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Published: March 5th 2009
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Antigua at night
Its great to able to walk around in the dark again without a curfew Xmas is coming and the goose is getting fat
We decided that with xmas coming up we wanted to be somewhere not too far from the beaten tourist path and chose Antigua as we wanted to get as close to an authentic Xmas dinner as possible, these things become increasingly important when you eat beans and egg three times a day. We also arranged to meet up with Benj and Arlene as they were feeling the same way too. Xmas is important in Central america too but is different to back home - it being hot and sunny being a clear difference for us.
Antigua is a little like disney world, it's pastel coloured buildings, cobbled streets, coffee, icecream and waffle shops, expensive yet beautiful hotels and restaurants make it a strange place to arrive and leave.
Yet Antigua also has a dual personality like the rest of Guatelmala, the hectic foodhall of the municipal market where you can eat at concrete tables, in a huge noisy concrete hall of about 50 make shift diners is a world away from the 50 pounds a head restaurant round the corner.
Antigua is a place of ruins caused
by an earthquake about 200 odd years ago, we don't think they know what to do with them but it gives the place a feeling of a giant museum that people live in. It feels a bit artificial with mainly Americans hanging out learning spanish and no real locals living there, but we were glad for the opportunity to wander about without being shot or murdered during the evening and not being under the normal curfew of a couple of hours after dark.
We found a nice hostel - the yellow house that had private double rooms with TV's showing Premiership football - so Marcel could catch up with all the Xmas games (poor Karen).
Marcel has seen more premiership games this season than when he had sky TV, there are two games shown on saturday and sunday and all the european games midweek. The hostel also provided a really nice breakfast - not an the scale of the one in Mexico but enough to keep us going for most the day.
Xmas day was spent in an english themed pub - the first and only one we have been in so far, as it served
an approximation of Xmas dinner and had a veggie option too. A good time was had by all, with cocktails aplently to wash down the food (Apart from Karen who had discovered she had picked up the Giardia parasite and was on medication that sent her wee bright tango orange).
One thing that is hard to get used to is the constant letting off of giant bangers, you can be quietly sitting in the park and the next thing you know is some bugger has chucked a huge banger a few feet away from you that sends your choccy milk you were drinking over everyone you were chatting to. Needless to say at Xmas this practice is multiplied by a thousandfold and at the stroke of midnight the town sounded like Beiruit during the eighties accompanied by loads of cheap rockets shooting into the sky.
We ate in the market food hall very well (at first a little nervous as the only westerners) later in the week. A huge plate of veggie's, a 'meat' meal for marcel, tortilla's and a coke (refresco) cost us a total of 2 pounds sterling. We were happy and everyone seemed happy that
we were there.
There's also a massive clothes section of the market with new and second hand clothes from America (maybe donated for charity who knows?) but it's art student paradise and we enjoyed it too! 80's shell suits, evening dinner dressess and Lakers basketball tops (if only our rucksack was a tardis). We found another bit of the market full of clothes made in Guatemala for export to the US and Europe too. Massimo t-shirts for 50p, Rolling Stones official concert t-shirts for 50p.
It is Strange shopping in a guatemalan market as next to this is someone is chopping up coconut and then someone selling small clay biscuit fired dishes in a jummble of all sorts of trade.
All the food and drink we have eaten so far on this trip has been fine and good, with no stomach problems as yet (touch wood), it doesn't really matter where you eat (with obvious exceptions) as long as you stick to local food and not try and eat the things we normally eat at home, we think the standards of hygiene (water permitting) are probably better than some places back in the UK,there is a sense of pride
The central park in the evening
If only you could hear the bloomin bangers!! in the hygiene of the food sellers.
Marcel has found a favorite meal in Antigua - Costilla de Cerdo or pork ribs which he was addicted to for a while in Antigua,mmm tasty.
We got wind of a garage sale during our stay in Antigua and popped along, again we were cursing the fact we only had rucksacks - loads of old handmade furniture, religous and tribal objects, old saddles and loads of lovely items being sold at ridiculously low prices by a German fella who had enough and wanted a clearout - gutted! We could have filled a house out back home.
We also decided to go on a trip to an active volcano (Pacaya) and after a long slog uphill and up and across lava fields we reached the fresh Lava.
Now back home this sort of thing would never happen, Health and Safety would have shut this operation down years ago - you can't imagine the heat and the brittleness of the surface you are standing on, you are constantly thinking 'hang on a minute, about an inch under my feet (your shoes start to melt after a while) is molten lava and everything
is making cracking noises when I step on it - this is dodgy'. The most surprising thing is the noise lava makes as it rushes past you down hill - it is alive, cracking and popping along moving like a river. This was the first of many natural phenomena we have seen that makes you respect the forces of nature - this stuff would dissolve you whole in less than a minute if you fell in (and you nearly do with all the jostling with other tourists wanting take pictures).
We made a visit to the small but interesting modern art gallery in Antigua which had work by Contemporary Central American artists, there was a great film of leaf cutter ants carrying flags from around the world which they had cut into small managable shapes and were taking them back to their hill/nest. The camera was fixed in one place and the ants passed through the frame, really enjoyed it. We also visited a contomporary design showroom which focused on producing furniture from local woods. There was some seriously heavy (as in weight) furniture in there, but also some really amazing craftmanship.
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