Tsaiberspace

We left San Francisco around midnight Thursday night / Friday morning. This was my first-ever red-eye flight. Normally I read on the plane, but for some reason I slept on this flight.

We arrived in Guatemala City later that morning. The international airport there is still being built. What struck me immediately was a similarity to something I noticed on an earlier trip to Bangalore: human labor is very cheap. The airport was filled with an army of people with floor mops and brooms keeping the place immaculately spotless. One could probably have eaten off the floor of the restrooms and suffered no ill effects.

We took an hour-long bus ride to Antigua, dropped off our bags at the Casa Santo Domingo and went into town to exchange some currency and look at some of the buildings.

I’m not sure whether the banks or jewelry stores in town have alarm systems; instead, each bank had a few men with shotguns and handguns guarding the doors. It was fun “shopping around” for the best exchange rate; however, my plans for currency trading were nullified by the fact that none of the banks would do any buy-backs of Guatemalan Quetzales. We found a bank offering an exchange rate of Q7.6/US$1. I would later learn upon return to the States that it is probably better to purchase foreign currency at home a few weeks beforehand (Wells Fargo purchased my leftover currency at a rate of Q8/US$1).

The Casa Santo Domingo is on the grounds of what used to be a monastery. Today it is a 5-star hotel with a few museums, crypts (with real human remains in them), manicured landscaping, and lots of museum-like artwork.

But even a 5-star hotel is subject to the heat and 100% humidity. The landscaping and windows keep the rooms from getting too hot (no air conditioning), but the humidity renders things like the carpeting with a perpetual semi-damp feeling. The Casa Santo Domingo is a very nice hotel, but there are much better deals to be had in town (more on that in a later post). The hotel restaurant had decent but over-priced food: not bad, but nothing special.

Later that night we met up with other wedding guests (and the wedding couple!) for dinner at a restaurant in town: