Edwin van der Sar drinks seven lemons

It´s been a few days, and the inevitable has happened: I´ve got the sniffles. Spanish today was thus particularly gruelling as I desperately tried to keep my head from spinning long enough to complete even the most basic of sentences. In the morning it was especially difficult, but come one o´clock it was time for Miguel.
My lessons with Miguel are as brilliant as the morning sessions are overwhelming. We just sit and chat, and learn in the process, rather than doing the sort of exercises and rote learning that made school so woeful. I have more to say to Miguel, and when he talks I´m more likely to understand. And boy, does he have a lot to say.

I appear to have met one of the 5% (that figure according to Miguel) of liberal Guatemalans. This is a man who is not afraid to cook at home, for which he assures me most Guatemalan folk would think him to be gay. He is 46 years old, and has been teaching Spanish for as long as I have been alive. Most of the topics we discuss revolve around life in Antigua, but we branch out occasionally. Today, we were talking about the upcoming Manchester United versus Chelsea Champions League final. He asked what the name was of the Man U goalkeeper, and where he was from. It took a lot of dictionary checking on both sides for us to agree on the Spanish for Holland, but it was when he referred to the team as the ´naranja mecanica´ that I was certain we were talking about the same thing.

In the second half of our sessions, Miguel becomes a walking tour guide. All in Spanish, of course. Today we visited Hotel Santa Domingo de Cerro, which is a five star hotel with a museum and a hell of a lot of parrots flying around in the garden. If you want to pay $200 a night, I thoroughly recommend it. During the break between talking in the school and going walkies, a young man name Profirio came up to me in the park and, in SpanGlish, asked me if I liked Led Zeppelin and offered me drugs. The answers I gave were yes and no respectively. I assure you though that this guy was actually extremely pleasant, and has a great name.

The days are pretty long at the moment. I wake up at 6.00 every morning to eat breakfast and go to school, though when one wakes up to pancakes with maple syrup, bananas and watermelon, you can´t really complain.

I´m going to end this post with one of Miguel´s many pearls of wisdom. In Latin America, if a man has a cold he drinks seven lemons squeezed into a single shot glass. But in Guatemala, he drinks seven shots and one lemon. Tomorrow is the traditional end of week BBQ at the GVI house, and if I´m still ill I know which method I´ll be using. When in Rome, as they say.