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Designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979, Antigua sits snugly in the Southeast corner of the Western Highlands. Antigua was Guatemala’s capital from 1543 to 1776, but the city receded in importance when the capital moved to Guatemala City following a devastating earthquake that leveled much of Antigua late in the 18th century.

The city is surrounded by three volcanoes—Fuego, Agua and Acatenango—and is characterized by well-preserved Spanish colonial architecture and a smattering of ancient ruins dating back several centuries. The focal point of town is the Parque Central, a central square where the young and old, natives and tourists alike flock to socialize, read, nap, stroll, and play music in the midst of towering trees and resplendent Baroque fountains.

Antigua thoroughly captivates new arrivals, myself included. Its quaint streets and pastel houses with red tile roofs dripping bougainvillea in riotous colors reminded me a little of Florence. At the same time, Antigua’s streets abounded with indigenous people adorned in colorful Mayan dress selling traditional handicrafts, giving the city a time-warped and distinctly Latin feel.

Besides its colorful natives, Antigua’s tranquil pace has attracted a sizable contingent of well-to-do Guatemalans from the capital, a diverse community of European and American expats, Peace Corps workers on leave and college students intent on polishing their language skills between semesters.

My relationship woes notwithstanding, I’d arrived in Antigua keen on reawakening the long dormant Spanish, unused since my Sophomore year in high school—in the days before I senselessly overwhelmed it with mellifluous but utterly impractical Italian. My motivation to learn Spanish was selfish.

While I joked that at some point I’d like to order tofu burritos at my favorite taqueria in San Francisco, using complete sentences, in truth, my obsession with travel off-the-beaten path had recently shifted from Southeast Asia to Latin America. During the past year and a half I’d explored parts of Ecuador and Chile, and been secretly appalled at my inability to banter with the locals or ask even the most prosaic questions in correct Spanish. Traveling south of the border, particularly on the sort of aimless, independent adventures of which I’m so fond, required at least a basic working knowledge of the language.

Prior to my arrival in Antigua, I had spent several days exploring Flores and Tikal, where I muddled through requests for hotel rooms, restaurant bills, directions to the bank, and help finding bathrooms in halting Spanish.

At this point, realizing that learning Spanish on the fly was a pipe dream, I needed some practical, no-nonsense instruction to see me through my remaining two weeks in the country. Lacking even a basic guidebook on Guatemala—I had originally intended to limit my trip to Belize and Honduras—I set off to find a solid but inexpensive language school in Antigua, given my dwindling travel funds.

In a mental lapse that could charitably be described as premature brain rot, I set off for Central America without replenishing funds in my bank account and without my Visa card, instead bringing along my near-useless American Express card—and inadvertently became the poster girl for one of those annoying Visa commercials.

I spent my first afternoon in Antigua leafing through a used guidebook in the Rainbow Reading Room & Café, a low-key student bookstore café and popular hangout near the outdoor market on the southern end of town. I jotted down several reader-recommended schools and set out to do some scouting.

The highly regarded Christian Spanish School (www.learncsa.com) looked a little intimidating from the outside. Its slick corporate lettering was set against large picture windows that revealed a well-tended courtyard overflowing with blooming bougainvillea and small umbrella shaded café tables with students and teachers engaged in their daily lessons.

Offering experienced, professional instruction for intensive one-on-one study, CD-Rom-based listening aids and new textbooks for its students, the CSA bills itself as Antigua’s “five stars Spanish school” and is the standard bearer for language study in Antigua. However, at $135 per week for four hours of daily instruction, it was well beyond my budget.

My next stop was the Don Pedro de Alvarado School (www.donpedrospanishschool.com), just three blocks north of the CSA and around the corner from the exquisite canary yellow Iglesia La Merced. When I strolled into Don Pedro, I found a tiny, unpretentious school surrounding a rustic courtyard with overgrown shrubs, flowering trees, two resident parrots named Paco and Camillo, and a small coffee bar.

The friendly school administrator promptly sat me down in her office and proposed a week of classes—the standard four hours a day of one-on-one instruction—for the paltry sum of $60, which was a 20% discount off of the school’s published rate. My tuition would include 30 minutes of free Internet access a week and participation in free or discounted activities such as salsa lessons, excursions to Antigua’s museums, a school-hosted dinner party and a visit to an avocado farm. In Don Pedro I had stumbled onto the veritable ramen noodle of language schools—dirt cheap but more than able to satisfy of my basic needs. I signed up on the spot and began my studies that same afternoon.

While it’s easiest to begin language classes on Mondays, most schools can get you started any day of the week as there seems to be a surplus of under-employed language teachers in Antigua. Fernando, my instructor, was an affable fifty-something Antiguano with twenty years of teaching experience, a limited command of English and a taste for radical left-wing politics.

