Posted 9:42 PM by Gobbler
blimey, three requests for a fascinating discussion on the evidently intriguing subject of 'what i do in the day and how i am getting on in the fair town of antigua and all that spanish (ES-PAN-YOL) and all that. you did indeed ask for it.

Well now, i´m staying in a charming house with, as i have already mentioned, two lads, dom and john. My landlady is called carla and she is a teacher (maestro) at the Casa de Lengua (House of Language), the school (escuela) at which i am a student (estudiante). Carla is very nice despite the fact that she nearly killed me with her dodgy electricity. i dont think she yet knows that i was electrocuted, and when i have sufficient linguistic acumen i will be sure to grind out a grovelling apology as i recount gruesome largey made up details. She was extremely apologetiic in the first place purely because i had destroyed her light; she thought that i may have hurt myself in its fall. Mr Carla is mysteriously absent and i am harbouring the suspicion that he may have been done away with in a freak shower accident in which he was electrocuted due to faulty wiring. needless tomsay i have no proof that she actually killed him, i can only testify to the fact that such things can and do occur on her premises.

In all fairness, carla seems to have mellowed markedly from whatever deplorable past activities she may have engaged in viz. her matromonial situation and is friendly and accommodating. She speaks clearly and slowly to us estudiantes and utilises a carefully engineered, limited vocabulary. she is therefore largely comprehensible even to novices such as myself. She has two kids, a boy of abour tenj and a girl of about eight who mostly run around making lots of noise and eat things, as far as i can gather. Furthermore i am quite certain they have names but i cannot at present elaborate upon such details. She has a gentleman named Alex who is also friendly, rides around on a bicycle and does odd jobs around the house, which, since i have been here, has largely involved hitting various parts of the house with a hammer that he keeps secreted about his person. It seems likely that he is also the family electrician (yesterday he hammered up a new light fitting to replace the one i, ah, encountered) and so is probably largely responsible to that charged incident i have often referred to. There is also a maid called i think anne-marie who is more or less (mas o menos) four and a half feet tall, and cooks our lunch and generally keeps house. She too is exceedingly friendly tho harder to understand, and she watches us estudiantes intently as we eat our lunch chattering away in english and spanish. My room is small but entirely sufficient and has a comfy leather armchair included, in which i lounge while reading or studying in my few unoccupied hours (heartlessly lifted from th4e pages of ..........) and overall i have settled in very well.

I have four hours of spanish every morning from 8 to 12 with the option of paying for 2 extra hours from 2-4 which i do not deem necessary or economical. most afternoons there is some kind of cultural activity at that time. Monday i ahd an orientation tour of the town, and tuesday there was a trip to the coffee museum which included the sketchy musical instrument museum (in spanish: this is a drum made by guatemalteco´s ba boom ba ba boom. This is a rattle made by guatemaltecos tra trum tra tra trum. thius is a trumpet made by guatemaltecos da daam da da daam... the guide had the most extraordinarily robotic way of describing everything and their were lots of dummies sporting traditional clothing who, made out of some kind of dried leaf, looked disturbingly like mummies.

yesterday there was a cultural class on the subject of the day of the dead celebrations and a free salsa class (a lot of the activities are provided gratis) both of which i missed as i was reading Jonathon Coe´s 'The Rotters Club' which i must say was very good but this is not the time for a book review. I was not much in the mood for such heady activities as i had only managed three hours sleep after being out the night before. everywhere closes at one but i did not go to sleep until closer to four due my usual knack of refusing to for no discernable reason other than that i didnt want to and i'llsleep when i'm dead or some tosh like that.

This week has apparently been very quiet at the school as 40 odd people left last friday. there are apparently about 20 comingnext week. I'm at one of the more expenmsive schools, there are about fifty official schools here, but have naturally enough been assured that i´m at the best ones. Its 175 USD for a week including board and three meals a day bar sunday. So far, as i mentioned, i´ve only paid the 100$ deposit but i suspect theyll work out that i'm being a cheeky monkey before too long and wring it out of me. I consider the price to be entirely reasonable, being as it is the cheapest place in the world to learn spanish.

Tonight is a big salsa night in one of the clubs but i dont think i will be attending as a reqasonable sleep would be welcome before el salvadore expedition tomorrow. mind you, if i bump into a few amigos before i am safely ensconsed in the sanctuary that is my bedroom i may yet succumb to the promised delights of a frivolous night's entertainment. however it seems unlikely.

