Yesterday we spent most of the day in the city of Antigua. It is the oldest city in Guatemala and at one time was the religious and political capitol for all of Central America. It was the home base for Catholic Missions and was the capitol for Guatemala until the early 1970's. It's a beautiful city nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains. At one time there were 38 catholic monasteries in operation in the city and the surrounding area. In the early 1700's sever floods damaged many of the churches. An earthquake in 1972 nearly destroyed the city and the capitol was moved to Guatemala City.
Antigua is a tourist city and we saw people of many nationalities. We spent most of our time in the open market in the city center. We would think of it almost as an upscale flea market. There were hundreds of merchants with beautiful products. You could purchase just about anything. They even had an open air meat market, but we didn't visit it. The people were very friendly and generous. We were warned about picpockets and we had a guide with each group, but we never felt unsafe.
Traveling to and from our destinations is a different story. There are not many "road rules". I've seen a few traffic signs but once you get out of the city, there are almost none. One phenomena that we've learned about is "painted trees". We noticed that many of trees in the countryside that were close to the road had white paint on them. We learned that the paint is reflective paint so that cars can see where the trees were at night.
Another phenomena is cattle along the side of the roads and the medians. Farmers tie their cattle to posts or trees alongside the roads to graze. Since most of the countryside is mountains, there is not a lot of places for cattle to graze.
I wanted to catch you up on some of the cultural stuff in this post. I'll update you more on ministry in later posts. Thanks again for the prayers.
No comments:
Post a Comment