Antigua

This weekend, CJ and I went to Antigua, whichw as very lovely and intersting. It´s an old colonial city and there were many churches and buildings with the type of archetecture you´d expect in an old colonial city. The streets were cobblestone, at least in the majority of the city, and it´s very clean and touristy compared to the rest of Guatemala. There aren´t stray dogs wandering around, and people don´t come up to you in restaurants trying to sell you things (though they certainly do on the streets!) and many people speak English.
We stayed in a nice hotel, Casa del Parque, which was about a block from the central square. It had very nice landscaping, and a nice pool which unfortunatley wasn´t heated. It had nice big rooms with big windows, comfortable beds, and bizarrely small (NYC style) bathrooms with only a standing shower stall (typical for Guatemala) and the toilet less than two feet away. They folded the towels like swans, which CJ liked and had a very good breakfast included in the price of the room.
When we got in on Friday night it was raining, and we´d sat in traffic for a long time in another city near to Antigua, so it was already dark by the time we arrived. It took awhile for us to get checked in because they had a hard time scanning my card, which was annoying and frustrating. After we put our things in the room, we walked over the main street of restaurants and went to a decent tex-mex place called fridas. We had excellent veggie tacos and some pretty good nachos that CJ loved and kept going on about, though she was slightly less impressed after I pointed out that they had guacamole on them (which she always whines about) which goes to show the legitimacy of her complaints about things like that.
After we ate, we walked back to the hotel, showered and went to bed.
On Saturday morning, we were woken up at 6:00 by a family from El Salvador who decided that 6:00 was the perfect time to go to the pool and sing and talk loudly, despite the fact that the pool opens at 9:00 am. It never ceases to amaze me how inconsderiate and selfish a lot of people are. I mean, if you really, really want go swimming at 6:00 in the morning, for God´s sake, keep your mouth shut! Singing???
The upside was that CJ and I got a lot done very early in the day. We read, had breakfast, and went out to walk around the city. We walked around the parqye central, visited a couple of churches and went to the market, and swam in the pool. We and lunch at a place called Monoloco which caters to tourists (their menus are entierly in English) and CJ had a really, really good hummus sandwich. She chose it but was less impressed than I was with the outcome. It was really, really good. We bought some gifts for people at the market in the afternoon, and had dinner at Fridas again, at CJ´s requst. This time she had encheladas in mole sauce .

We fell asleep early on Saturday night (thanks to our wonderful friends in the pool).

On Sunday, we got up, ate breakfast, I took CJ swimming, and then we went out, walked around the city a bit, and got a bit of lunch at Monoloco again, and had nachos. Then we went for a coffee at a little coffee shop and went to a couple of bookstores in the neighborhood. CJ spent pretty much the whole day after about 12:00 being a huge, rude pain. At 3:00 the shuttle came to take us back to Xela.

The first part of the shuttle ride was very nice, because there were only four of us in the shuttle (a fifteen passenger van). About and hour into the trip, however, we stopped at a random gas station in the middle of nowhere where there was another shuttle from the same company, as well as another car apparently also belonging to the same company. They did a big confusing thing where they combined and re-routed some of the vehicles because there werne´t as many people as they were expecting or something, and we ended up with our shuttle totally full for the rest of the way home. We got home around 7:00 and were quite tired. We unpacked, and got things ready for the following morning and went to bed relatively early.

The pictures: the pictures above are all from antigua this weekend. On is CJ at the pool, others are night time pictures she took around the city. There are also a couple of her in the mexican restaurant, and a day time one that she took of herself in monoloco, and a picture she took of one of the table signs there, for who knows what reason.