Wednesday January 15, 2014
Today we slept in a little bit, had breakfast at our hotel in Tecpán, packed up all our luggage on the bus, then traveled back to Antigua, the town we stayed in our first night in Guatemala. On our way we made a little pit stop at the Mayan ruins called Iximche. Here we learned about the fascinating history of these ruins and the people of this culture. We even witnessed a small group of people burning an offering and praying at one of the ancient alters there. From there we headed to our hotel in Antigua to drop off our luggage. We decided to grab lunch at a delicious little smoothie and crepe café called Luna del Miel. We spent the afternoon walking around the city to finish up any last minute shopping we wanted to do. A few of us chose to participate in a chocolate making class at a little place called Choco. Here we learned all about the history of chocolate and how to make it from scratch. We each had the opportunity to pour our own chocolate into molds and top it with a variety of toppings. At one point during the class we were each given a mortar and pestle and a few cacao beans to grind into a paste. Our instructor gave us a 2 minute time limit and said the winner would receive a free bar of chocolate. The competition wasn’t very fair for our classmates because Drew and I dominated this task in no time. Just goes to show that the skills we learned in pharmaceutics lab came to good use in everyday life. 🙂 For dinner we walked over to a local Mexican restaurant called Fridas. The food and drinks here were delicious! Our field coordinators then showed us a little bit of the local night life before we headed back to our hotel to get a good nights rest before our big day of traveling home tomorrow.
~Lauren
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