I’m not going to lie… The closer I got to the airport this morning, the more nervous I became and the more apprehensive I felt towards the idea of traveling in a completely unfamiliar setting and at some points, by myself. And then I got here. Pictures cannot describe the beauty and mystique of Antigua, even on an overcast crap weather day like today. Every doubt I had about attempting to travel for the next five weeks, with one bag of clothes and a comprehension of Spanish that is borderline nonexistent, was completely erased the moment I walked to the roof of my home for the next few days.
My friends and I spent our first hours in Antigua tracking down a good place to eat and checking out what felt like a vast majority of the hostels in the city. Â On a few occasions owners of the hostels would try to sell us on rooms that were obviously not going to work for our five person crew, like the room that had four twin beds…. Â When asked what we were supposed to do we were told two of us could share… Â We all looked at each other and could not hold back the laughter. Â Granted that was probably a rude response to her offer, but you have to realize we are talking about five full grown men here, and we are talking about the smallest “twin size” beds I have ever seen. Â Eventually we found a room at Casa Rustica right in the heart of downtown Antigua. Â This hostel was next to the highly recommended Black Cat Hostel but they offered us our own room for only $8 a person for tonight. Â There will, however, be some bed sharing going on, but this time those beds will be queen sized!
We spent the rest of the afternoon touring the city on our own and planning out our schedules for the next few days. Â Unfortunately, Volcan De Pacaya is still closed due to the eruption last week, so I’ll have to try and make it back to this area before I leave Central America if I want to hike it. Â Here are a few more photos from the day.
Women selling fruit in the Antigua Market
Pirated DVDs in the Antigua market, they had everything you could think of!
A fruit new to me, the Rambutan
A row of Chicken busses. This wasn’t even a quarter of the busses in this lot.
Believe it or not, this is the outside portion of the McDonalds in Antigua. The inside was just as nice.
Parakeets for sale in the Antigua Market, lots of them…
Ted Nelson
Good post. Just an FYI, your email notification of this post is not working. It only provided part of the first paragraph and did not provide a link to the whole story. I had to manually visit your blog to read the whole article and see the pics.
Have fun,
Matt
Hey Ted,
First off, thanks for reading. I am still getting some kinks worked out with the site itself and now I see I need to fix the mail notification too. It is a bit tedious as internet here isn’t the best. Hopefully I’ll have that fixed by the end of the week but I appreciate you letting me know because I might have missed that for awhile. Don’t be surprised if some of the posts (like the one yesterday) that I already have up change here and there because I am still figuring a few things out. Thanks again for reading.
Matt
danielle steiner
did you try the fruit!?
Matt
Not the rambutan but I’ve tried some of the other fruit. So fresh! I’ll try the Rambutan at Lake Atitlan hopefully, I just didn’t really have a chance here.