December 1-18- San Pedro La Laguna

Lake Atitlan

Ally and I arrived in San Pedro on a Thursday night. We found a small hotel across from the school that she had signed up for that was reasonably priced. She was starting spanish classes on the coming Monday so I decided to check out the school to see what it was like. My original plan was to spend a few days at the lake because everyone had said it was really beautiful and then to head up to a small town called Todos Santos for spanish lessons. However after a few days here I decided to stay for one week of spanish lessons.
Over the weekend before classes started we kayaked across the lake, went to the local market and hung out with the rest of the tourist taking spanish classes.

Garden at San Pedro Spanish School

On Sunday afternoon we moved into our first homestay. The parents names were Pedro and Deborah. They were super friendly, but the meal portions were really small and I found that I was having to buy extra meals because it wasn´t enough. At the end of the first week of classes, I was still having a really good time so I decided to stay another week if I could switch homestays. There was a group leaving one of the family´s and they said that we would get our own bathroom and the portion sizes were huge so we decided to switch.
On Saturday night of the next weekend there was a full moon party about an hour from San Pedro. We decided to go although it was expensive because there was a zipline that you could do at midnight and because there were a lot of people from the school going. When we got up there it was freezing cold and we basically just sat around and drank for the first hour to try to ignore the cold. After about an hour we went ziplining. It was really fun because you really couldn´t see where you were going on the path or where you were going to be ziplining. There were two, the first being a shorter faster one and the second being a little slower but much longer. I had no clue what to expect because we were walking uphill in a forest. When I jumped off the deck for the zipline, I was still in the trees for about 2 seconds. Then all of a sudden I broke out of the trees and realized that we were ziplining across a valley. The moonlight completely lit up the valley below. It was awesom!

My three favorite people from San Pedro: Jo, Ryan and Ally

After we got back from ziplining, a lot of the people there were already either really drunk or really high. The music sucked and we basically sat around the fire till 6am waiting for the bus to drive us back. That part of the night sucked, but the zipline made it worth it!
That next morning we moved in with our new homestay. It was a new house, the rooms were really nice and as promised we got our own bathroom. We continued on with classes the next week but took it easy in the evenings until the weekend. Unfortunatly on the weekend we ended up getting the same intestinal infection that a lot of the students were also getting. Alli was a lot worse off then I was, but it still wasn´t fun.
I left San Pedro for Mexico on the 18th. I was really sad to leave. The people were awesome and the town was beatiful. It was definitely one of my favorite parts of my trip.