Guatemalan weekend - Thursday

It´s hard to believe how much stuff we packed into one weekend, but we teachers can make it count!! Kelly and I got to leave school early on Thursday b-c the other teachers wanted to decorate for the big Kids´ Day on Friday, so we got to get out of town a little bit earlier. That was a good thing b-c leaving Ocotepeque at 1pm, we bused to the Guat. border, then taxied to the other side of the border, then taxied from the G. side of the border to a town called Esquipulas, then bused (on a fancy, airplane-seat bus) to Guat. City, then bused to Antigua, arriving at 930pm!!! When we got there, we went looking for an internet cafe b-c our friends from Ocotepeque (who had been in Guat. City for the US soccer game) had arrived already and we needed to find out where they were staying. We had picked a back-up emergency meeting place, a bar called the Mono Loco, so Kelly and I found our way there, we thought to email, but instead Matt was there waiting for us so we got to go to the hotel and meet everybody else for happy hour at 10pm!!! Everybody else included about a dozen Peace Corps volunteers, some of whom we met earlier in the week, and all of whom were lots of fun. Then much drinking and an unsuccessful attempt to go salsa dancing pretty much ended the night.

Antigua is an interesting town ... much more like a town than a city b-c the buildings are all one-story, in fact we almost didn´t get off the bus b-c it didn´t look like a big enough city! The architecture is very Spanish, and everything is painted bright colors, like in Puerto Rico, and the streets are all cobblestoned and cool. There´s anything you could need there, including dry cleaning and bagels. But, there are also TONS of gringos, so much so that in asking directions to the bar of 4 or 5 different people we didn´t speak a word of Spanish. A lot of people hate it for that reason --- I don´t think I could hate it b-c it´s really beautiful, but it´s definitely touristy and not as authentic as many of the places we´ve seen so far.