Day 2- Guatemala City and Antigua

We got up early and attended a session at the Guatemala City temple.  A lot of the temple workers are serving missions there from the United States, so it was nice to have some English speakers to help me.  I know very little Spanish, so I relied on Tyler a lot.

After the temple, we headed to the city of Antigua.  It is about an hour away and made for tourists.  On the way there, we noticed a personalized bus just for me!

Buses are a huge source for transportation.  They deck their buses out with crazy colors and nice grills. They also have tons of yellow school buses as well.

This is a street right when we entered the city of Antigua.  It got very busy and crowded just down the way.


I got to experience my first taste of the markets here.  Tyler had to brush up on his bargaining skills and also get an idea of what prices things were going for.  We ran into several missionaries here.

Here is one of the Catholic cathedrals:



Here is the inside:



We toured some old ruins by the cathedral.



On the roof.  These bushes were found in each corner.



After Antigua, we headed out to stay the night in the town of Retalhuleu.  Our three hour drive ended up being five, mostly in the dark.  The driving was the most scariest thing in my life.  I said a constant prayer and had white knuckles the whole way.  Where do I begin???  The roads are very mountainous--up, down, and curvy.  Hitchhiking in the back of pickups and buses are the common way of transportation.  There were people always on the sides of the narrow roads waiting for buses or walking.  Stray dogs were a common site as well.  Vehicles would be broken down in the middle of the road or buses stopped to pick up/drop off people.  There are no passing laws, so people pass whenever they want.  You would often have to make an imaginary 3rd lane so you wouldn't get hit with the oncoming traffic.  There was no warnings of road construction, except for boulders and small signs in the road to move you over to the next lane.  There were many landslides in the area and some parts of the roads were washed out.  Pot holes and bumpy and uneven roads were common.  So driving at night made all of these unexpected things in front of us even harder to see.  Many of the trucks did not have back lights either, which caused some surprises.  Speed bumps are the common things in each village.  Villages came often, which means speed bumps came often, and sometimes camouflaged.  People were always out on the side of the roads or by the speed bumps trying to sell the littlest things. 

We made it into the town where we were staying and found out that our hotel reservations were not fulfilled.  Luckily we found a nice place just down the way.