A Beautiful Day in Paradise

On Saturday, we walked to the mercado. as you can see many Antiguans walk in town, even the very young.

 At the end of the street, you can see one of the two favorite names of streets in Antigua. "Una Via," i.e. one way. The other favorite street name is "Doble Via," i.e. two way. All the streets in Antigua have names and the names appear, for the most part, on city maps. Unfortunately, when houses are renovated or even painted, street signs often are taken down and never put back up again. It does make it interesting when you need to find a particular location. Fortunately, there are enough churches, both active and in ruins, to help with navigating.

Just walking downtown.

Here's one of those churches no longer being used...as a church. It's called San José El Viejo or St. Joseph the Old. I don´t think they're referring to an old St. Joseph, just to the fact that there's a newer church in town called San José, which just happens to be the cathedral that faces Parque Central.

As we walked down the street, a gate was open and I managed to take this picture of a bucaro or wall-mounted fountain. I guess they were created for folks who couldn´t afford a free-standing fountain.

As we walked towards the Alameda de Santa Lucia (the main drag), we passed this entry way to a fairly expensive hotel. They've managed to stretch their fountain out along a rather long wall.

Since it was about lunch time, we stopped at the Picadilly Restaurant and purchased two personal pan pizzas. The man kneeling behind Linda is one of Antigua's professional beggers. He is actually blind and almost starving to death, as you can plainly see. Actually, many people buy him pizza, which is why he's selected that location for his business. And it is a business, as he keeps regular hours. Around 5:00 p.m., he heads for home. I'm told that he's quite successful at his business.

Finally, we arrived at the mercado.

 You can almost fine anything you want at the mercado, especially if it grows. Here's a vegetable vendor.

That strange thing that looks like an oversized green bean is actually a (Guess what? I don't know). I'll have to research this and report back.

We still have problems with the way meat is handled in the mercado. The smell is rather strong too.

 
Guess how these guys got to the mercado...right, they came on a Chicken Bus!

After we finished our shopping in the mercado, we stopped by Dispensa Familiar (one of the two larger groceries in Antigua) to pick up a few other staples we needed and then headed home. We really should have hired a tuk tuk, but walked back to the casita with three heavy shopping bags of groceries. Dumb, dumb, dumb!