Welcome to San Pedro…
March 3-4
Welcome to San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, on the shores of Lake Atitlán!
Oh boy, I’m happy now (it’s the 4th), but it took some work to make it happen. I arrived on the 3rd after a 2 1/2 hour microbus ride that actually took 4 hours. I went first to the school, San Pedro Spanish School, and was very pleased with the reception and the physical layout of the school.
They were to assign me a homestay and the magic just wasn’t working. The local year-around population of this town must be 70% Maya with the rest made up of Westerners with a decidedly hippie-ish lifestyle who have made a home here by offering services to the tourists, and a very few native Spanish speakers who run language schools.
I visited three homestay families and all of them spoke their language between themselves and only used Spanish when speaking to me directly. I just wasn’t up to dealing with another language, interesting as it might have been.