Spanish School, Bolivia🏫

One fun activity to do when travelling South America is to do a Spanish School. There are loads of countries to choose from, such as Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc, but because our friends were doing one in Bolivia, we decided to join them.

Spanish School includes taking a week or more (could be five weeks if you wanted) of Spanish lessons to improve and learn the language, with a majority of people doing two weeks at a time. As we were tight on time, we only decided to do one week, although we did wish we did it for longer. When booking a Spanish School, you can decide if you want to either stay with a Spanish host and family, or just do lessons. We ended up doing just lessons, but I think for a full experience you should definitely stay with a host family, as you are forced to continue to speak Spanish rather than just in classes.

Me Gusta School
The School we went with is called Me Gusta Spanish School in Sucre. To research the classes and school, check out their website here. We can’t recommend this school enough and really wished we could have spent at least one more week here.

For this school, lessons normally start Monday and run to Friday, with weekends off. However, you can pay extra to have weekend classes if you want. As we were tight on time and wanted to make the most of the school, we ended up paying for a lesson on Sunday morning finishing on Thursday the following week. This is because we had to get to our next stop, Uyuni quite quickly, otherwise we would have been tempted to do another week. For the week (Mon-Fri) with Me Gusta, it cost 1,050 Bolivanos each.

Me Gusta is an incredible school, with locals praising it to us when we said we were going. Everyone was extremely nice, sociable and just happy to be there. When booking the classes, they do vary in price depending on what type of class you want. You can decide if you would rather have one to one lessons, private as a couple, group lessons, or big group lessons, which can be up to eight people. As there were four of us, we opted for private group lessons together. If you are solo, going with group lessons is a lot easier and a nice way to meet other people, but as a group of friends, we do think private group lessons were a lot more beneficial to us. As there were less people in a class, this meant we got more time with our teacher and forced to speak a lot more and answer questions. Before classes started we were told that we would have to have a short interview with one of the teachers to determine what level of Spanish we were at. You can say Beginner to Professional on your application, but they want to hear you speak as well. All of us did Spanish in school, so we knew the basics but we wanted to improve to the level of being able to hold a conversation with someone.

For our week, we had Raquel, who was a great teacher, so lovely and energetic. She brought great personality to our classes, making us laugh and we had an overall great time with her. She rarely spoke English, even though she was pretty good at it, which forced us to speak in Spanish the whole time.

Me Gusta Cafe
Me Gusta also has a cute cafe attached to it, that you can get really nice coffees from. Either before class or during the break, we would grab a coffee from here!

Week Itinerary
We started on Notepad 1A, and if you stay for a few weeks or pick it up quickly you get put on to the next notepad. You would only start learning the past tense after week 3, so we didn’t even touch the surface! Everyday we would have classes from 8:30am - 12:30pm, with a short break at 10:30am. We would also be given homework everyday to do for the next class. Our itinerary was the below, but it can easily change depending on how quickly you pick things up!

Sunday
As we started on Sunday, we went over what we knew and learnt more basics. We learnt how to introduce ourselves and someone else, different vocabulary and popular phrases to use in a conversation. We ended the class with learning the pronunciation of the alphabet and different animals, ending on a fun game of hangman. Each lesson had a fun interactive exercise and game to break up the intense learning, which also allowed us to test everything we had learnt!

Monday
As Monday was the first full day of school, we started the morning getting to know the other students. We did an introductory session, speaking to others in Spanish and learning fun facts about them. We then had to introduce them to the rest of the school. For us, as we had learnt this the day before, it was a pretty good way for us to practice. We then spent the day learning and identifying different masculine and feminine words, learning adjectives and descriptive words.

Tuesday
Tuesday we went straight into learning verbs and the present tense, grammar and Spanish conjunctions to help connect words and phrases into proper sentences with the correct pronouns. We then learnt present progressive words to express actions, which are currently happening and are formed using conjugating words.

Wednesday
Wednesday was a pretty hard lesson for all of us as we were learning about irregular verbs, which took the whole lesson! To end the class, we learnt the colours, shapes and descriptive words to describe yourself, your appearance, your clothes, facial features etc.

Thursday
Thursday was a pretty hectic day for, as it was our last day so Raquel wanted to go through as much as she could! We learnt more important words like numbers, months, how to identify the dates, seasons and basic words which we could use day to day!

After our lesson ended for the day, we went to Despacho de Salteñas, which is this famous Salteñas restaurant. Raquel highly recommended it to us, so we went there afterwards as a little treat!

Cooking Class
With Me Gusta, they also offer a few activities that you can do with the whole school in the evenings. This included a cooking class, Wallyball (Bolivia’s version), beer museum, pub crawl etc. We chose to do the cooking class, which cost 75 BOB each and Wallyball, which cost 10 BOB.

On Tuesday, at 6:30pm we met up with everyone at the school before walking to one of the hosts houses to cook. As a group we were making Bolivian lasagna with quinoa instead of pasta sheets and cheesy bread made out of yucca. As a cooking class, for us, it wasn’t really one where we learnt a Bolivian dish, it was more of a social cooking class, getting to know the other students and the host. Normally, you are taught how to make a Bolivian dish, like Salteñas (a delicious pastry with meat, vegetarian filling), which the week before us got to make. However, even though we didn’t learn a Bolivian dish, it was still a really fun evening! We grabbed a few drinks, played some games and it was nice getting to know everyone else. The boys also decided to do Walleyball the next evening, which was another fun activity for them to get to know everyone!

Graduation
At the end of Spanish School, you are treated with a small graduation. Your teacher says a few words and you are treated with a certificate! Really nice way to end your week!