Good Times- Guatemala

We spent 4 nights in Guatemala- one night in Quetzaltanengo (Xela) and 3 in and around Guatemala a City.

We arrived in Xela in the evening and wandered around the city center for quite a while before stumbling upon the Hostel San Andres. Little did we know that we had arrived to one of the more festive hostels in town. No sooner had we returned from an early dinner were we invited for some drinks and conversation with the hostel owners and their friends. One thing led to another and before we knew it we were all drunk singing "welcome to the Hotel San Andres," I with my trusty guitar and Jacob piping along with his Harmonica. Jacob passed out a little early that evening and I spent the night jamming with an El Salvadoran guy who also played guitar.

By the afternoon, we had sluffed off our hang overs enough to catch a bus to Guatemala City. There we met Fernando, a friend I met at CISV camp last summer in Finland. Fer works in the office of his family´s funeral home company. He kindly offered us some of the best whitebread/American cheese sandwiches we had ever tasted. That evening we went to Antigua Guatemala, a small town about 30 minutes from the capital. Antigua is a beautiful town full of buildings preserved from the colonial Spanish era. It is so beautiful that it is now overrun by tourists, travellers, and language school dropouts. Mas gringos que gente, se dice. We stayed the night at a place called "Jungle Party" and then headed to Fers house on the big lake outside of Guatemala the next day. We ate more in those 2 days then we had in the last month. They just kept feeding and feeding us- spaghetti, tamales, chichuron, frijoles, tortilla. We were stuffed. The last night in Guatemala we stayed at hotel near the bus station in order to make an early exit to El Salvador. At five in the morning we were awakened by the sound of a massive traffic jam outside of our room. Our hotel was in the middle of the biggest market in Guatemala City and things get started early there!

Although things got started early we didn`t we did not manage to get on a bus until 12. However while we were waiting in the bus station we saw another Pooh. Here I am pretending to look at a poster of Guatemala while Jacob sneaks a picture of me next to the Pooh bag.

Oaxaca and San Cristobal

Oaxaca
The other half of our trip to Oaxaca was much calmer than our adventures with the thorns. The first night that we arrived we stayed in hostel for the first time. It was nice to meet some other travelers. We met an Australian guy who had been living in Toronto only a few blocks from where Mark had been living. Small world. However, sleeping in a room with 6 other people was not really our style and we found a place cheaper for the next nights. This picture is what we could see off of the roof deck of our new hotel. Not the most interesting but we spent some time up there playing music and reading.
The Plaza in Oaxaca is one of the best that we had seen. No traffic was allowed and there were a lot of restaurants around the edges to sit and have a beer or coffee. And since neither of us drink coffee we had a beer and some peanuts.
We hardly saw any signs of the general strike that had happened the summer. At least not in the places that we were going. There seemed to be some extra guards on the plaza and some movable barricades. See the post Mark, Jacob and Jorge vs los espinos for more about our adventures in Oaxaca

San Cristobal de las Casas-Home of the Matrimonial Bed.
When we were looking for hotels, we found lots of signs here that advertised the Matrimonial bed for cheaper than the other rooms. We weren’t really sure what that meant but we found a cheap hotel with out one so we never found out.
It was a pretty nice town. There were a lot of craft markets and people trying to sell blankets and bracelets on the street. We went to a museum of Mayan traditional medicine that was really interesting. It had the poster on the right that we liked a lot. We went to the museum of some Dutch explorers who had studied the indigenous peoples of the area that was a little strange because only in half the rooms was anything labeled but in the half that was labeled there were really intricate descriptions.

This was our last stop in Mexico next stop Guatemala.

Problems Posting

Dear esteemed blog readers. I apologize for not updating the blog recently. I have actually tried twice to post about our other adventures in Oaxaca and Chiapas but once the computer I was using restarted and I lost it and another time I was using someones personal computer when the interet stopped working. However we have crossed many borders and have many stories to tell and will hopefully have them up shortly.