Beautiful beautiful Antigua

Antigua. A stunning colonial city complete with parks and crumbling ruins of beautiful old churches, surrounded by active volcanoes. An extremely picturesque place.

I again found myself alone in Antigua, with Roz having gone on to the lake (my next destination) and Carlie going to school to improve her already impressive Spanish skills. Though I would much prefer to travel with people, being alone does mean I walk more, drink less and get forced to practice my Spanish. Today for example I learnt the words for glue (pegamento) and shoe (zapato) when I discovered my trusty sneakers were beginning to fall apart. Off to the hardware store I went where a very interesting conversation in Spanglish followed. I walked out with superglue though – success!

I spent most of the time exploring by foot (in thongs waiting for the glue to dry on my shoes) walking precariously over the cobblestoned uneven roads. The shops and restaurants are all hidden away in the buildings on the street, so I would constantly stop to peer in.

(This is the hill I walked up to get photos of the city)

(Shops – the blue shop is a bank!)

(Tiny mosaic tile on the sidewalk to indicate motorbike parking)

(Guatemalan long distance buses or ‘chicken buses’)

There are so many ruins of churches here that I can’t go through them all. Many of them were destroyed by earthquakes and have been left as they fell. I did explore the church of San Francisco though, with the hall of miracles – a room dedicated to the healing miracles performed by a local saint. On the walls hang crutches and braces etc of people who have been healed by his miracles.

Antigua is the perfect place to sit, get a coffee and watch the world go by. So that’s what I did. I watched people sitting in Central Parque, I wandered into the cultural centre and looked at a stunning photo exhibit of Central American people (that’s about all I could gather as it was all in Spanish) and I walked up the side of a hill to see the view of the city.