Antigua

This morning we woke up and the first thing on the agenda was to find a different hostel. We walked around and were getting frustrated because many places had no availability and the ones that did have rooms were very expensive. Along the way, we decided to stop for coffee. They didn't have regular coffee so I decided to get a macchiato, expecting it to be like at Starbucks. What I got was the little espresso cup on the left. :) I'm not used to drinking such strong coffee so I was wired after that.

We weren't having much luck with the hostel search, so we decided to head back to The Terrace and let them know that we'd stay a second night. We were almost back when we noticed there was another hostel across the street from The Terrace called Dionisio. We asked them if they had a private room and they did for $170 quetzales. It is good that we decided to take it because when we got back to the Terrace our room had already been sold for the night. Once we got our stuff moved over, we decided to go the the local market. It is a huge market selling literally anything you could ever want. We picked up some rope (to make our own clotheslines) and some fruit.

After the market, we booked our bus trip to Managua, Nicaragua for Monday. Unfortunately it is a 15 hour bus ride to Nicaragua so we will have to leave at 4am (cost $940 quetzales or $110 USD). We then decided to do our own walking tour of the city. Antigua was colonized by the Spanish and really maintained its colonial feel with the cobblestone streets and beautiful architecture.

The city has an entirely different feel than the rest of Guatemala, you feel like you are somewhere in Europe. It's not just the architecture, the people are different too; have really embraced a more modern life style and treat tourists very differently. They also have tons of amazing restaurants! As we walk around the city, all we talk about is how great each restaurant looks and how much we want to try them all. Along with this though comes a much higher price tag for things than we have seen in the other Guatemalan cities so its been harder to remain on budget, but the city is definitely worth visiting; we really like it here.
We ended up meeting up with Alyssa (from Semuc Champey) and another girl friend that she was traveling with for drinks at The Terrace.

We met a few other people there as well and decided to all go to dinner and drinks. After walking around the city for almost an hour trying to find a place that everyone in the group would like, we finally just decided to eat at the next place we saw, which ended up being a super fancy Italian place. Alyssa and I had not planned on spending much for dinner so we were a little disappointed about this, but it was a nice place. After dinner, we went to "Cafe No Se" for drinks. We had heard about this place from a lot of people and it had been described as something out of "From Dusk til Dawn".

If you pass through the little midget door, you enter a mescal bar where there is a two shot minimum to stay in the room. I had mescal for the first time and definitely hated it (Alyssa loves it).

There was a live musician who played guitar and sang in the front room. He played his version of different American songs and made things like "No Diggity" sound like Jason Mraz (he was American but living in Guatemala). He was actually amazing. The bar was really awesome; the dark lighting with candles and the very random sort of dia de Los Muertos knicknackery created a very interesting feel.

We headed back to the hostel at around 12:00am making this our latest night out (we are so old, ugh!).

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