Antigua - picture perfect

Antigua is the hotspot for tourism in Guatemala. It's a UNESCO world heritage site, and it's packed full of language schools. So we thought it would be easy to find. But it turns out that they've rerouted the (very new, nicely paved) highway *around* Antigua, and not put up any signs!! You actually need to exit at a different city, drive through that city, and arrive at Antigua. And there are no signs!!!! I guess most people don't drive themselves here, but still!!

Once we found it, we liked it - well, sort of. It's amazingly touristy, and pretty expensive. But so lovely!! Every view is just perfect, cobblestone streets lined with brightly painted colonial-style houses. Little shops selling marzipan animals and cappuccinos. It was charming. We unfortunately ended up staying in a parqueo, which is a gravel lot surrounded by big cement walls with razor wire on top, but we spent all of our awake minutes out in the city, so it didn't really matter.

We of course ran into our friends Linda and Maggie, which was nice - it's funny how we keep running into them, even though we're not planning to. I guess we're just walking the same path through Guatemala.

We decided to mail some packages home from here, before we went on our volcano walk. What a saga!!!! First, all the DHL-type shipping places had closed their offices in the past year or so, so we trooped around town looking for all of them, only to be told they were closed. We finally find the regular mail place, but they don't have any boxes we could use to pack our stuff in. Next door, at the Dispensa Familiar (kind of a cheap supermarket), they had a pile of boxes as high as my shoulder - but we were only allowed to take *one*. Go figure. So we took our box back to the post office, and tore it into pieces and wrapped each bundle of stuff in pieces of cardboard and packing tape (and now we're hurrying because the volcano walk leaves soon), and wrote the addresses on them, and took them up to the counter. Where the lady tells us we have to unwrap them so she can see what's in them. She watched us wrap them from a few feet away!! It took at least 30 minutes!!! Anyhow, the packages got totally covered in stamps and sent off, and we hope they arrive!!!

We dashed off to our volcano walk. The woman at the tourist office told us to follow another woman to our bus. We followed her a few blocks, and she stopped at a little tienda and went inside. Another woman came out, and told us to follow her. She dropped us off on a street corner, and told us to follow another guy. We thought we were in a James Bond movie!! But we got to the bus, and drove to the volcano, and the pictures say it all here. It was HOT!!!! I thought I was going to get cooked by the lava.