1 week in Antigua

Wow... I've been here already for one week. Those days passed so fast.

I started with my Spanish classes on monday. My teacher is Rita, and we get along quite well. So apart from learning the grammar, we are also talking quite a bit. But about that later more.

Originally i planned to take 6 hours of classes every day. But as I was quite sick at the beginning of the week, I could not make it this week. I did not only burn my shoulders on Saturday, but I also got a light sunstroke and catched a really bad cold in the evening, as it can get quite cold in Antigua. Adding all this to my still existing (but not very bad) stomach problems, it was just too much.

So I went to the Spanish School in the morning, had 4 hours of classes and then went back to the hostel. I even made it back to the school in the afternoon to take part in the first activity, but being there, I just gave up. I went back home to my hostel, also skipping classes in the afternoon and went straight to bed.

I needed 3 days to more or less recover. So on Thursday, I finally participated in the my first activity. We went to a coffee plantation. There they also have a coffee museum and a museum about the Mayan music instuments. We had guided tours in both museums and it was quite interesting. But being me and being totally addicted to coffee, I liked most all the explanations about coffee. And of course, in the future, will be more careful about which coffee I will buy (the one from Brasil, obviously ;-) is really bad quality and all about money).

My Spanish classes are quite interesting as I am talking a lot with my teacher about the lives in Guatemala and Germany. She is going to university in the evening to become a lawyer, so this is also quite interesting for me. But what really totally shocked me: the students there were told to read "Mein Kampf" in order to understand the concept of nationalism. And they really like the book, think that it is interesting and has quite some interesting concepts and ideas. How can this be possible? First of all, how can anybody like this book, and second of all, how can a teacher officially tell his students to read the book for university?

This of course led to an interesting discussion about German history and the History of World War II.

Apart from that I realized that i am just used to go a much faster pace in learning in studying. But this would completely overwhelm my teacher, or all the other teachers I happened to know. So I decided to spend only one week more in Antigua and then finally head to the beach in Honduras, after spending 2/3 days in Copan ruinas.

Yesterday, I went hiking. Yes, you are not mistakten, Heidi went hiking without being forced. Of course nobody told me how high up we would go and how hard it would be, so I thought it should be okay. I went up the Volcano Pacaya. The views were great, sometimes it even was fun, but I was so so happy, when we finally reached the end and had a nice bread there were some of the others tried to roast some Marshmallows. Of course this was kind of impossible as there was no lava and no heat, but still it was fun.
The sad part of it was, that we just did not have enough time to enjoy the view and take really great pictures.

So at this time I have to declare my neverending love to my new camera. It just is the best. And it makes just great pictures (because it still is not me who makes good pix). So, when I come back, the fist thing I have to do is to get it professionally cleaned. All this volcano dirt is now on my camera and it really looks very used now.

Btw, you can find all the interesting pix of the last days on Facebook, it just takes too much time to upload them here and I do not like the way they are embedded in the text.

One last thing I would like to talk about today:
on Friday, I spent some time sitting in the Parque Central and watching the people. There are so many tourists, of course. But what I am really wondering about: why do people think, that they do not have to dress nicely/ normally when being on holiday? Really interesting what people think is clothes.

And why on earth, do especially female travelers who are way past their thirties think that they do not need to comb their hair, wash their faces and - worst of all - do not need to wear bras? This is really something nobody wants to see!!!!

(for Sebi: I am using the ctrl-C trick now)