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It’s done and dusted. Last night we booked tickets on American Airlines for $335/ea. round-trip from O’Hare to Guatemala City. We haven’t chosen a Spanish immersion school yet, but there are plenty. The ones with the highest ratings are booked but there are others that have overwhelmingly positive reviews that are still open.

The basic gist is this: for around $150/week, you get five hours of one-on-one Spanish instruction each weekday, a home to live in, and three meals every day but Sunday. Generally, tutoring happens from the morning to mid-day and the afternoon is open for extracurricular activities. Amy will likely help out in a medical clinic; I plan to teach English to school kids. Every program has offered me the opportunity to play footie with kids, too; I just hope they don’t play like the adults. Weekends are spent hiking the rain forests and volcanoes.

All expenses included, two weeks of Spanish immersion classes for two should come in well under $1500. Guatemala is a poor country so you do have to watch yourself, and some students have lamented that their home-stay families didn’t feed them enough, i.e. serving a single corn cob for dinner. We’re not convinced that this will feel like vacation, but we’re both hoping for a significant boost in our proficiency with Spanish. Absolute beginners claim to leave with a firm grasp on the language. We’ll be about 10.5 months along in our intensive Spanish course by August, which should put us at either a high intermediate or low-advanced level. Three weeks would be better but we have to live with two.

My hope is that I can test into graduate-level Spanish literature courses by the fall semester. Only time will tell.

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