The First Day

The Lake: Lake Atilan is beautiful. The lake is at 5,600 feet from sea level. It is surrounded by three volcanoes, San Pedro, San Lucas, and I forget the other name. The lake is a deep blue color. When the morning sun hits the water just right, there appears to be diamonds dancing on the water. As you get closer to the shoreline you notice clusters of small boats. As you get even closer everyone asks you San Pedro? San Lucas? I will say although every one of them will ask as if we magically changed our mind in the last 5 seconds, they stop after 2 or 3 no gracis responses.


The Spanish class: Yesterday I had my first class. I took a test at the beginning which covered numbers, letters, question words, regular verbs, female and male nouns, plural. My teacher (Zoila) began going over the test. I did alright with most of it. When there was a concept that I did not have we would practice it. Since my vocabulary is very limited at this point, she would talk and ask me questions. After she was satisfied I understood the concept, it was my turn to ask her questions. The answers to the questions would be 2 to 3 sentences long...a short conversation. Any word that I did not know that she said or that I wanted to say, I wrote down. We covered several verbs. By the end, my head was swimming and I had 4 pages of vocabulary word to learn by this afternoon. I also had to write 10 sentences and 9 questions practicing what we had worked on. I learned more in 4 hours of individual tutoring than in all my Spanish classes. I get frustrated as I do not have the vocabulary to say what I want to say. My teacher is very patient and generally by the end of my struggling in broken Spanish understands what I am trying to say.


The house:Yesterday was the first full day in Panajachel (Pana as the locals call it). My house is on the main street in the middle of town. You would walk right by it as it appears to be another colorful shop. Inside there is the first floor where the family lives in one room. There is a narrow hallway that leads to the small rustic kitchen and a dining room. One then proceeds upstairs to the rest of the tenant rooms and a bathroom. The stairs are outside but covered with thick plastic. The room is simple but has everything you need. The shower does have hot water supposedly. It, however, is so hot that it encourages one to pratice navy showers in order to avoid freezing in the shower.

The sounds: Being in the center of town provides ample background nosies throughout the day and night. The schedule appears to be 3 to 5:30AM the rooster begin crowing, a5 to 7 the buses clang their cymbal as they pass through the center of town, during the day there is normal hustle and bustle with tut tuts (small taxies), buses, bikes, etc, 8-12PM concaphony of music is heard from multiple bars down the street. There is also the sound of the bursts of wind that rattle the plastic covering of the stairs.

The food: It is decent. If you are on a low card diet, however, you would be starving. The meals are heavy on the carb side with potatoes made in different forms, bread in different forms (rolls, english biscut type, pancakes, watermelon is fruit served at every breakfast) Breakfast has eggs or pancakes. Lunch was a thin soup with a potato side. Dinner is normally a lighter meal with beans (jovas- like long green beans, frijoles-black beans in several forms) and potato or bread.