Robb: 0 Clown: 1

Our week in San Pedro went by quickly of course.  Our last day we took a hike up to what is called "Indian Nose", due to the fact that if you kind of squint the top of the mountains kind of sort of look like the profile of a person, and the peak is on the nose part.  We took a pickup to through the nearby town of San Juan, and started the hike up through a coffee plantation.  From our first overview we could see that, typical of many towns down here, the town is fairly ordinary and relatively poor, except for a state of the art pristine soccer field.  The people down here love their soccer, I cannot emphasize that point enough.

Anyway, the hike was typically harder than expected, but luckily our guide was the elderly gardener from our school so he didn´t push us too hard.  The view from the top was fantastic, overlooking the entire lake.  From there we hiked down the other side to another village that was having market day, which we got to walk around.  We had some kids approach us just to talk, and happily they didn´t try and pull out my arm hairs this time which was a special treat for me.

From here we got in the back of another pickup which took us down the hill again back to town.  So far I´ve only been in pickups that we hired especially for whatever group I was with, but this time we just piled into the back of a regular service one, which meant that they were going to take every last person that was willing to climb on.  So as we are making our way down this super steep and windy mountain road, in addition to several large bags of produce, we had 17 people and at least one chicken standing in the back holding on to the rails and each other for dear life.  The grandma standing in front of me was only about four feet tall so at least I had a little arm room above her.  (The benefits of being tall here are few, but are nice when they work out.)  The people here do not have the same ideas about personal space and are not shy about cramming up to other people when necessary, and in this case it was certainly necessary.  Luckily our driver was very considerate and took the road down at a slow enough speed that no one was lost along the way.

That night as we were heading to dinner there was a power outage in town.  Fortunately all the restaurants cook with gas, so with few exceptions everyone was operating in candlelight.  It was a memorable farewell to town.

From there we took a bus to Antigua, which was notable only for the fact that our driver kept falling asleep as he drove.  Luckily when he would doze he would just slow down, so other than a few people on bicycles passing us (on the freeway!), we arrived without injury to Antigua.  We jumped around to a couple of hotels, and ran into several groups of people we´d met in other places, but since we are intending to return to Antigua later in the trip we didn´t really do much but eat and sleep and look at ruins of churches.  (There is a ruin of an old church like every three blocks, I kid you not.)  I did get a $2 haircut from a local barber, which is on one hand pretty terrible, but on the other hand looks just fine.  So there ya go.  We also ate dinner one night at a place where the owner was in a Peruvian band and gave a live concert.  They were pretty good and we had a great time.

Antigua is famous for their Santa Semana (Easter Week) celebrations, where they have huge parades that trample over these gorgeous flower "paintings" they make on the streets beforehand.  To go to this you have to make reservations months in advance, and we had no intention of doing so.  But by happy coincidence while we were walking around we stumbled on a mini-parade doing the exact same thing.  I don´t know if it was a prequel, or even just a practice run, but there were hordes of guys in purple robes and floats and bands and the whole shebang.  So we were pretty excited about getting to see that, even if our non-Catholic roots hadn´t prepared us for what any of it meant.

One thing I have to admit to, was that I broke my ten year stretch of abstinence and ate a meal at McDonalds.  But before you judge me, I had several very good reasons!  The first was that David and I started our malaria meds, which are best taken with a fatty meal, and I could think of no more fatty meal than a quarter pounder with cheese and fries.  The second is that this was the most posh McDonalds I have ever seen.  After you order the back of the restaurant opens into several different seating areas, one indoors with a play area, two seperate internet cafés, an outdoor patio garden with a big fountain.  My favorite were these fancy mahogony tables that overlooked the patio with views right out onto the huge volcano that overlooks the city.  Totally ridiculous.  Actually most of the fast food joints in town (and practically every American chain was represented) were decked out similarily.  They take their fast food seriously down here.