Well, I finished my last day of spanish school today and as you can probably imagine, after all the hard work and stress, I need a vacation. Tomorrow I´m going to go relax in some natural volcanic saunas and hot springs and Sunday I´m going to get back on the road and start living out of my backpack again. My spanish is OK and the best way to keep learning now is to practice and actually use it. This, however, requires accepting the fact that major mistakes will be made. Last week, when we were leaving for the The Lake I told a bus driver we couldn´t board the bus because we were waiting for HIS friends instead of OUR friends.
This explains the weird look I got. A couple weeks earlier, my spanish school visited a nearby women´s prison which was a total hell hole; it´s one of their charity projects. Anyway, I carried a box of medicine and some bread. Afterward, I told my home stay family I took the prisoners drugs. They found this to be hilarious... they all pinched their fingers together near their mouth pretending to smoke marijuana. Rob, from my school, was playing basketball with a bunch of Guatemalan kids a few weeks ago. To communicate, he referred to the guy he was guarding by the color of his shirt, which was yellow or "amarillo" in spanish. Several hours after the game, he realized he called the kid "mantequilla" the whole game instead of "amarillo". I can´t even imagine what the Guatemalans thought of the Gringo that kept calling their friend "butter". The most famous error of all... and this one is in the history books at the school because every teacher told it to me ... was about a student a couple years ago that took a weekend trip to Antigua. After returning, he explained in spanish that he "took a car" to get there. In Mexico, his choice of words would have been fine, but thanks to some different interpretations and slang here in Guatemala, the student told everyone he had sex with a pig over the weekend.

Next destination(s) - probably Huehuetenango, Todos Santos, and Nebuj. All are in Guatemala.