A Day Downtown

In 2021, when Duolingo was hosting Zoom meetings, I joined a three month series of classes designed to bring you from beginner level to intermediate level Spanish. It was an interesting challenge that began with 24 online students that were paired up for the purposes of completing some of the assignments. In addition, we were required to access daily and weekly assignments through Google classroom and share and participate in the group chat on Telegram. 

Every day we were given resources to explore and assignments to complete and then every Sunday the class would meet for an hour and a half. A section of the class was spent reading stories in Spanish with the help of a native speaker. This is how I met Iris as she would often assist with this part. It was a lot of work and students were dropping like flies. By the end of the 3 months, we were down to only eight. 

So today the plan was to meet Ismar, the coach and host of that three month challenge. As it turns out, I was the first of his students that he had ever met in person. Pretty cool.

Ismar had chosen a traditional Mayan restaurant in downtown Guatemala City. Afterwards, he suggested to take a walk to see the Palacio Nacional.

Palacio Nacional

Originally, the city's prison and city hall were located at this spot, but they were destroyed by the earthquakes of 1917-18. The National Palace was constructed during the government of General Jorge Ubico and completed in 1943.

Since it had been years since Ismar or Iris had been inside and Charlie had never been, we decided to take the tour. We had to go through security which we found out later was due to the newly elected president, unlike his predecessors, choosing to have his and his vice president's office in the palace. Most Guatemaltecos thought that was pretty cool.

Once inside we learned the palace was built of concrete with brick covered in green stone. There are two water fountains on the second floor which we were told were used to muffle sensitive conversations. Galvez Suarez painted the mural below depicting the country's history from colonialism to independence.

Mural by Galvez Suarez

Don Quixote with Sancho Panchez mural

The palace also boasted a reception room where the signing of the peace accord occurred that ended the Guatemalan Civil War. The ballroom below is kilometer zero for the country and also boasts excellent acoustics.

Balcony above the ballroom

Coincidentally there was a concert planned that evening. Our tour caught them practicing in the hallway.

We were invited to return for the concert to check out the acoustics for ourselves, which we did. As it turns out, also attending and sitting a few rows in front of us was the president of Guatemala. How cool is that?

By the time the concert ended it was dark and we were able to get pretty night time shots of the palace and the church across the square.

Considering everything beyond lunch was unplanned the day turned out to be pretty cool!

A dopo!