Our lessons began each morning at 8 a.m., a time of day when I normally have trouble speaking coherent English. Typically, Fernando and I would spend about half of each day working on conversation skills. To me, this was the best aspect of the one-on-one instruction as it forced me to practice all of the new words I was sponging up in the course of my daily interactions, without the requirement to share the stage with other students. Granted, my primitive subject/verb/object sentence constructions felt like a throwback to kindergarten, as I struggled to express simple ideas without gestures or pictures.

Following my usual breakfast of “café con leche” and “pan dulce,” Fernando and I would chat about the excursions I’d taken the previous afternoon, cafés and watering holes I’d discovered with my fellow classmates, and the mishaps I’d invariably suffered while making my way in a Spanish-speaking world.

Equipped with a limited vocabulary—made worse by the fact that my brain seemed to have become a sieve for new languages upon hitting my thirties—our conversations explored politics, nature, my work or lack thereof, and travel adventures, all of which left me mining my overpriced dictionary for colorful new words to express my thoughts. In addition to conversation practice, we spent considerable time drilling verb conjugations and proper word usage—boring but necessary drudgery for any beginning language student.

When the school’s bell jingled around 10.30 a.m. each day to signal the mid-morning coffee break, my brain usually felt like it was about to explode. My fellow students and I would gather around the picnic tables during the break, savoring freshly made avocado sandwiches and sipping strong Guatemalan coffees. After our cursory attempts at conversation in Spanish—we were virtually all beginners—we’d guiltily chatter away in English, regaling each other with our latest travel yarns and plans for afternoon exploration.

As it turned out, resuming Spanish study after years of Italian and French language classes in college and graduate school left me completely tongue-tied. I called it the curse of the Romance languages – the maddening overlap of Italian, Spanish and French. The three languages became commingled in my brain as if they’d been pureed in a blender. To my dismay, I realized I was developing a new linguistic form, “Spa-talian.”

Similar-sounding and perfectly overlapping Spanish and Italian words wreaked havoc on my attempts at conversation, even as my skills in one Romance language were invaluable for my comprehension of another. It gave me a false sense of accomplishment when I listened and a feeling of utter verbal paralysis when I opened my mouth to speak. Fernando would adopt a look of mock horror each time I subconsciously lapsed into Italian, during those many occasions when my Spanish vocabulary was seriously wanting.

After a week of classes, I was anxious to put my incipient skills to use but still a bit too green to carry on conversations of more than a few carefully contemplated sentences. Instead, I would take refuge from the afternoon heat pretending to read the local newspapers on hand at my favorite little café called Fernando’s. It was a tiny gem located just around the corner from my hotel, Posada la Merced, with map puzzles for tabletops, walls featuring amateurish photographs from Antigua and the Lake Atitlan region to the north, and to-die-for pastries made by Fernando’s wife. After much skimming, I was inevitably left with reading the sports section, which thankfully was free of flowery, metaphorical language and relatively easy to understand.

The local papers became my primary source of news on the Summer Olympics, happening a world away in Athens. It was here whiling away my afternoons that I learned idioms like “no tira la toalla,” a direct translation from English, to add to my verbal repertoire. In fact, it was a damn good one to remember as I muddled through my daily lessons.

One afternoon at the café, I was curiously observing Fernando and his friend, who were engaged in a lively conversation that moved at too brisk a clip for my fledgling Spanish skills to comprehend. Discreetly eavesdropping, I searched for familiar words to shed some clue as to what the two were chatting about with such animation. Much to my chagrin, the words I finally recognized weren’t Spanish at all, but “Soup Nazi.” In an incredibly strange cross-cultural moment, I laughed out loud as I realized they were reveling in one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes.

While I still had a long way to go, I had broken the ice and was gaining enough confidence to strike up conversations with waiters, tour guides and the friendly staff at Don Pedro. I enjoyed finally getting my foot in the door—even if sometimes in my mouth—to the local language and rhythms of daily life. So it was with regret that I finally uprooted myself from Antigua, retracing my path across Guatemala in order to catch a flight out of Belize City.

I relished the prospect of my return trip through Flores though, where I hoped to surprise the proprietor of Mesa de los Mayas—my old hotel—with a few new phrases, to make up for my pathetic attempts two weeks earlier. More than that, before I’d even returned home my improving Spanish has jump started my imagination in search of my next foray south of the border—perhaps to cooking school in Oaxaca or to hike the Inca trail in Peru? “Quien sabe?”

Dawn Stoner is a freelance writer and recovering former Wall Street yuppie living in San Francisco. She is planning to blow the budget on an upcoming safari in Botswana.

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