Antigua, 2015

Once again I have found myself in Antigua Guatemala.  This time around, I did a walk through the local market, avoiding most of the tourist stalls and winding my way through the small stalls and glancing at what the local had for sale.

If I even slowed down in my walk, the vendor I was in front of immediately started to talk in Spanish about what they had and hoe great their prices were, and as I moved along, this chant was passed from place to place.  The thing that always hits me in looking at these many small stores is the dichotomy between both how similar they all are and at the same time how different they are.  There are stalls that virtually the same, the same brands and articles and colours that can make you think there is no difference between them, and a slow blending as you move and the next few stalls carry more and more different things so that by the time you have passed fifteen places, the stall has totally different stock, but the echoes of the first one remain, and it all somehow blends.

For some reason, I was reluctant to haul out my camera, and this time I settled for watching the people and things around me with trying to capture it to share the visuals.  The whole place was busier than I have seen before, with a lot of foot traffic during the day and a steady stream of vehicles in the late afternoon.  There was a celebration issuing from a large church, I am unsure as to what was going on, but it was less of a religious feel than a celebration, and a local said it was about the founding of the church.  It made for crowded roads and hordes of people in a good mood.

Earlier I had parked my butt on a park bench, enjoying the day and reading a book.  A local came to share the bench, and we began to talk.

Two hours later we switched to a bench in the shade and continued.

He was only five years younger than me, and curious about Canada, the differences between canada and the USA, and in how I saw Guatemala.  He seemed to be quite interested in the world at large even if he had never traveled outside of Guatemala, and was just beginning to learning about Canada.  That is not all that we talked about, and the whole range included human rights, gay marriage, violence, the military and veterans, children and family, religion and our over all view of the world.

As my way was blocked by the stream of people heading to the church, I started to ask three other tourists what they were doing.  A long conversation evolved out of that as they were on a missionary journey that would take them to at least two more continents, and they were curious about my view on god and religion, so for the second time that afternoon, I ended up in a talk about what I believe and a bit of it was how my belief has changed.  I will not go into the discussion at this time, but it was both pleasant and not heated. 

All in all an interesting day in Antigua, and although I am heading on to San Pedro, I will be looking forward to returning here again.