There are about 20 students here, most of them American. In our off hours, the school keeps us busy with traditional cooking courses, visits to local farms or tree plantings in the school's reforestation project on the outskirts of town. Most evenings we take a sunset swim before joining our host families for dinner. From a swimming pier built in part with school revenue, we sit and watch the lake smooth over in the dusk calm. Small dugouts paddle or motor in, trailing long rippling contrails.
Shoreside lights blink on and throw white stripes across the water.
San Andres is a much rougher town than Antigua, where most of the Spanish schools are located. But there's a unique rural luster here that more than makes up for the lack of Internet access and cappuccino. Still, a few students have opted to bypass the home stay and are basing out of the tourist hotels in larger Flores, a 40-minute boat ride away. I ask around for the best steak in Flores and settle into a table at La Luna, marshaling Hubar's verbs in my head as I open the menu, determined for once to be tense perfect and grammatically correct. Please, I would like the filet of beef, medium rare, mashed potatoes and a glass of red wine.