Day 2

By Madeleine
Today we all went to Antigua. Antigua was the capital of Guatemala before Guatemala City. The capital was moved to Guatemala City in the 1970's because of a big earthquake. We all drove to Antigua in a big van. When we got there we ran into these two strangers from the Canadian Navy, and they just followed us around the whole day because they didn't know where they were going either. Then we ran into this Guatemalan girl named Mariealle, who lives  in Antigua and who speaks English really well, and she asked us if we wanted her to go with us up the mountain that we were about to climb. I think she was worried for us because we had no idea where we were going, and our Spanish isn't very good. So she showed us the mountain, and then afterward offered to show us around the rest of Antigua. We saw the ruins from the earthquake, we saw many churches, we saw the library which was just a series of open courtyards, we went into two markets, and bought headbands. The worst part of the trip was the very poor indigenous people, walking around trying to sell us things. It was so hard to say no to them, especially  because many of them were children whose families had sent them to Antigua for the day. Our Spanish really improved though because we talked with a lot of them, along with Mariealle, and other people in the park!