To further elaborate my standard day i will now slap down a timeline:

6:45 wake up, get up, consider washing myself
7:00 eat breakfast. keenly, as its so far been tasty thos intriguingly changes daily. thankfully, despite disturbing warnings, neithyer rice nor beans in evidence at the breakfast table. in fact i have yet to eat a single bean in this country.
7:40 leave for school. On foot.
8:00 begin first period of lessons. learn spanish with the maestro, tony and continue observations on the somewhat mad dutch person with whom i study, JUDITH from UTRECHT.
9:50 twenty minute break to refill flagon (plastic tumbler) of weak coffee and chat to persons there present.
10:10 Resume studies with other maestro, Carlos.
12:00 bell goes, signifying the end of the day.
12:01 begin to filter out of casa de lenguas. so far i have always done this with some description of matey, but it is entirely conceivable that in due course i will undertake this operation entirely independently. Retire to a casa relevant to what i want to do for the next hour. Para exemple (for exaple, e.g.) internet, home, brothel.
13:00 luncheon served at homestay. Shortly after this occurrence i eat said luncheon. thus far the luncheons too have been entirely palatable. But i am prepared for the fact that before too long i will be served something thoroughly minging.
14:00 Afternoon lessons/cultural activities begin, such as the coffee museum. If i elect to go, i go, if not, i dont. In such a case i then have the afternoon free. Today i finished the rotters club, but there is in theory a multitude of possible activities with which i can engage myself, such as go and study in a picturesque cafe, plan trips or go to the internet.
16:00 other cultural activities such as salsa may occur.
19:00 Dinner is served. When finished my plate consistently resembles a crater on teh moon and johns some kind of warzone. this is due to the fact that i eat anything and everything and he does not. Simple, really.
19:45 or after dinner. Evening activities take place. study, drink etc. tonight has mostly been bloggage.
11:00-04:00 ready for lights out. Lights out.
I have run out of time and must go. i may have lost sdome of this expansive blog due to pressing the escape button, which does the blog no good at all. i hope not, and i hope you find this explanation of my day helpful and interesting.

Talk backs next time, as i am being evicted from the cafe. Oh, this below is about GUAM. does anyone knowexactly where guam is?

*** a short extract from the upcoming and thoroughly rubbish novella from the happily unknown 'autor' arthur thripson***

urgent message follows:

...am abandoning world trip and any chance of a positive outcome to my existence and am instead going in search of the mythical land of the Guam to live forever. its a wonderful place and has no potatoes so i will be sarfe from the perils of the phantom irishman, the shirt snatcher. it doesnt have great cities in it like cairo or las vegas but i hear that they are both thinking of relocatiing there. this is something i will be campaigning for...

message ends

Posted 3:13 PM by Gobbler
a day in the blog

a litle blog time again, how marvellous. however, cant access my blogspot at the mo which is an irritation to be shar.

here in antigua guatemala for three weeks and then ioff to tikal. spanish lessons are 8 til12 in the am, a frightening time of day all things considered. today i passed my initial level exam which wasnt very hard but at least shiows that i have learnt something in the last few days.

nothing particularly exciting has occured in the last couple of days viz a vis earthqwuakes and electrocution lessons. things are just humming along quite nicely. tomorrow i and a couple of chu8ms are taking the liberty of going off to el salvador for the weekend. there does not appear to be much of note to do in el salvador so i dont have huge expectations about the place. still, its another country under the proverbial belt and beats sitting on my asrse for the weekend. plus it includes travelling via guatemala city and dodging the street gangs and urban warfare currently prevalent in that particular conurbation. plus there has been some friction between the el salvadorand and the guatemalteco´s which may make crossing the border an interesting experience, but in triuth i am scraping the barrel.

i thought there might have been another tremor last night but as at about half one i was awoken by by door mysteriously knocking and shaking. it may however just have been a freak gust of wind. or perhaps some naughty person was trying to get in? either way i must concede that its not the most exciting thingn that has ever happened.

