Antigua
I spent exactly thirty nights in Antigua, which means old, or ancient, and whose name is actually Antigua Guatemala, or old Guatemala, as it was once the capital of the country. In fact, the full name is Ciudad de Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala, City of St. James of the Knights of Guatemala, but you’ll only find that on some especially ornate placards on old statues, and everyone just calls it Antigua. It really is a lovely place, with the best-preserved and oldest Spanish colonial architecture perhaps in all of Central America, a (relatively) cool valley surrounded by green mountains and towering volcanoes, but it was a strange time, my month there. On my second day in what is likely the most expensive place in the country, I realized I didn’t have any money, as my debit card had been compromised on my first night in the country, and my bank had cancelled the card and shipped a new one to my father’s house, which would probably take three weeks to get to me. It was to be a lean time.
This was also my first real contact with the storied gringo trail, a steady current of pale-skinned Europeans and North Americans in their early twenties, equipped with overstuffed backpacks, which mostly skips Mexico but begins on the Yucatan peninsula, runs down the coast of Belize into central Guatemala, and then southward all the way to Panama. The walkers of this trail come ready to party and spend money, take tours and extreme guided adventures, and bounce quickly from one landing spot to the next, with little attempt at learning language or culture. All of this was quite different than my previous experiences with other backpackers in Latin America, mostly in Mexico, whose reputation as a dangerous country selects for a slightly more intrepid and independent-minded traveler.
Antigua is absolutely one of the first main stops on the gringo trail, and every day, hundreds more of these young backpackers would arrive in town, signed up for their pre-programmed adventures: group volcano hikes, pub crawls, zip lining, any of these for at least twice my daily budget. I had very little in common with them, especially here in Antigua, as I was to be taking a very difficult class and studying in what would otherwise be free time, and had neither the time or money to carry on like they did, but still it disturbed me that the locals saw me as one of them, and even more however much we did have in common.
On the morning of the first day of class I met the six people who I would spend most of my time with that month: my five classmates in our TEFL course, and our teacher, all of whom happened to be Americans, while most of the travelers in town were from other countries. The students first- four young women in their early twenties: Monica, a hippie-ish poet from Nebraska, into the outdoors and writing; Tayannah, from Atlanta, the only one of us who’d previously been a teacher, quiet (at first) but full of spirit, grace and confidence; Emily, blonde, bubbly, sportive, kind, from Washington state, with a hearty and explosive laugh; and Angie from a tiny town in Iowa, quiet, halting, sweet, her personality slowly expanding out of its previous restraints. The first two were somewhere on the liberal side of the spectrum and hoping to see some of the world; Emily and Angie were both deeply religious evangelical Christians who hoped to pair English teaching with mission work. Then there was Grant. Somewhere in his late 50s, tall and slow moving, with a perpetual far-off look in his eye. He professed to have been off drugs and alcohol for twenty years, but the effects seem to linger. He spends his winters in Florida, doing union stagehand work, and his summers in Guatemala, had done so for a long time, and everyone around there knows him as the funny old gringo who drives a big four-wheeled off-road vehicle on the road.
Claudia was our teacher, a master TEFL teacher from Arizona who is fluent in Spanish and has lived in Latin America for years, smart, funny, vivacious, dramatic. She is an excellent and demanding teacher, and believes that teaching English is serious work that most new teachers are not prepared for. Her sense of self-possession and confidence was such that I thought she was ten years older than she actually is, in her late twenties.
After six hours of class on the first day, my head swimming with pedagogies and philosophies of education, I was still wondering how I was going to pay for my room at Casa Matilda that I was supposedly about to move into, or for anything else for that matter. As I was packing my bags it struck me that I had some US dollars hidden away for emergencies. This certainly counted as one, and after some searching for the too-well hidden stash I found nearly $100, and on my way across town, exchanged it for quetzales at a money-changing house. I gave the majority of that on arrival as a deposit to Matilda, who graciously agreed to wait for the rest of what I owed her. My Dad had agreed to wire me some money via Western Union, but this would take a few days to come in. After moving in, I went back out to the supermercado, and spent most of the rest of my money on food to last me until then.
My room was a large, dark, damp and dusty space, though not lacking in charm, containing a bed, bureau for clothes, and a writing desk, walls painted in pastels, with its own private bathroom. It felt great to drop my heavy bags and know that I wouldn’t have to pick them up again for a long time. I went around and met several of the other residents. The three that stuck out were Nacho, a long-haired idealistic Spaniard studying abroad for a semester who played reggae songs on his ukulele late into the night; Martina, a pretty Swede near the end of a trip from Peru to Mexico, volunteering at an orphanage and studying Spanish, and Cassidy, a young American woman teaching English. That first night at Casa Matilda, I went to bed listening to the sounds of young people partying into the wee hours at the hostel next door.
