Guatemalan Weekend - Friday

We woke up Friday and went to get some bagels (organically grown delicious local bagels with coffee and fresh orange juice!) and decide if we were staying in town. Some of the Peace Corps people awoke for a 6am hike on the nearby volcano, which Kelly and I had decided was something we´d do next time we came to Antigua. At breakfast, Matt, Jonno, Kelly, Aaron - a returned PC volunteer who lives in Chicago now but is back in Honduras visiting, and I decided to go Lake Atitlan, a few hours away and reputedly breathtaking. We walked around town a bit, shopping in several of the artisan markets there. Guatemala is much more indigenous than Honduras, and we bought cool skirts and woven bags and other local stuff before heading out to the Lake.

So several buses and about 3 hours later, we could see the lake (check out the picture below) and hopped a little boat to take us to the town of San Pedro. We had wanted to go to San Marco b-c it´s apparently a more chill town to San Pedro´s party vibe, but that boat didn´t leave for another hour so we decided to just go to SP, even if just for the night. The boat ride at sunset was one of the most beautiful things I¨ve ever seen ... clouds everywhere, the sun turning them pink and purple, volanoes nearby, and gorgeous water. At that point I said I could have turned around right then and my vacation would have been complete.

But then we got to the town ... lots of little hotels with lakefront views, one of which we got for a whopping $3 a night (or 25 quetzals, which are about 8 to $1). The owner of the hotel offered us horses for the morning, as well as various illicit substances, delivered to our door!! We decided to forgo both for the evening and went out for dinner. The town was bizarre, we couldn´t figure out how to find all the restaurants that people on the street were recommending, until finally we took a left up a dirt path behind several buildings to another street (apparently only accessible by that sketchy path) and found tons of restaurants with names like Trippy´s and Munchie´s, all run by burnt out gringos who probably came to this town for a weekend and never left. We chose, sort of by accident, a restaurant whose name I can´t remember and ate one of the best meals of our lives. Somehow out on this lake, in the middle of nowhere, they made hamburgers, mango curry, beef medallions, and pork tenderloins that were just out of this world. We seriously could not stop talking about it the whole rest of the weekend. They also sold beers by the liter there, and after enjoying Gallo, Guatemala´s national beer, I was so full and happy.

Then we were ready to dance. A bar overlooking the water had advertised salsa lessons (and when we tried the night before to go dancing we were turned away at the door b-c the club was closing), so we showed up there expecting a huge party. Instead we were the only ones and the teacher had gone home. But we were determined to get lessons (I had salsaed before in New York and on various adventures, but Matt, Kelly and Jonno - despite frequenting many salsa parties in Honduras - didn´t really know how) so a woman agreed to teach us. She was a great dancer, but a pretty crappy teacher, and noone else in the bar was dancing, but we decided to make the most of it and "shredded the carpet" so to speak with our dancing. We stopped on our walk home to lie on a little stretch of grass at the edge of the lake, looking up at the stars, and it was quite a day!!!