I left Santa Elena on Sunday at 0750 blue skies and the road winding through hills small towns along the way, cool weather roads good most of the time except for about a 100km section of broken pot holed road through the mountains (altitude 1500m) approaching Guatemala city which then turned into a new concrete 4 lane highway for the last 40km. The Road engineers have worked out a couple of innovative ways to slow traffic down, put up signs for speed bumps and then dont have any speed bumps, next is lay down some patchy bitumen over the good road in corners to make it bumpy enough to slow cars down, see pic’s. It took 6 hours to do the first 500km to Guatemala City and then another 2.5 hours to do the next 50km to Antigua hahahaha, I got to the other side of the city without too much trouble then hit a road block and went around in circles for 1.5 hours trying to get onto the highway, finally got fed up asking for directions and stopped at a taxi rank and got one of them to show me the way to the Antigua turnoff for the princely sum of Q100 ($13), he probably made a 100% profit and was very happy and I was very happy to get out of the traffic and into Antigua before dark. There are no GPS maps of Guatemala and signs are practically non-existent.

Antigua a very old historic town that has been preserved in its original form, narrow one way cobblestone streets, another trick from the engineers to slow traffic down and keep cars off the roads ie. its faster to walk if you don’t break an ankle.

Spanish school (http://www.donpedrospanishschool.com/index.php) is full on, 0800-1200 then siesta and then 1400 to 1600, one on one tuition. I am staying with a local family about a 5min walk from the school very convenient, I don’t think I can handle more than a week of this. Today we went on a tour of a Macadamia plantation instead of having class in the afternoon, thank you, my brain was ready to explode and spew nuevo palabra all over the lugar.

Dinner and Salsa dancing (not me) at the school on Thursday then a session at Frida’s.