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Articles Tagged ‘Guatemala City’

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Bloody Students

Monday, December 12th, 2005

Antigua

Tuesday morning and it’s back to school for me, but not much changes. I’m still the poor student who can’t manage to get to class on time, do my homework properly or dedicate myself to my studies. Instead I spend four days prioritising my social life over study. On many of these nights we seem to end up at a ‘ladies night’ somewhere in town. This involves the ladies paying next to nothing for their drinks while the men pay through the nose for them, just so they can letch over the women. Thankfully I have Maria and Haley topping up my rum and cokes under the table all night so I get the best of both worlds, free drink and letching. It’s no wonder school the next morning is always such a struggle and my spanish has improved very little, though even a little is an improvement.

On the last day of school I go to Guatemala City with my teacher Edy, where we wander around the main square taking in El Presidente’s big bastard palace and the central cathedral. It was nice to revisit this city and see a different side to it, one that’s not so shitty and scarey as the first time I was passing through it a week earlier. However, as with all the big catholic cathedrals I’ve seen over here, it seems to involve plastering the place with a vulgar display of wealth, while poor people with fuck all to their names faithfully worship at the altar. What’s wrong with this picture?!

After spending nine days in Antigua I decide it’s time to move on. Not through boredom of the place, it’s somewhere I could settle for much longer, but the pressure of time to get up to Mexico for xmas means I should push on to Lake Atitlan, supposed to be one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, three hours west of Antigua.

Posted in Central America, Guatemala, Travel | No Comments »

Hola Gringos

Sunday, December 4th, 2005

On wednesday I took a tour from Livingston which involved following a couple of local boys around the town, through the graveyard, which was as unexciting as it sounds (I mean it was really dead), and out through the surrounding local area to soak up the local ´culture.´ The only high point of this was having a small child saying ´Hola gringos´ (I don´t think he realised it was an insult but I´m sure his parents would be proud) and then watching one of the young german girls on the tour slip over in the mud and ruin her pristine skirt – you have to take your laughs where you can get them!

Then we all climbed into a hand-carved canoe for a paddle up the river. This might sound nice to you but I spent the whole time shitting it thinking we were going to roll over, and wondered where the hell we could climb out if it did as the river was lined with mangroves. Miraculously, despite how unstable we were, we made it safely, that was an experience I didn´t care to repeat. Thankfully we had a nice walk along the Caribbean beach to recover before getting to Siete Altares (seven alters) waterfalls, which was what I´d taken the tour for. However as we clapped eyes on it we soon realised it was not all it could be. There was a pool of water, but no water falling down it and I was pleased to find that Tim and Stu, two guys from England, were even more cynical about the whole experience than I was, which makes a nice change. Complimentary drinks afterwards involved sharing some bottles of barely brewed homebrew piss, so all in all it was pretty poor, but I went out in the evening with Tim and Stu and rounded the day off on a higher (!) note.

Carribean coast, Livingston

Thursday came and it was time to leave Livingston, so I sat chatting with a local rasta dude by the dock waiting for the boat. He was the soundest local I´d met in Livingston and he told me about the history of the area, the politics and the (alleged) drug smuggling yacht owners anchored out in the bay – quite an eye-opening hour of conversation that took in guns, drugs and corrupt politicians. The return journey down the Rio Dulce was quite different to the inbound journey as it was bright and sunny, and almost bumped me off the front of the boat when we hit the wake of another boat.

The following couple of days were pretty quiet, staying down in Rio Dulce struggling to get up in time to catch the bus in the morning. I finally made it at 6am on saturday and headed for Guatemala city. This city is frankly quite a polluted shithole and not somewhere to hang around. Thanks to a nice man named Omar and his brother-in-law they gave me a ride across town to find the bus to Antigua. If it wasn´t for them I think I´d still be lost in Guatemala City, or worse! Omar found me the right chicken bus so I bid farewell and headed to Antigua to a soundtrack of the drivers favourite mambolatinogabba tunes, which made the knee in my face rather more bearable.

I knew we´d hit Antigua as soon as we came round the corner, it´s such a beautiful spanish colonial town you can´t help but love it. I found the hostel, met some people and went out to have drinks watching the sunset over the volcanoes, followed by food and then beers in an Irish bar, as you do when in Guatemala. I think I´ll settle here for a while 🙂

Posted in Central America, Guatemala, Travel | 4 Comments »