Very quickly I was able to find a comfortable routine, albeit one buried in schoolwork. It was certainly a bit of an adjustment, from the scattered, floating existence of a traveler in Mexico to the rigors of a serious academic class. This was my first time in a classroom in maybe ten years, and after several hours of intensive grammar I’d feel my head go foggy.
In the morning I’d drink some tea on the rooftop terrace, and if it was clear, watch Volcan Fuego in the far-off distance puffing smoke. Had a nice fifteen minute walk to the school, cutting through the two main plazas of the city (though in Guatemala they call them parques), usually stopping by Panaderia Santa Clara on the way for a fresh-baked croissant. Didn’t know it then, but I was living two blocks from one of the best bakeries in Central America. If I had time, I’d pause at the Parque de la Union to savor my pastry.
Class was three hours in the morning, from 9 til noon, an hour’s break, with three more hours in the afternoon. For lunch, several of us from class would usually go to the market, the real, old-fashioned labyrinthine mercado where most things you might want to buy are for sale if you look long enough. There is a collection of comedores that all serve pretty much the same things: pepian, a thick brown gravy with a little chicken thrown in, pollo dorado, pan-fried chicken, chiles rellenos, here a few small chiles filled with meat and vegetables, no cheese, and caldos, stews of beef or chicken. These would generally be served with a bit of rice and pureed black beans, maybe a root vegetable if you were lucky, and the agua natural of the day. This sustenance would cost you roughly two dollars. Grant took us to his favorite place the first or second day, and the tradition mostly stuck. We’d come into the comedor area, and a crowd of middle-aged Guatemalan women would pursue us “adelante, por favor, pepian” and we’d get swept into one or another. There was an idea of trying all of them, a tour of the comedores, but at some point we realized they were all more or less the same.
This was the rainy season in Guatemala, and so generally my walk back after school would be a wet one, and on getting home I’d take an hour to unwind, listen to the rain, before starting on reading or one of the numerous projects Claudia had in store for us. In addition to the six hours a day of class, we had at least a couple hours of reading at night. Not to mention five observations of other teachers, lesson plans: three 20-minute classes and eight hour long, and two five-page academic papers to write. When they said this class was intensive, I guess I didn’t believe them. I suppose I figured it would be pretty mellow- hang out in Guatemala and learn about teaching English meanwhile. Around dusk I’d go up to the roof and cook something for dinner, predictably involving a mess of beans with a couple quesadillas, jockeying for position with the other residents at the gas stove, and then come back down to my room to work before I’d start getting drowsy.
Things seemed to be good enough, though money would be tight. I felt reasonably happy with my teacher and classmates, and the place I’d found to live. I knew from the first day that the class would be challenging, and I welcomed that. But by the end of the first week, it was clear that challenge would be the operative word for my time there.
On the Friday of the first week, we were to do our first mini-lesson, 20 minutes with adult basic English learners, the lesson being a “How to” of our own devising. I decided to teach the class how to play blackjack. Minutes into my lesson, feeling nervous from the start, I realized just how hard it is to teach people in a language they don’t understand. We knew it would be hard- all six of us. Angie had started crying at the end of class the day before from the anxiety of it. But looking out at blank faces, seeing that they weren’t understanding the words I was using to teach the words I needed them to learn, I began to grasp that it was going to be very, very difficult.
I think this was the idea of having us start teaching before we’d done much of the course, before we were ready, to shock and frighten us into getting serious about the methods and philosophies we were learning. All of us were pretty bad that first day, with the exception of Tayannah, who is a natural teacher, and graced her way through the twenty minutes with poise and humor.
After just a couple minutes, I could see that there was no way we were going to get through the lesson plan I’d made, that there was way more complexity to blackjack than I’d realized. The decision I came to, up there in front of the befuddled class, was to plough through, with the goal of actually playing some cards, which we wouldn’t do if we stuck to my plan. The downside of this was that I wasn’t putting in the time to properly teach either the language or strategy needed to play the game. I should take a moment here to describe the philosophy of English teaching that Claudia was indoctrinating us with.
Three words sum it up: Elicit, don’t explain. It took me a little while, but at this point I think this method would apply to almost any kind of teaching. The idea is that the material should be generated by the students, and elicited from them by the teacher through questions, hints, mime, pictures, etc. The students should do the majority of the talking, and build their command of the material rather than simply trying to sponge up what the teacher is offering them. Time spent explaining things would be wasted, as listening comprehension is one of the most difficult parts of learning a new language.
It all felt like some kind of a Jedi trick, teaching them without talking- giving the students space to fill on their own. Being up there in front of the class, nervous, I relied on one of my main strengths, my ability to talk. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a talker, and an explainer. Suddenly these were liabilities. In my rush to get to actually playing blackjack, I was in fact doing quite a lot of explaining, and as advertised, it wasn’t working. Somehow, I kept my composure and managed to get a hand of blackjack dealt out to the class, and they seemed to understood the words “hit” and “stay”. But that’s pretty much all they got. I realized as people kept hitting with hands of 19 and 20 that the subtleties of blackjack were lost on them, and then the time was up.
