Back to School...

Monday we stared Spanish school at Escuela Bio Itza, in a small town called San Jose across the lake from Flores. It is peopled by Itza Mayans and backs onto Bio Itza national reserve park.
...so once we arrived in San Jose, it was straight to school for us! We met our teachers, Zoila and Sandra. We then had four hours of one on one instruction...very intense to say the least. Plus, the teachers don't speak any english, so you're forced to bumble your way through lessons passing the traslation dictionary back and forth... but all in all our first day of instruction went well.
After class we were taken to meet our Gautemalen host family, ironically named the Chans...the setting was extremely rustic, with pigs and chickens roaming the yard. We met our host mom, Linette, and she showed us to our quarters that we a but set off from the rest of the family's dwelling. She opened the padlock on our door to our new abode and what greeted us was a cement room with two very hard twin beds, a small desk, and thankfully a ceiling fan. Next came the bathroom and shower tour which consisted of two cement huts with tin roofs. The toilet was nothing more than a cement block with a hold in it! YIKES! We settled in as best we could and headed to the family kitchen for lunch. We discovered over the next week that lunch was easily the best meal of the day... with veggie soup, warm tortillas, tomaltios, papas fritas, salad, rice and numerous other vegetarian delights that Linette prepared for us.
In the afternooons the school organized many different activities, we hiked around their local ruins, we got a tour of the entire city, we went onto the lake and fished and we made soap for their local business. Throughout the week we learned much about the local flora and fauna, about how you can create glue by rubbing these two particular fruits together and how the towns people spent their days. Also, we got numerous leg and butt workouts, as San Jose is bulit on the side of a mountain... but all in good preparation for Machu Picchu. lol