Last Days of Guatemala

I figured I should finish this up so I can move on to other things...

The last full day we were in Guatemala, we checked out of our hotel in Antigua...

Then met up with our tour guide who took us to the temple in Guatemala City so we could do a session.  I opted to use the head phones as my "church" Spanish isn't as good as my "school" Spanish...I think I would have been ok without them though.  We met a few temple workers from the states who had only been there a few weeks.  They were really excited to speak and understand English with us.

We returned the rental car then spent a few hours driving around and touring Guatemala City.  One of the places we went to was a giant relief map we had been told about.  We all pictured a nice table top map someone had done, but no, this was huge!

It made some of the things we had talked about make a little more sense as we could see the difference between the flat lands of the north and the mountains, valleys, and volcanoes in the south.  IT even had the rivers carved out and water to go through them.  The scale was a little skewed though.

Our guide showed us that Guatemala City was basically just built on top of an old city.  These figures were found in a regular neighborhood.  If everyone dug up their yards they'd find evidence of the old city.  There is a law in the city that 10% of the ancient city must be preserved on their land if found, so a lot of places had "hills" in their backyards that were most likely a temple or structure of some sort.

We then tried to go to this park but got there as they were closing.  Don't worry, we slipped the guards 200Q and they let us run over to see this one set of ruins as they got everyone else out.  We really wanted to go here because it is thought to be the City of Nephi.

Old aqueducts found in the city (mostly I took this picture to show my students when we talk about "ancient" aqueducts)

We spent the night at a hotel in the city that had a shuttle to the airport the next morning.  We got back to Los Angeles with enough time for my brother and me to go to Sacrament meeting in his ward (of course that was after we found the flat tire on his car).  I flew back to Utah the next day.

So those were the highlights of my trip to Guatemala.  I would go again.  It was very pretty and there was a lot to see and learn about.  I wouldn't mind brushing up on my Spanish a bit more too.