Afterwards, when the students had left, Claudia went around to give us feedback. To everyone else she gave at least a little bit of praise, mixed with strong criticism, but for me it was all negative. Not one bit of positive reinforcement. I was feeling fairly vulnerable about my first day teaching, and as she went on, just trashing my lesson, I began to feel hurt. While I knew it was something of a flop, there were two people in the class whose lessons had been obvious disasters, and she had some nice things to say to them. I walked out of there feeling like I was not cut out to be an English teacher.
My tough day continued that afternoon when I went to try to pick up the wire transfer my Dad had sent some days before. By the second location, I was able to figure out why they weren’t letting me cash it: the wire transfer was made out to “Gabriel Goldstein” but my passport said “Gabriel Joseph Goldstein”. I tried to explain that in the US, middle names aren’t important, and that since I knew the number of the transfer, the amount, the sender, the sender’s location, and had the same first and last names as the recipient, it was clearly me, but it wasn’t happening. Tried a third place but they weren’t going to give me any money.
This was a strong candidate for my lowest point in town: Friday evening when all the backpackers were getting ready for their pub crawls, which I wouldn’t have joined anyway; but there’s something about watching people throw money around and make merry when you’re broke that’s particularly distasteful. I went home to cook a simple dinner and stew in my frustrations. It all felt hard: being in a foreign country where I had a hard time communicating with people, trying to learn a new skill that wasn’t particularly natural to me, living in an expensive touristy town with people constantly trying to sell me tours and trinkets and handicrafts, without any money.
The next day things seemed to turn around a little bit. My heroic Dad was able to modify the name on the wire transfer, and late the next morning I was able to cash it. Solvent again. I paid Matilda the rest of the money for the month, and treated myself to a decent breakfast. In the afternoon Monica and I walked up the road into the mountains north of town, in search of a rumored place called Hobbitenango, and it was so good to get out of the little town full of tourists and locals on motorbikes and stop breathing the car exhaust. One of my biggest frustrations about my month in Antigua is that I’d sit on my roof and look at beautiful green mountains in every direction, just calling to me. And the depressing reality is that I couldn’t walk in them. At least not without a guide, and even that was no guarantee against getting mugged. Cassidy told me the story of her friend who’d hiked Volcan Agua (with a group and guides) and were all robbed by men with machetes. It was difficult to be surrounded by alluring nature that was inaccessible, like being in a beautiful prison.
But after extensive asking around, apparently walking on the road in some directions was okay, in daylight. Monica and I had a good walk, telling stories, talking about teaching and traveling, commiserating about our class, detailing the nuances of languages and writing. We wound our way up and up, with breathtaking views of the various valleys around Antigua, coffee plantations and little villages and dramatic volcanoes.
In late afternoon we reached the village of El Hato, where we found several signs. One said Hobbitenango, 3 km, and another Earth Lodge, 2 km. Both of these were probably a little far for the remaining light, and so we decided to just walk a little further, as we could see another sign down the way advertising a restaurant. Five minutes walk got us to Restaurant El Tambor, where the proprietor was delighted to welcome us to his place, our gringo-ness outstripping our somewhat scrappy looks and sweat-soaked shirts. He showed us the mirador above the restaurant, where there were a couple tables set up high on the mountainside above a patch of corn and coffee. We ordered a couple beers, and when the waiter brought them they threw in some homemade chips and delicious guacamole.
We walked down and made it back to Antigua before dark, refreshed. Things were looking up. When I got home and told Matilda that I’d walked to El Hato, she said, oh no, it’s very dangerous there. I mostly chose to overlook this information. It was a long weekend, some kind of national holiday, and that Monday Monica and I set out on our next adventure. This time we rented bikes and plotted a course to several little villages in a circle around the area. This loop was a popular guided bicycle tour for $45, but we figured we could do it on our own.
After five spine-jangling minutes navigating the cobblestones of Antigua, we were on a dirt road heading for Volcan Agua, and the town of Ciudad Vieja, the previous and third incarnation of Guatemala City (Antigua being the 4th) where we found an old, mostly empty plaza, and a fenced-off miraculous four hundred year old tree that seemed quite unremarkable. From there we headed east, checked out a macadamia farm, and then through the little sleepy villages of San Miguel and San Antonio, stopping in each to savor the plaza and distinctive churches.
Out of town I had to walk my bike up a tremendously steep hill, while youthful Monica was able to ride most of the way, and in the late afternoon, we turned back for an expansive view of all the little towns in their valleys before we got back on our bikes to roll down into town and traffic. This day spent on bicycles might have been my favorite thing I did in a month there. Having the freedom and mobility to explore at our own pace, to get out into the countryside, visiting these unknown villages, somehow made me feel more fully present in Guatemala than within the beautiful confines of our fabled city.
