guatemala and plan on spending a month at the language school, overlapping our stay for almost four weeks. It’ll be great and we really look forward to seeing them again. However, we also hope we don’t do our daily lessons and then simply sit around talking in English all day with our friends.

They are actually the reason we even had the idea for going to a language school in Guatemala. They had friends that attended the school and they gave very good reviews. Dave and Jenn were really excited about the idea and it in turn rubbed off on us, especially since it overlapped with one of our big long term projects. The school is very affordable (under $750 per person for room, board, and lessons per month).

So we’re pumped. We have Marathon Madness getting into gear next week and taking us through early February and then on February 8th, we hop on a plane to Guatemala. It’s good to be back to work and getting going on all these wonderful Projects.

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