Adventures in Antigua: Day .5 "The Rain"

This past weekend, myself, my roommate from college, and two other girls from the Spanish school went to Antigua, Guatemala. Antigua is only 6 hours from Copan Ruinas, and since we are here we figured we might as well do a little more traveling.

Antigua is a beautiful and interesting town. I was a little taken back as we drove there and ended up sitting in rush hour traffic in Guatemala City for over an hour. Definitly not what I was expecting after having spent two weeks in a town of 6,000. We finially arrived in Antigua after sunset and made the long trek to our hotel just across the street from where the bus dropped us off.

Our first night in Antigua was an adventure. After checking into our hotel rooms we wondered around the town square and looked for a place to eat dinner. I´m not sure exactly what I was expecting of Antigua, but there were a lot of really nice places to eat and some great cafes that were, of course, scattered with tourists just like us. We ended up eating in a nice cafe right on the town square. Right after we started eating, much to our dismay, the rain started. Now, I really don´t mind the rain and have come to appreciate it more and more since I´ve been here since it makes it considerably cooler, but this was a downpour. It didn´t look like it would be stopping for a while, so our group decided to make a run for it back to the hotel. The locals had the right idea and stayed close to the buildings under the awnings, but we felt brave and made our way into the streets that had then become rivers. We tried to puddle jump, but with little success. By the time we made it back to our hotel our tennis shoes were soaked as were our clothes.

By far, the best part of our night was the hot showers that were calling our names at the hotel. I was determined to take full advantage of the hot showers that were promised us and was not disappointed. The hot water was close to scalding and by the time I was done was reduced to a trickle from the shower head, but I was very content and felt clean for the first time in two weeks.

We went to bed early, 10p.m. to be exact. The music from the discoteccas and bars played on until early in the morning. Welcome to Antigua.