Our primary purpose for staying in Antigua Guatemala for a month was to take Spanish immersion classes. We have repeatedly been told that Guatemala is one of the best places to learn Spanish as Guatemalans are reputed to speak incredibly clear Spanish and options for classes are cheap and plentiful. We waited until Phil was feeling well enough to talk without coughing out his lungs and ended up registering to commence classes from our first Thursday in Antigua Guatemala.
After some research, we settled on taking classes through Antigüeña Spanish Academy as the school has overwhelmingly positive reviews online. We didn’t take the homestay option as we already had our own accommodation and we didn’t want to be stuck in case we changed our minds about the school or taking Spanish classes. The cost was 90 USD (~114 CAD) for a total of 20 hours a week. That worked out to be 4.50 USD (~5.70 CAD) an hour. We chose the afternoon option where our classes were from 1:00-5:00 PM so we got a bit of a discount. Sorry, morning people 😛
So, how did the classes go? We’d like to start off by patting ourselves on the back for not depending on the school’s homestay option for our accommodation because we would have ended up homeless at the end of the week. Perhaps the school scraped the bottom of the barrel for our teachers because I went in knowing just enough Spanish to not accidentally call my father a potato and didn’t leave with much more than that. Plus, my Spanish was better than my teacher’s English, making it less than an ideal situation for a beginner like me. I played a lot of charades to make myself understood and often caught the attention of students and teachers in neighbouring rooms with my impressions of animals because my teacher did not know the word in English.
Phil didn’t fare much better and that had us questioning all the positive reviews that lead us to go with the school. Needless to say, we didn’t extend classes for another week and decided to do what we should have done from the start and self-studied. I may sound harsh; however, I feel like the money we paid was an utter waste. I have taken language classes before through Alliance Française and then later private classes from the same teacher at a rate of 30 CAD. My French teacher was worth every penny because in 20 hours, my level of French had gone from high school gibberish to basic conversational.
With a combination of Duolingo and YouTube videos, my Spanish has been progressing at a much more palatable rate and since the weather has been nice here, we have been enjoying being tourists in Antigua Guatemala so, all is not lost.
Antigua Guatemala
City Street
We have also had the pleasure of being in close proximity of the Volcán de Fuego (Fire Volcano) when it erupted overnight on Wednesday, January 31. There was an orange alert issued due to the ash tower of 1.7 kilometers into the sky and lava flowing up to 500 meters down the crater’s side so, we stayed indoors all day on Thursday. Phil was recovering quite well from his pneumonia so he decided to take the opportunity to go up to our rooftop while there was volcanic ash in the air and snap a few pictures and record some footage of the smoky volcano. Now that’s what I call commitment… to the blog.
View of Volcán de Fuego from our rooftop
