© Emily Ding - Central Park, Antigua, where the volcanoes are omnipresent

The small colonial town of Antigua, Guatemala, is the mecca of the package Spanish school, combining both study and travel and so-called immersion social activities and accommodation with a Guatemalan host family. However, having studied at Ixchel School for a week I can tell you that you won’t get much of a genuine immersion experience in Antigua - at least, not for the short term.

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It’s more exciting not to have anything planned, to have only one ticket in and one ticket out and know that in between anything is possible. That way, things never quite turn out the way you expect them to.

I now find myself in Antigua (the quaint little town in Guatemala, not the Caribbean Island by the same name, mind you) despite the fact that I never intended to spend any time here, or Guatemala, at all. I’d thought that from San Francisco I’d work my way immediately to Nicaragua, but that just didn’t happen.

People who know me can testify that I can - frustratingly - be a very last-minute person. I prefer to be described as ’spontaneous’ and I like to think that that makes me better able to deal with challenging situations under pressure, but I know my parents prefer the use of the unflattering adjective ‘haphazard’. Admittedly my last-minuteness hasn’t always proved to be a good thing, but more often than not I’ve found it to be quite useful, and it’s landed me in plenty of interesting spots I’d never have found my way to otherwise.

Basically, what happened was this:

I had a flight booked to Guatemala from San Francisco on October 16 at 8:05 p.m. and by 5:30 p.m. I still wasn’t sure if I was going to take the flight. You see, I’d fallen a little bit in love with San Francisco and wanted to stay longer, thought that perhaps later I could make my way down to Nicaragua by land via Mexico and Guatemala. But in the end, for fear of invalidating my return ticket home if I missed this segment, I decided to board my plane.

However, I had no onward ticket to Nicaragua and no accommodation booked in Guatemala. I thought that upon my arrival in Guatemala I would buy the next ticket out to Nicaragua, if there was one, or take a bus. Or maybe I would stay a night and make a little tour of Guatemala before moving on to Nicaragua, since I was already in the area. But honestly I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So I waited till I arrived to survey what my options were.

In the end, what happened came completely out of the blue: two elderly women from Hong Kong adopted me for a little while and gave me a place to stay.

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