I’m glad that Jen from school also wanted to go to Antigua even though she would go again the following week for Good Friday. Next week is Semana Santa (Holy Week) but even this weekend there would be much celebration activities on the street we heard. My flight out from Guatemala City is on Monday so I’ll have Saturday and Sunday 2 whole days and ½ day Monday. The chicken bus with transfer at Chimaltenango was good except there was this guy who was preaching the bible. He walked back to the end of the bus after he finished talking while nobody really paid attention, sat down next to me across the aisle and all of a sudden tried to touch me. I was caught by surprise and immediately pushed his hand away and yelled “No!“ He gave me kind of a sleazy smile and I just wanted to hit him, that SOB. After that he moved and sat further back on the bus. I wasn’t scared really because there are all these people on the bus and Jen was sitting right there next to me. I was just pissed. So nothing happened until he came up on this way to get off the bus at the front. I couldn’t see him walking up from behind but he tried to touch me again! This time I was quicker in reaction, and both Jen and I hit him (probably didn’t hurt him that much) as he was walking away. We were saying “puta” and also just simply “fxxk you” and gave him the finger. He suddenly turned around and started yelling back at us as if he’s going to hit us or something. This Guatemalan man sitting behind us stood up and said something I didn’t understand but obviously backing us up so that sleaze ball just had to walk away. I thanked the guy and that was end of this little episode on the bus. All the people on the bus I’ve seen are nice so I’d say this is an isolated incident.
After about 4 hours we arrived at the main bus terminal in Antigua. It is such a different world here. The city is quite small but everything looks prettier and there are nice restaurants and even shops! A lot of cafes, travel agencies, even a few spas and I saw a Japanese fusion restaurant. I haven’t seen any shops that sell nice stuff until Antigua. The touristy atmosphere is very different than in Xela where local people actually live and work. It looks as if Antigua is for tourists and real Guatemalans don’t live here. I couldn’t imagine if I had chosen Antigua to study Spanish. Anyways I was still not feeling very well on Saturday and Jen and I just walked around the small city. There are ruins of churches where we snapped some cool pictures. There’s also a Central Parque in Antigua and we found a bench to sit down and people watch at early evening. The we started talking to these two older gentlemen sitting next to us who were in their sixties probably. One of them knew some English so it helped but we were chatting in Spanish mostly. We talked about Hong Kong (the English speaker lived there for a few months long long time ago) and their families here etc etc. They were very friendly and nice, and very interested in what we are doing there. We chatted probably for 45 min with them and had a great conversation and even exchanged email addresses at the end. It was fun! After that we booked our tour for a volcano hike for early 6am departure the next morning. We were quite tired after dinner and went to bed pretty early. No partying for us but I’m sure there are plenty of places for that in Antigua.
