Guatecate

I made it to Guatemala! I'm so glad to be here, it's a lot different from Costa Rica and reminds me of Mexico. Me and Lauren's first stop was Guatemala City which was very commercialized, lots of fast food joints, malls, and American companies. The guy we stayed with, Ricardo, was very friendly and everything worked out perfectly with him. He works for Frito Lay and when I asked about his wife, he told us they were kind of separated and were probably going to get a divorce. So we could tell he was pretty lonely and I was glad we were there to give him some entertainment. The first night he took us on a night tour around Guatemala City when there weren't a lot of people and traffic. We went up to this hilltop lookout too so we could see the city from above. Then he took us out to dinner at a Mexican place. He was so nice and couldn't stop talking about traveling, American culture, Guatemalan people, etc. We stayed two nights there and were sad to leave him. Our first couch surfing experience was a huge success, both Ricardo and Lauren and I were glad everything worked out.

After we left Ricardo, we came to Antigua, which we heard was super touristy but a point of departure for the other places we want to visit. It's not that touristy here (we were prepared for your typical ignorant, embarrassing gringos), so we were pleasantly surprised to see mainly a lot of Europeans who were there taking classes at the many Spanish schools here. The cobblestoned streets, antique ruins, horse carts and costumed indigenous people selling any item you can imagine on the street all reminded me of San Cristobol in Mexico or Trinidad, Cuba. We've just been in awe walking around the town, with all of the shops, restaurants, and people to gawk at, it's been quite entertaining. We walked through a pretty big market yesterday, but it wasn't as big as the one I went to with my mom in San Jose. While meandering around today, we happend upon a group of elementary school aged kids having band practice on the street. They were all girls (except for one boy playing a drum, strange) and were quite good, accompanied by some dancing and baton-twirling-very impressive. Today we walked up Cerro de la Cruz, a little hill with a great view of the city at the top. There used to be a lot of robberies on that trail so they started having Antigua tourism police acompanying tourists twice daily up there. So we went to their office to potentially meet up with other tourists to do the walk up there, but there were no others so Lauren and I were personally escorted by both a male and female police officer on the 45 minute or so walk to the look out. The officers were pretty chummy with each other and made it clear this was not their idea of a fun little walk, so Lauren and I set the pace and walked out ahead of them. We had to stop multiple times to wait for them to catch up, but at the end of the day, it was nice to feel a little important and have our own little police escort service with us.

There's a volcano that is close by that we were thinking of hiking, but we're kind of volcano-ed out, having spent many weeks doing programs that involved volcanoes in Costa Rica. So we're going to give ourselves a little time before we attack any more of them here in Guatemala. For now, me and Lauren are telling ourselves we're on vacation and we don't need to push ourselves too much, haha. Tomorrow we're off to Lake Atitlan, which has various little towns surrounding it as well as volcanoes, of course.