some0 details aboput this lttle escapade. i live in a homestay with a uatemalan family and two other students, a swiss fellow called dominic and a canadian called john. john is off home of sunday and we are then joined by the intriguing prospect of a swedish chica. i live in the other end of town to the school which means a hearty 10 minute walk or a 15 minute leasurely waltz. this place is full of multicoloured buildings that would look decidely silly in say manchester or bristol or in fact most anywhere else but which look quite splendid here. my classes are excellent and i have only one other in my group, a girl named judith from utrecht who does not appear to be qu ite normal and who is i am somewhat disturbed to relate studying to be a doctor and has already gleefully recounted to me how the surgeon has on one occassion already let her cut someone open. i have run by her the sum total of my dutch skills, namely 'nurken in de kirken' (bonking in the kitchen) and 'liker liken tursen de artopols' (i like to lick between the potatoes), two indispensable phrases i picked up in chiang mai, thailand, from a similarly eccentric netherlander who was forty something who giggled incessantly with a penchant for showing off her monstrous cleavage at every conceivable moment. this did not amuse her newly wed thirty something husband who clearly felt that such outlandish behaviour (which my old headmaster would undoubtedly describe as 'leaving little to the imagination') was innapropriate, especially as they were on theiir honeymoon. He was however quite powerless to effect such affectations with his opinion, being as he was quite under the thumb and lumbered with a considerably weighty but nevertheless (i imagine and for his sake hope) desirable and gladly bourne ball and chain. everybody found the whole affair quite amusing, well, except for him, whio could do nothing but put a brave face face on it and grunt to himslef now and again. The point here is that the dutch are a curious bunch prone to excited ecdcentric outbursts of laughter who talk a very peculiar but fasacinating language that sounds incomprehensibly amusing and looks, when typed, thoroughly ridiculous. Welsh is wiered enough with its obsession with the letter 'l'. the dutch have gone one better with their concentrated groupings of unlikely consonants such as 'k' and 'v' forming words that look ominously if not impossibly long on paper but actually form only two syllables. Judith from Utrecht isnt here at present but, in the name of science and by way of example, i will attempt to procure from her, for your gastronomic linguistic stomach, a dutch word of such astounding literary incomprehensibility that will leave no doubt as to the disturbing accuracy of the argument i have here outlined. And i am harbouring the theory that all dutch people are insane. but i deviate.

lessons progressing well tho i'll miss a couple of hours tomorrow in pursuit of el salvador's delights. oh, and i havent paid yet, indeed they seem to have forgotten about that aspect of the tuition. being as i am a splendidly nice fellow i will of course pay them but at the same time i do not perceive any particular rush to do so.

i might comem back later to see if the blogspot is working and scribble more dribble as i will probably be off til at least sunday.

Evil Uncle: dont know what you have written, if anything, but it was certainly depraved or would have been. You will then be pleased to hear that i am el salvadoring it with Judith from UTRECHT and a 'dishy' austrian dame called dominica (apparently quite a normal name in her part of the world) and therefore i have given busty bev the week off and hedging my bets on some international congress. i appreciate that bev is made in china but thats hardly the same thing. Everyone else: in the dark at the mo as to whether you are punks or not. but lets face it. you probably are.

Posted 11:54 AM by Gobbler
Blogado rapido.

oh its midday and i{ve beenn up for hours and hours and hours and everything. no eruptions to report i'm sorry tosay, tho apparetnly there was another trmor last night but i slept through it. heh heh, earthquakes smirthquakes. actually i must concede that hat one the other noight wasnt actually an earthquake. anything under 5.0 on the richter scale is technically only a tremor and it as 4. something. still, i recommend tremors like that to all and sundry they are quite a treat. they dont make you shake quite as much as when a couple of hundred volts runs through you but are on the whole a safer option.

So it appears that doctor octagon really has had it in for me in antigua and laid some nasty traps to cause me many woes. but he has failed again. actually he has been very quiet recently on the blog, perhaps he has finally imploded in a big mess of icy core octagonalness. Gone polygon critical, leaving the mantle of evil to e. uncle, who keeps sending me monopoly money and blow up whores. i must concede that bouncy bethany had a few surprises. clearly tho, as i am celibate and neutered and dead from the waist down and all (took these steps after the lady-of-the-night fest with monopoly money hte other night but bethanby looks quite tempting and i{m somewhat regretting the move now. evil uncle, i may need your help with this one.

mlk will have to wait for another moment. now its time i describeda little about antigua. it used to be the capital of guatemala for a few hundred years unde the spanish but they decided to move the capital to guatemala city because there were so many earthquakes and their carefully constructed buildings (no doubt utilising the local populi who, basking in their new found religious enlightenment were just all keen to build a big town 5,000 feet up - what a pleasant climate - and do it all for nothing. thats just how happy they wer about it) kept falling over which, one can imagine, they werent very happy about. so most of the big buildings are now ruins. in fact one quite got the local religious community in a bit of trouble some decades and centuries ago. when some of the monastery fell down after a particularly forceful ground wobble, locals were smewhat disturbed to see bones poking out between the compacted rocks use to fill in the insides of the walls of the monastery buildings. The same strange phenomenon occured inthe broken walls of the nunnery some distance away. The bones were identified as being those of human babies. no one could understand just what was going on, as you might imagine. The ,monks and nuns, living on their own seperate sites, never left their sanctuaries, being frightfully religious and all. They'd built their monasteries all by themselves and indeed had been in antigua ever since its founding. (that last bit of info isnt releveant to the story but is never the less an interesting point)

A highly unusual and thoroughly naughty conclusion was eventually reached as to the grim fate of the babies. During the course of construction the monks and nuns, living on different sites about half a mile from one another, and never passing the gates of their respecvtive sanctuaries, built a connecting tunnel so that they could oh i dont know talk toi one another i suppose. Unfortunate yet unsurprising results followed as they engaged in fraternisational activitiesd unbecoming of men and women of the cloth. Clearly it simply wouldnt do to have little monks and nuns popping up, so something had to be done. Perhaps they considered it fitting to make their illicit offspring permanent pillars of the church thus affording the poor little childers some kind of status that would not ahve been possible had they simply dumped them in the garden. Well, whatever the reason, thats what happened to the poor little blighters.

When the quake game along the game was decidedly up and the locals werent all that happy about it. Neither was the religious management back in espana and those misbehaving copulating monks and nuns got a severe ticking off, and the monastery and nunnery were closed down.

And the moral of the story is: build strong and thick walls in earthquake zones or they might fall down. or something of that ilk.

Posted 9:01 PM by Gobbler
You gotta blog it

Before i begin i must acknowledge a greivous error in my calcualtions. the slide is 63ft long and 22ft tall, not the the paltry 35ft i cited in a previous entry. how could i have been so wrong.

i forgot to mention that, when i arrived on saturday, one of the first things i learnt about guatemala was that 600 people have been killed in the last 2 months in guatemala city in gang warfare. thats 10 a day. reassuring. so, after that useful titbit and after being electrocuted yesterday, i got an extra treat early this morning: an earthquake measuring a satisfying but non life threatening 4 on the richter scale. quite exciting, my very first quake. i lay awake awhile afterwards quietly hoping that the local volcano would presently erupt and splat a few buildings (not mine) but after a few minutes it became clear that it wasnt going to happen. Still, in three days three memorable things have happened, four if we include almost missing my flight. I wonder what the next day has in store.

First lessons today. despite my best efforts to blag it into more advanced class i was dumped straight into the bottom group. just me and one other, two of only three new intakes this week. But this isnt fascinating.

in fact, i had a load to write a while ago but its gone fresh from my mind. ah well. i´ll do talkback replies tomorrow. what a rubbish blog effort this has turned out to be. cant win them all. evidently i'm not used to getting up at 6:45.

Posted 9:18 PM by Gobbler
And so i finally gave in to the temptations of Evil Uncle. i picked up a monopoly set at the airport, and on arrival at guatemala city told my chauffeur where to shove it and instead headed straight for tart avenue just off rouge boulevard. Completely duped as they were by the pretty colours of the monopoly money i hired the lot (37!) and spent the night exploring their lingerie collections for 10,000 pounds! Admittedly i did have to 'borrow' from the bank to pay for this as the 1500 i had started with quickly dwindled after landing on May-Fair and Park Jane. Then i had to fork out for some electric company. Then took the cheap option with Old Kent's Broad and moved on to Picca-Filly. Thats about all i can remember, but evil unc´s definitely got a point there. Ahh, i´m being corrupted by the forces of evil!!

Today i mostly just got electrocuted. I dont recommend it. I´d just come out of the shower and was putting my tshirt on when my hand caught on a wire which pulled over a lamp. as this crashed to the floor the wires that had been held together with tape came apart and began to fry me. And the wire wouldnt come off, it stuck to my arm. had to actually pull off the cable with my other hand. Yep, its definitely not on my top ten list of things to do of an afternoon but was on the other hand an interesting experience and i appear to have come through unscathed.

Better go now as i'm still smouldering and the cafe is closing. Lessons start tomorrow, i hope my alarm works sufficiently to wake me up at half 6. probably not but i reckon someone´ll wake me. more exciting tales later.

Tulsa Hilton: clearly beechings needs a water feature, what a marvellous idea! now that you say it i wonder how we have survived without one all these years. I'll get dad on the case, i'm sure he'll love the idea...